Close but no cigar

According to the Economist, we residents of Washington, D.C. are almost full fledged participants in this experiment we like to call democracy:

"DC's congressional representative—and those of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands—inched closer to gaining full voting rights in late January. The House passed a bill allowing the five territories to vote, although if any of their votes prove decisive, the ballot will be cancelled and retaken without them. Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC's long-time congresswoman, had sponsored a bill to award these representatives full rights. So she was disappointed with the compromise, which restores the rights the representatives had before the Republican congressional takeover in 1994. She has described it as 'heartbreaking'."

Wow, thanks guys. Our elected representative is allowed to vote, but if her vote proves decisive the ballot is cancelled?! Doesn't that really defeat the voting in the first place? It reminds me of when I was a senior in high school and it came time to vote for a class song. Pink Floyd's "Another Brink in the Wall Part II" won decisively. Well this song, with it's famous line "we don't need no education," proved too much for the school administration to handle. What was their solution? The vote was retaken, but this time we were only allowed to vote for one of three pre-approved songs. Wow! How exciting! I could hardly bear the suspense! At least in this case, we were voting on a rather meaningless issue like a class song, not on huge issues like the war in Iraq and what to do about the millions of Americans who don't have health care. (In the end, John Cougar Mellancamp's "Small Town" won, and I have never quite recovered--as is obvious from this post.)

I would almost prefer the District (and other territories) weren't thrown such a pathetic bone by those members of congress (predominantly Republican) who'd prefer to get the issue off the agenda. Now they can pretend like they addressed the issue, when all they really did was come up with a politically opportunistic way to act like they did.

Let's hope our newly elected Democratic Congress will address the hypocracy of working so hard to bring democracy to far flung regions of the world while the citizens who live in our nation's capital enjoy no such right.