Dick Heller, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned Washington, D.C.’s 32-year-old ban on handguns and established that the 2nd Amendment provided an individual right to own guns, was denied a handgun permit by the District yesterday.

He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit. But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

Sheesh.  Glenn Reynolds writes, “It’s obviously a campaign of ‘massive resistance.’ Gun prohibition now, gun prohibition tomorrow, gun prohibition forever!” Don’t discount the possibility, however, that these people simply aren’t very bright.

Reynolds and Brannon P. Denning have an interesting colloquy on “Heller’s Future in the Lower Courts” in the Northwestern University Law Review.  The intro:

The Supreme Court has released its long-awaited opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, and the buzz has been considerable.  Though much has been made of the majority’s historic ruling and of the narrowness of that majority, many commentators have missed an important point.  What Heller is most notable for is its complete and unanimous rejection of the “collective rights” interpretation that for nearly seventy years held sway with pundits, academics, and—most significantly—lower courts.

The repudiation of this extensive body of case law  suggests that the real test of Heller will occur once the lower courts, traditionally hostile to an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, face the inevitable follow-up cases challenging other restrictive gun laws.  Experience with other seemingly groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions in recent years, such as United States v. Lopez, suggests that lower-court foot-dragging may limit Heller’s reach, though this time around there will likely be considerably more scrutiny and more vigorous litigation efforts.

If the lower courts present a challenge to the implementation of Heller, they also provide litigants with an opportunity.  Given the fact that the Heller majority declined to give a detailed accounting of the proper standard of review to be used in subsequent Second Amendment cases, litigants have a rare opportunity to write on a tabula much more rasa than is ordinarily the case in constitutional litigation, making use of recent scholarship on the crafting of constitutional decision rules that implement constitutional provisions.

Arguably, it would have been preferable if the Supremes had simply spelled out their ruling a bit more clearly.  As Reynolds and Denning note in their conclusion, however, that’s rarely the case.

Photo credit: KEL-TEC

Barack Obama has apparently been on the campaign trail so long that they don’t recognize him in Washington anymore.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may have one of the best-known faces in the world, but that doesn’t mean he is recognized everywhere, even in Washington.

Washington Sports Club employee Takehia Wheeler was manning the front desk to scan members’ identification cards Friday morning when the presidential candidate walked in with his entourage. The gym opened a month ago in the Columbia Heights district. “He came in and walked past me,” Wheeler told In The Know. “I was like, ‘Sir, you need to come back.’ ” Wheeler said Obama looked familiar, but she didn’t recognize him. So she asked for his ID card. “I said, ‘What’s your last name?’ He said ‘Obama,’ ” Wheeler explained. “I said, ‘So what’s your first name?” Then she laughed because it was at that point that Wheeler realized who she was talking to. How did she make amends? By saying, “Sorry, Mr. Future President!”

She wasn’t alone in not recognizing Obama. Trainer Drew McNeil wasn’t sure either. “I was training right next to him, and I was like, ‘That looks like Obama,’” he said.

Obama brought his security detail along. Gym staff said Obama stayed for 20 minutes. They said he has a membership to the citywide gym network, with his home gym at the Gallery Place/Chinatown location.

Well, at least they recognized the name and know that there’s an presidential campaign going on. I suspect that a goodly portion of the country are less clued in than Wheeler and McNeil. Despite the fact that political junkies like myself have been following this race closely for more than two years already (there are 1,237 entries, including this one, in OTB’s Campaign 2008 category), most people are only peripherally aware of it, if that, at this stage of the game. Which, incidentally, is probably just as well.

via memeorandum

There is a large fire at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This building houses the (ceremonial) Office of the Vice President, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Security Council. According to ABC News everyone has been evacuated from the building. No word on the cause or extent of the fire.

More from CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Firefighters battled thick smoke and flames inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, on Wednesday.

Smoke could be seen from the White House driveway.

Video showed firefighters breaking a window and spraying flames with a hose.

From WJLA, ABC 7:

Thick black smoke billowed from windows of the Old Executive Office Building on the White House compound on Wednesday.

A fire appeared to be centered on the second floor of the building, which houses staff of the White House, National Security Council and other presidential agencies.

UPDATE From the Associated Press:

The blaze appeared to be located near the ceremonial office of Vice President Dick Cheney on the second floor of the building. The vice president was across the street in his office in the West Wing of the White House.

Secret Service spokesman Darrin Blackford said the Old Executive Office building was evacuated as a precaution. District of Columbia firefighters poured water on the blaze and moved furniture from the building onto a balcony.

UPDATE (James Joyner): I initially posted this separately and saw only later that Dave had posted.

My morning commute was delayed slightly because of the fire, since I work a few blocks from the scene. I heard about it on WTOP as I was driving in.

A fire at the Old Executive Office Building on the White House grounds is under control. “The fire is contained. It appears to be accidental at this time,” D.C. Fire and Rescue spokesman Alan Etter tells WTOP.

All 1,700 people who work in the building have been evacuated. No one has been injured, Etter says.

WTOP’s Capitol Hill Correspondent Dave McConnell, who is on the scene, says smoke has been billowing from a second story window. At one point, there was dark smoke coming from the building. The blaze appeared to be located near the ceremonial office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The vice president was across the street in his office in the West Wing of the White House. Television images showed firefighters breaking windows in offices where flames are clearly visible inside.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler)

The fire is now under control:

Cheney’s office was damaged by smoke and water from fire hoses, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said. The vice president was not in the building at the time; he was in the West Wing of the White House with President Bush.

More than 1,000 people who work in the building were evacuated. The fire broke out on the second floor of the building around about 9:15 a.m. and was under control within a half hour, District of Columbia fire department spokesman Alan Etter said.

Afterward, Bush and Cheney appeared on West Executive Avenue, between the White House and the damaged building, to thank District of Columbia firefighters. A fire tanker nearby still had its ladder extended to a window on the blackened second floor.

The blaze was located in Cheney’s suite of ceremonial offices. His working office is in the West Wing. Secret Service spokesman Darrin Blackford said the building was evacuated as a precaution. District of Columbia firefighters poured water on the blaze, broke windows and moved furniture onto a balcony.

There were no reports of serious injuries, Etter said. A U.S. Marine stationed at the building smashed a fifth-floor window to escape from the smoke and had to be rescued from the ledge, he said. The man suffered a minor cut to his hand.

The building remained evacuated while firefighters ventilated the smoke, Etter said. The displaced employees were sent to other offices or went home.

The extent of water, fire and smoke damage was unclear.

Now if they can get those whose offices are in the Old Executive Office Building under control, they’d have something.

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning declined to take action on D.C.’s appeal of an appellate court decision last March striking down its ban on handguns.

Linda Greenhouse provides background:

Both sides in a closely watched legal battle over the District of Columbia’s strict gun-control law are urging the Supreme Court to hear the case. If the justices agree — a step they may announce as early as Tuesday — the Roberts court is likely to find itself back on the front lines of the culture wars with an intensity unmatched even by the cases on abortion and race that defined the court’s last term.

The question is whether the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual right to “keep and bear arms.” If the answer is yes, as the federal appeals court held in March, the justices must then decide what such an interpretation means for a statute that bars all possession of handguns and that requires any other guns in the home to be disassembled or secured by trigger locks.

The Supreme Court has never answered the Second Amendment question directly, and it has been nearly 70 years since the court even approached it obliquely. A decision in 1939, United States v. Miller, held that a sawed-off shotgun was not one of the “arms” to which the Second Amendment referred in its single, densely written, and oddly punctuated sentence: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Lyle Denniston reports on the Court’s action this morning:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday announced no action on a new case testing the meaning of the Second Amendment — an issue the Court has not considered in 68 years. The Orders List contained no mention of either the District of Columbia’s appeal (07-290) or a cross-petition by challengers to the city’s flat ban on private possession of handguns (07-335). The next date for possible action on these cases is likely to be Nov. 26, following a pre-Thanksgiving Conference of the Justices set for Tuesday, Nov. 20.

The Court, of course, does not explain inaction. But among the possible reasons for delaying the case are these: one or more Justices simply asked for more time to consider the two cases; the Court may be rewriting the question or questions it will be willing to review — especially in view of the disagreement between the two sides on what should be at issue; the Court may have voted initially to deny review of one or both cases and one or more Justices are writing a dissent from the denial. The appeal in 07-290 (District of Columbia v. Heller) raises the key issue about the Second Amendment’s meaning — that is, whether it guarantees an individual right to have a gun for private use, at least in one’s home — and the appeal in 07-335 (Parker v. District of Columbia) poses a question about who may bring lawsuits to challenge laws before they are actively enforced. Together, the cases thus present a somewhat complex mix for the Court, and it perhaps was not much of a surprise that no order issued on Tuesday. At no point is there likely to be an answer to what happened to bring about the delay. Both cases are expected to be re-listed for the Nov. 20 Conference.

It’s conceivable, then, that the Court will still decide to take action on the case this term. Practically speaking, though, doing nothing is a victory for friends of the 2nd Amendment, since it lets stand the appellate decision. If the Court were to take the case and uphold the ruling and its broad reasoning, however, it would be have nation-wide effect whereas the current ruling applies only to the District.

No, thankfully, they didn’t name it after Marion Barry.

Reacting to news that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty has ordered taxis to install meters, thus overturning the bizarre “zone” system unique to the District, Ezra Klein observes that this will have a profound effect in his daily life second only to the recent smoking ban for DC bars.

Local politics matters! And yet I spend all my time arguing for an expansion of health coverage that I already have, and an end to a war I’m in no danger of fighting. It’s weird.

Commenter Henry Evans cynically observes, “It’s not that weird. Your probability of having an impact on an actual policy outcome is so low that you might as well allocate your time based on your tastes rather than the impact of policies on you.”

My initial instinct was to agree but, in reality, we’re a lot more likely to have an impact on local politics than national, owing to both the numbers and the relative lack of big lobbying money working against us. School boards, utility commissions, zoning regulators, municipal councils, and others are far more likely to impact our daily lives and yet most of us are far more interested in national issues that have only theoretical impact on us. (To be sure, most people aren’t interested in politics, local or national, at all.)

The only explanation that comes to mind is that most of us interact with politics through the mass media and the national version does a better job at creating a sense of drama. It’s the difference between a high school talent show and “American Idol” or between community theater and Broadway.

Ezra Klein ignited a big inside the Beltway cross-blog discussion by positing that Washington, D.C. is much less yuppie friendly than other major cities, notably Seattle and Portland.

What makes DC awesome is the collection of people pulled their for work (and no, the existence of the suburbs doesn’t change the fact that most of us, Matt [Yglesias] and myself included, moved to DC for a job). Defense wonks and political journalists and Hill staffers and health policy types. It’s a city filled with folks I want to talk to. But it’s not a city that puts much special effort into being really livable, or pleasant, for said folks. Seattle and Portland really do seem to put a lot of affirmative thought into building a city their residents will enjoy, and that’s in part because “enjoyability” — as opposed to “Congress is there” — is a big part of the reason people move to Seattle and Seattle needs to keep it that way.

Brian Beutler adds that he

cannot possibly fathom why D.C. lacks the number of book stores, record stores, coffee shops, night clubs, 24-hour restaurants, etc., etc. that you’d expect based on it’s relatively large population of wealthy, single young people. I love my D.C., but I’ve also found that San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and Chicago all have way, way more urban perks than Washington does. It’s such a stark difference that I’m starting to believe my peers (and even some of my friends) are allergic to the upshots of yuppiness.

For his part, Yglesias doesn’t think the city’s that bad and that Klein’s analysis ignores D.C.’s suburbs.

There’s no reason anyone has to live in DC as opposed to Arlington or Silver Spring. And, indeed, when the city was at its nadir of malgovernment and crime that’s exactly what everyone did. Just like anyplace else DC needs to make itself an attractive place for people to live, and the past few years of DC repopulating itself (it’s still way lower than its peak population) are driven by just that — lower crime rates, more retail opportunities, more intense development around the newer Metro stations, etc.

Ryan Avent agrees that the suburbs are part of the issue, along with the fact that young bloggers are confining themselves to rather narrow areas of the city. More importantly, though, “the main issue is that the District has not been all that dense, residentially, for all that long (or rather it was, then it wasn’t, and now it is again).” He sees a revitalization occurring rapidly and thinks this problem will go away soon.

Megan McArdle figures that the expectations for nightlife are largely a function of sampling bias. “When I was visiting DC, I always had a great time going out, and always went to a different bar or club. I didn’t realize that when I moved here, I would be going to those same six spots over and over and over again.”

Although I’m now working in the District for the first time, I still live far enough in the suburbs (just far enough outside the Beltway to avoid changing the blog’s name) that I don’t spend many evenings here. Further, as a lifelong suburbanite, I find most major cities to have an excellent concentration of all the aforementioned amenities but to have too much congestion, too little parking, overpriced and tiny housing, and too much blight.

Plus, I’m somewhat older and significantly more married than the others, so my interests and needs are rather different. D.C. has plenty of mid-priced and high end restaurants and, so far as I can tell, a more than adequate supply of businesses selling coffee, books, and alcoholic beverages. Then again, I generally take my coffee to go (when I’m not brewing my own) and order my books online. And Starbuck’s and Border’s serve my occasional needs just fine; I’m no indie snob.

But Matt and others are right: Most people who live in “DC” actually live in its suburbs. Indeed, when I moved up here from Alabama five years ago, I considered myself to be coming to “DC” even though I was going to live and work in the exurbs near the Dulles airport, a 45 minute drive way even in off-peak traffic.

Only tangentially covered in the others’ posts is DC’s unique political status. Until fairly recently, it was run by Congress. Once the District got home rule, it was run by the likes of Marion Barry. They continually make moronic decisions like ticketing people with Virginia and Maryland tags parked on the streets in the evening hours, making it even less desirable to hang around. Compounding that, it has a very lousy tax base, owing partly to the flight of most of its capital to the suburbs but mostly to federal regulations.

Despite all that, the city is undeniably getting more yuppy friendly (often vilified as “gentrification”). Adams Morgan is rather seedy by my tastes but certainly thriving. The Chinatown area, near the Verizon Center, has been completely upscaled in the last decade or so. And even Anacostia should get markedly better with the opening of the new baseball stadium.

The top candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination appeared last night at a gay rights forum sponsored by LOGO, a “lifestyle cable channel aimed at gay and lesbian viewers.” CQ’s Sara Lubbes, Josh Stager and Jesse Stanchak describe the setup:

Unlike several candidate debates held earlier this year, the Democrats never appeared on stage together, but took questions at 15-minute intervals from Carlson and a panel made up of Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese, singer Melissa Etheridge and Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart. Candidates were questioned in the order in which they agreed to commit to the forum, with chief rivals Obama and Clinton book-ending the discussion as first and last, respectively.

The Hotline staff quips,

You can’t say they don’t know their audience. Prepping the crowd of tonight’s HRC/LOGO debate, an organizer told attendees to feel free to applause/boo the WH Dems. “This is a little like being at a Broadway show,” he explained.

Note that “HRC” stands, in this case, for “Human Rights Campaign” rather than “Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

Substantively, not a whole lot of news comes from the forum/debate. Perhaps the most significant exchange was CQ’s Most Uncomfortable Moment:

Etheridge grilled Richardson for using the Spanish word for the anti-gay epithet “faggot” on the Don Imus radio show in March 2006, then asked Richardson pointedly if he believes being gay is a personal choice or an inherent biological trait. Richardson voiced the most conservative view among the candidates. “It is a choice,” he said quickly, looking down. Etheridge repeated her question in a friendly tone, wondering aloud if Richardson did not understand her the first time. “I’m not a scientist,” he answered. “I don’t see this as an issue of science or definition. I see gays and lesbians as people…I don’t like to answer definitions like that that are grounded in science or something else that I don’t understand.”

Otherwise, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, the candidates all oppose gay marriage and support civil unions:

“The country isn’t there yet,” said Richardson of his opposition to gay marriage. “Civil unions with full marriage rights is achievable.”

Clinton described her opposition as “a personal position,” adding that marriage laws should be determined by state legislatures.

Obama, who served in the Illinois Senate for eight years prior to his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, would not say if he would have voted for a bill to legalize gay marriage. “It depends on how the bill would’ve come up,” he said.

In one of the most direct moments of the night, Edwards backtracked on recent comments that his personal faith influenced his opposition to gay marriage. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Edwards said, adding, “My position on same-sex marriage has not changed. I believe strongly in civil unions.” [...] “We desperately need to get rid of DOMA,” Edwards said. Edwards has said he would not have voted for the bill if he had been in the Senate in 1996.

Live blogs: Gay Patriot, Ryan Sager, Pam Spaulding, here, here, and here.

Cato’s William Niskanen argues in today’s Washington Examiner, as I have numerous times in this space, that the solution to the lack of congressional representation for D.C. residents is not an unconstitutional single vote in the House but rather retrocession to Maryland.

