"The right to vote is so fundamental that to deprive any group of citizens of that right is to effectively deny them their constitutional protection," said lawyer Charles Miller of the law firm of Covington & Burling, who is preparing the case pro bono. "This is a suit to obtain voting rights for people in the District."

Miller said it is not yet clear who the lawsuit will be filed against.

The litigation, endorsed by the D.C. City Council in March, was to be filed July 4, but will probably not be filed until later this year.

"This suit would mean an end to the disenfranchisement of District residents," said council Chairman Linda Cropp. "We are the only city in the nation that has no one to represent us. This means we would be at the table when decisions are made."

U.S. citizens who move into the District from other areas are penalized by losing their voting rights, Cropp said.

Until the 1960s, District residents could vote only for the President of the United States. Since then, residents have elected a delegate to the House of Representatives, a "shadow" senator and a shadow representative, none of whom have full voting rights in Congress.

"The right to vote means more than sticking a piece of paper in a box," said Jamin Raskin, a constitutional law professor at American University, who has written about the pending case for several legal journals. "That vote has to mean something. The right to vote is not fully meaningful in the District of Columbia until the District has voting representation in Congress."

The upcoming suit builds on a 1970 case involving Maryland residents who lived on federal property at the National Institutes of Health. In that case, the court struck down the so-called disenfranchisement argument that the residents lived in "a federal enclave" and were therefore not entitled to voting rights in the state of Maryland, Raskin said.

"This case will try to extend that principle to D.C.," he said. "The citizens who live in Washington have never directly challenged disenfranchisement in Congress. This is an opportunity to correct a two-century mistake."

Contention over congressional representation for District residents is not new. District residents have complained unsuccessfully about non-representation for more than two centuries, Raskin said.

As early as 1820, District residents claimed they ought to be exempt from taxes since they were not represented in Congress. But the "no taxation without representation" argument failed, Raskin said, when the courts countered that many non-voting residents such as children and resident aliens, routinely are taxed.

A more recent legal argument centered on lack of local self-government. That argument failed when courts upheld the right of Congress to govern the District as dictated by the Constitution.

This lawsuit, based partly on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, follows a different tack, Raskin said, and may succeed where other arguments have failed.

"The heart of the cause of action is the violation of the right to vote. The theory is that all American citizens have a Democratic right to be represented. A stack of Supreme Court cases stand for that principle."

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator