I’m not saying that party politics were determinative (though they have certainly played a role), but your reasoning is inaccurate, cmkeller. In all those 40 years, the Democrats never had the 2/3 majority in both houses required to amend the Constitution, much less control of 3/4 of the state legislatures needed to ratify the amendment. So the Democrats never had the power to make D.C. a state or give it congressional representation.
Sua
Look, if you all are so upset about not getting representation in congress, why aren’t you petitioning for congress to cede most of the district back to Maryland? Then you could be represented by Maryland’s congressional delegation. Oh, wait. That wouldn’t give the Democrats 2 more Senators and one more Representative. What was I thinking?
Would that be the 40 year period prior to 1994 (when 34 democrats were given the steel-toed boot)?
1961 - The 23rd Amendment is ratified, granting D.C. residents the right to vote in presidential elections for the first time. The District is entitled to the same number of electors as though it were a state.
1970 - The U.S. House of Representatives restores the position of nonvoting delegate from the District of Columbia.
1978 - Congress approves the D.C. Voting Rights constitutional amendment by two-thirds majorities of both chambers.
1985 - The D.C. Voting Rights constitutional amendment fails when it is ratified by only 16 of the required 38 states.
1993 - The U.S. House of Representatives votes to allow the delegates from the District of Columbia and the four territories to vote on the floor of the House in the Committee of the Whole. Previously, the delegates had been permitted to vote only in committee.
I don’t know about you, but I see a definite warm & fuzzy relationship between the 40-year democratic congress & the District of Columbia. Want to guess what happened on the very first day of the new Republican-controlled congress? This:
1995: The District of Columbia’s delegate is terminated from the official House roster and no longer has voting privileges, even in cases where her vote is nondecisive.
When the amendment fell short of ratification in 1985, you could probably look at the makeup (R/D) of the state legislatures that failed to ratify, that would certainly be telling. If only I knew how to collect this information. Finding a list of the states would be a good start, I guess.
Ya weren’t. 
Maryland has made it very clear that it does not want D.C. Adding the city would be a financial burden to the state.
Sua
I have another good reason why the residents of DC don’t have a voice in Congress:
They created Batman and Superman.
I mean, would you want a bunch of people running around in tights with secret identities to decide national policy?
Attryant - good points. Nonetheless, it still begs the question of why they didn’t just go whole-hog on the matter.
Perhaps not having enough to pass an amendment (as Sua said) was the reason. But if they tried and failed, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time an attempted amendment failed.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Aren’t the President and Vice-President considered residents of the state from which they were elected? I seem to recall a news story a few years ago around an election about how Bill Clinton was going over an absentee ballot from Arkansas. And during the counting of the electoral votes upon Clinton’s re-election he was referred to as “William J Clinton from the State of Arkansas” not “William J Clinton from the District of Columbia”.
In any case, the law defining the reduced federal district could state that it is not possible for said district to have any residents, the President living in the White House not withstanding.
That would mean that the remaining District would be entitled to zero Representatives “if it were a State”; however, it would still be entitled to two Senators “if it were a State”. Thus, the remaining District would be entitled to two electors; Ghu only knows how they would be chosen with no voters. Thus, the 25th Amendment would have to be repealed in order to have retrocession without absurdity.
All in all, retrocession is the most sensible solution (as it is, lots of the infrastructure of national government is in Maryland and Virginia anyway). As several people have already noted, the problem is that Maryland doesn’t want DC dumped on them (and I would add that the incumbent Maryland political establishment doesn’t want a bunch of DC voters draining the boodle away from Baltimore).
(Slight digression: The equal representation of states in the Senate cannot be modified, even by Constitutional amendment.)
Hijack: since when do juveniles pay taxes?
Since always, if they earn more than the minimum. It’s common for newborn babies to get taxpayer ID numbers, so that they can record tax information if anyone gives them invested assets.
You know those 16- and 17-year-olds behind the counter at McDonald’s? They pay income tax and FICA withholding. They also pay gasoline taxes when they fill up the tank of their parent’s (or their own) car, sales taxes when they buy just about anything, and entertainment taxes when they buy tickets to their favorite band’s concert.
Were you under the impression that taxation begins at 18?
Wait a minute. Why can’t a constitutional amendment do away with equal representation in the Senate? Would it be unconstitutional? Uh, the point of a constitutional amendement would change the constitution to MAKE it constitutional.
Of course, no such constitutional amendment would ever pass, since it would require ratification by the 3/4 of the states, and the small states would never cut their own throats by ratifying a change that decreased their representaion.
Yep.
Article V of the U.S. Constitution describes the procedure by which the Constitution may be amended, but ends with 2 circumstances where the Consitution cannot be amended. The first un-amendable circumstance is that Article 1, Section 9, Clauses 1 and 4 can’t be altered prior to the year 1808. And the second un-amendable curcumstance is this:
“no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
Um, actually I was.
Though I actually remember having to file when I was sixteen or so because I had some money in my name- I think saved for college.
Thanks for all the info. That’s pretty unfair if you think about it.
But is there anything preventing Article V itself from being amended? Theoretically, we could amend Article V to remove the “no state, without its consent…” clause.
Zev Steinhardt
Not really, if 2/3 of each House of Congress, 3/4 of the state legislatures, and 5/9 of the Supreme Court were willing to go along with the deal.
But that’s about votes. From a strictly logical POV, the amendment power has been defined as limited in a certain way. If that limitation can be removed by amendment, then the limitation meant nothing in the first place. And IIRC, there’s a legal presumption that statutory wording has meaning.
(I know, I know - but what do you expect lawyers to say? :D)
Since there’s a perfectly reasonable interpretation of Article V that gives that limitation meaning - that no Constitutional amendment can do away with the two-senators-per-state rule - they’d have to do some major gyrations in the Supreme Court opinion to go the other way.
**
Actually, you wouldn’t need to worry about the SC. The SC can’t overturn a Constitutional Amendment.
But, yeah, I know from a practical POV it ain’t gonna happen. I was just curious about the hypothetical.
Zev Steinhardt
Although the Supreme Court has stated that deciding whether or not a particular amendment was proposed and ratified properly is for the Legislative Branch to decide, in the case of an Amendment that deprived a State of its equal representation in the Senate, the Court could indeed say that said Amendment isn’t allowed under the Constitution and choose to disregard it.
The Constitution cannot implicitly allow something it expressly prohibits.
Well, I guess it really COULD be altered, with the added difficulty of needing 100% ratification by the states rather than 3/4ths.
The other constitutional way of altering the requirement would be a constitutional convention. Re-write the sucker from top to bottom, then get it ratified.