Mayor Adrian Fenty might not like it, but retrocession would be superior for most District residents on political, fiscal and economic grounds. Politically, District voters would get full representation in the House of Representatives, plus the opportunity to vote for the two senators from Maryland, the several senior state officials and the local legislators.

[...]

The most likely new residents of Washington, Md., would be those who are now most deterred by the District’s high taxes and poor government services: wealthier individuals and families, those with school-age children, those who expect to leave estates and businesses — especially unincorporated businesses, restaurants and hotels.

[...]

Retrocession would also lead to a division of government roles between the District and the state of Maryland. A division of roles similar to that now in Maryland would leave the new city of Washington, Md., with control of K-12 education, police, fire, corrections and streets; and most expenditures for parks and recreation, housing and waste disposal.

The Washington government would no longer bear the rapidly increasing costs of Medicaid, the responsibility for administering the University of the District of Columbia, and the special problems of providing long-term incarceration. Maryland would assume the responsibility for providing higher education, public welfare, health and hospitals, highways and prisons.

Aside from the not-insignificant problem that neither the citizens of Maryland nor the residents of the District support this idea, it makes plenty of sense. And, again, it has the additional advantage of being constitutionally permissible.

My only caveat is that I would not retrocede the entirety of the District but only residential D.C. I would still keep the government district, including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, and the National Mall as a separate District under the current constitutional scheme. The Framers showed wisdom in having the seat of government separate from the influence of any single state. They did not, however, anticipate half a million people moving there and being disenfranchised.

The Strange Maps blog has an interesting map which has the 50 United States plus DC renamed for countries with the closest GDP.

It’s interesting and puts into perspective our enormous wealth.

Andrew Sullivan, whose post drew my attention to the map, sees something else: “The District of Columbia has the same GDP as New Zealand. Now imagine if no one in New Zealand were allowed to vote for their own government, and they were governed by the Senate in Australia as a colony.”

While I’m sympathetic to voting rights for DC (via retrocession rather than statehood, as discussed numerous times previously) the comparison strikes me as unfair. The 50 states are, after all, part of the same country. D.C. exists as a significant population base — let alone a major economic center — solely because it is the seat of the nation’s capital.

After years of having Congress knock down attempts at imposing a commuter tax, three D.C. Council members have proposed a workaround, Harry Jaffee reports.

Three council members — Kwame Brown, Harry Thomas Jr. and Marion Barry — have introduced legislation to study the idea of creating a toll system to charge commuters who want to cross the D.C. line.

[...]

Says Ward 2 Council Member Jack Evans, chairman of the Finance and Revenue Committee: “I’m looking at the possibility of holding a hearing on the bill. I would expand it to see how we could capture more revenue from commuters. The District of Columbia continues to subsidize two of the richest counties in America.”

That would be Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland. By Evans’ accounting, commuters avail themselves of city services but pay no taxes to keep up the streets and bridges, let alone pay for cops and firefighters.

This reasoning — a slippery slope toward a commuter tax — is a surefire political winner in D.C. “Stick it to the suburbs” will translate directly into votes for Marion Barry and Harry Thomas. Both represent working-class wards on the city’s east and south sides. Kwame Brown, who serves at-large, can harvest votes citywide.

[...]

Every D.C. politician — from Evans to Gandhi and even to Barry — knows the end game of any proposal that attempts to tax commuters. Enacting such a tax would require a change in the Home Rule Charter and face a certain death in Congress.

Like it or not, paying a premium to use certain roads is coming. Once tolls get established for fast lanes on the Capital Beltway, the idea of paying a toll to enter the city might be right around the corner.

Commuter taxes have become quite popular in recent years, since they confiscate money from people who have no say in the matter. It’s taxation without representation and quite repugnant. The District would have done it long ago if they had the authority but Congress has rightly vetoed the move.

I’m not a fan of High Occupancy Toll lanes or carpool lanes, period, since they reserve roads that are being paid for by all the taxpayers for a select few. It’s also incredibly inefficient, since those lanes tend to be underutilized.

Still, that beats a tax on entering the nation’s capital.

The White House yesterday issued a press release threatening to veto the blatantly unconstitutional bill creating a House seat for the District of Columbia.

