Before retiring to Green Valley, I lived in the District of Columbia for over 30 years. I have often been frustrated by people conflating DC individuals and families with the president, Congress and the rest of official Washington.
My friends and former neighbors in DC have lives, families and struggles like those of my current friends and neighbors in Arizona. Like other Americans, DC residents send their children to school, work, play and pay federal taxes
Unlike the rest of the more than 331 million people living in the United States, however, DC residents have no representation in our government!
Here in Arizona, I’m represented by a governor, senators and a member of Congress.The DC community of 705,000 people — a larger population than that of either Vermont or Wyoming — has no voting representatives in Congress. For this reason, the official license plates for DC accurately read “Taxation without Representation.”
Recent events highlight how this inequity plays out economically and politically: First, because it’s not a state, DC got just over $700 per resident under the CARES Act to cope with COVID-19, less than half of what states received. Second, when DC residents protested against police brutality, the White House ordered a violent reaction and DC’s mayor was powerless to stop it. Shockingly, it became clear that the reason for ordering troops to attack peaceful demonstrators was for President Trump to hold up a Bible for the cameras in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, a historic edifice he was using as a backdrop to a photo op he was seizing without any prior communication with the church staff or parishioners.