There’s a reason it took a Constitutional Amendment to give D.C. three Electoral College votes. Indeed, the Supreme Court had rejected attempts to accomplish that through simple legislation.

Congress passed an Amendment in 1978 to the effect that, “For purposes of representation in the Congress, election of the President and Vice President, and article V of this Constitution, the District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall be treated as though it were a State.” It failed to win ratification by the state legislatures. That’s not surprising; treating a city as if it were a state is to the advantage of no state.

While the District was never intended to become it major population center, it nonetheless became just that. A generation ago, it’s population exceeded that of thirteen states; now, only Wyoming is smaller. Residents have all of the obligations of citizenship and are denied federal representation. That’s obviously a problem.

The solution, however, is neither unconstitutional legislation nor creation of a new state the geographic size of an average county. Retrocession of residential D.C. to Maryland is the obvious solution but not the only one.

When I saw the YahooNews headline “Study finds one-third in D.C. illiterate,” I presumed it was some sort of play on Mark Twain’s line that, “Those who can read and don’t are no better off than those who can’t.”

Apparently, they’re serious.

About one-third of the people living in the national’s capital are functionally illiterate, compared with about one-fifth nationally, according to a report on the District of Columbia. Adults are considered functionally illiterate if they have trouble doing such things as comprehending bus schedules, reading maps and filling out job applications.

The study by the State Education Agency, a quasi-governmental office created by the U.S.
Department of Education to distribute federal funds for literacy services, was ordered by Mayor Anthony A. Williams in 2003 as part of his four-year, $4 million adult literacy initiative.

The growing number of Hispanic and Ethiopian immigrants who aren’t proficient in English contributed to the city’s high functional illiteracy level, which translated to 170,000 people, said Connie Spinner, director of the State Education Agency. The report says the district’s functional illiteracy rate is 36 percent and the nation’s 21 percent.

D.C. is a strange town, consisting of one of the most highly educated workforces in the country, those working in politics and the various industries that seek to affect public policy and which mostly lives in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland and an underclass that constitutes most of residential D.C. Still, it’s unfathomable that a third of even this latter group is illiterate, even factoring in the immigrant population. After all, the literacy rate of the United States and other developed nations is variously calculated at somewhere between 99 percent and 99.9 percent.

Certainly, filling out a job application or, much less, reading a map, is a more complex task than basic literacy. Then again, a bureaucratic agency in the business of pretending that we have a substantial problem with adult illiteracy and seeking places to hold out money in support of combating same will likely be able to find it.

My Congressman and D.C.’s pretend Congresswoman are teaming up in a dubious and unconstitutional effort to give D.C. a vote in the House of Representatives.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) is teaming up with U.S. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) to introduce a bill that would for the first time give the District a full vote in Congress, a sign of bipartisan cooperation that advocates of D.C. voting rights hailed as a breakthrough.

The legislation, set to be unveiled at a news conference today, would expand the House from 435 to 437 seats, giving a vote to the District as well as a fourth seat to Utah, the state next in line to enlarge its congressional delegation based on the 2000 Census.

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution is clear on this matter:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the state of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any state, the executive authority thereof shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies. [Emphasis added]

It would be difficult for the Framers to have been more clear. Perhaps, as Dr. Hope Davis, my Con Law prof used to say, they could have added a “damn it” in there somewhere.

Update: Betsy Newmark notes another problematic aspect of the bill:

I’m also troubled by this idea of just granting Utah an extra seat to balance out the assuredly Democratic seat the the District of Columbia would be. They’re planning to make it an at-larg seat so that they don’t have to redistrict Utah and perhaps the one Democratic member from Utah would be gerrymandered out of his seat. As far as I know, no other state has both an at-large representative and ones from specific districts. That would grant every citizen of Utah double representation in the House, a very fishy arrangement that seems to violate the one-man one-vote principle.

This, too, would seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Article I.

Update: As I wrote when this idea was last floated (before I lived in Mr. Davis’ district),

The entire Membership of both Houses of Congress lives in or around D.C. This tiny speck of geography, which would scarcely exist were it not the seat of government, would for all intents and purposes have 435 congressman and 100 senators.

Update: I have sent the following correspondence to Mr. Davis:

Dear Rep. Davis,

I read with distress this morning’s front page story in the Post reporting that you are collaborating with Eleanor Holmes Norton in an unconstitutional effort to undermine my voting rights by giving a House seat to the District that serves as the seat of the government of the United States.

Article I, Section 2 could not be more clear that representation in Congress is reserved to the several States. Indeed, the word “state” or “states” appears eight times in that section, exclusive of the collective “United States.”

Furthermore, the fact that the addition of Amendment XXIII was required to secure voting rights for the District in presidential elections should provide additional evidence that this bill is unconstitutional.

I respectfully urge that you abandon this unconstitutional effort to undermine the suffrage of your constitutents. There is, after all, a reason that the Framers did not want the place where Congressmen reside to have voting rights that might compete with their obligations to the places they are there to represent.

Sincerely,

James H. Joyner, Jr.
Alexandria, VA

________

Related:

Giving D.C. A Vote in the House
D.C. Statehood Redux: Retrocession
DC Statehood Revisited
DC Statehood

Barry Tested Positive for Cocaine Use In the Fall

D.C. Council member Marion Barry tested positive for cocaine use in the fall in a drug test ordered by a court after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tax charges, according to two sources familiar with Barry’s case. Barry, who served four terms as mayor and was elected to the Ward 8 council seat in 2004, has since begun treatment for drug use, the sources said, but Barry’s failure to pass the mandatory drug test puts him in legal jeopardy. Because he violated the terms of his release, Barry, 69, faces an increased risk of serving the maximum 18 months behind bars — rather than probation — for his failure to file tax returns for six years. He is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 8, but a federal judge could jail him or sanction him at any time.

Barry, interviewed last night in his Howard University Hospital room, where he’s being treated for hypertension, said he did not deny accounts of his drug test and treatment but declined to discuss his case. “Write what you want to write,” he told a Washington Post reporter. “That’s my official quote. No more, no less.”

Barry pleaded guilty Oct. 28 to the misdemeanor tax charges, and as a condition of being released on his own recognizance, he was required to undergo drug testing soon after, court records show. But, according to two sources close to Barry and an official familiar with his case, the court’s probation office notified U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson and prosecutors in or around November that Barry’s test result was positive for drug use. Two of the three sources said the drug was cocaine. The sources asked not to be identified because a court case is pending. Robinson has not revoked Barry’s bond or ordered him jailed pending sentencing, as she could have because of the drug infraction, court records say. Nor did prosecutors seek to cancel their plea agreement with Barry, in which they had said they would not oppose his effort to seek probation at sentencing.

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Drug problems and speculation about drug use have plagued Barry through much of the latter part of his 30-year political career. In 1990, during his third term as mayor, Barry was arrested at the Vista Hotel after being videotaped smoking crack, an image that for years has haunted him and the city he led. Barry’s arrest was followed by seven weeks in treatment centers in Florida and South Carolina. He repeatedly invoked God upon his return, in keeping, a spokesman said at the time, with his 12-step, faith-based treatment program.

After serving six months for cocaine possession in the Vista incident, Barry led a political comeback in 1992, winning a D.C. Council seat and then a fourth term as mayor two years later.

While preparing to run in 2002 for an at-large council seat, U.S. Park Police reported that they found a trace of marijuana and $5 worth of crack cocaine in Barry’s Jaguar while he was parked at Buzzard Point in Southwest Washington. Police never charged Barry, who then scrapped his campaign plans. When he campaigned for a Ward 8 seat in 2004, he claimed in interviews that the Park Police planted the drugs in his car.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the bitch set him up.

Update: Added link to the Barry quote. Here’s an excerpt for those too young to remember it:

Jurors View Videotape of Barry Drug Arrest
By Tracy Thompson and Elsa Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 29, 1990; Page A01

Eighteen jurors, intent on missing no detail, watched yesterday as a television screen showed D.C. Mayor Marion Barry taking two long drags from a crack pipe in a room at the Vista Hotel on Jan. 18. It was the first public screening of the FBI videotape that showed Barry’s arrest on drug possession charges.

Within moments, the screen became a blur of sound and action as FBI agents stormed the room, grabbing Barry, placing him up against a wall with his arms outstretched and reading him his rights before leading him away in handcuffs.

The enraged Barry muttered over and over, “Bitch set me up . . . . I shouldn’t have come up here . . . goddamn bitch” — references to the woman who lured him to the hotel, former girlfriend Hazel Diane “Rasheeda” Moore.

Classic.