Prohibiting Voting By Noncitizens in District of Columbia Elections
Floor Speech
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I rise today to oppose H.R. 192, yet another attack on home rule in the District of Columbia. I wish we were here today talking about climate change, which is a dagger at the throat of humanity.
We have seen record drought in the Midwest, record forest fires in the West, record flooding in the East, hurricanes of record velocity in the distinguished gentleman from Louisiana's beloved Gulf Coast. There were mosquitoes in the north pole last summer. The sea levels are rising everywhere.
However, we are not here to talk about that emergency.
I do have a book for my friend, Mr. Higgins, called ``Bayou Farewell'' written by one of my constituents about what has been taking place on the Louisiana coast that I am going to offer to him today.
We are not talking about climate change, and we are not talking about gun violence, despite the fact that America now has rates of gun violence and gun-related mortality 20 times higher than the nations of the European Union. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among children and young people under 18 in America. It is out of control.
However, we are not talking about that.
We are exercising our constitutional authority, as my distinguished colleague from Louisiana says, to oversee the District of Columbia. Here today what has caught our eye is that they have legislation which passed and has become law in the District of Columbia which allows permanent residents and other noncitizens to register to vote.
As a result, they have nearly a half million registered voters in the District of Columbia. Madam Speaker, 512 of them are noncitizens. A little bit more than one-tenth of 1 percent of registered voters are noncitizens.
Their primary election in 2024 has already begun. The D.C. voters received their ballots or began receiving ballots in the mail on April 29, and the District has already begun accepting ballots.
The D.C. Council had transmitted the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022 to Congress for the required review period on January 10, 2023.
The House passed a disapproval resolution, as my friend mentioned, on February 9, 2023. The Senate did not pass the disapproval resolution.
The act became law in March of 2023.
What we are talking about now is passing legislation to overturn a practice that is literally taking place as we speak within the District of Columbia.
Now the critical point everybody needs to understand is that the District of Columbia has no voting representation in the House of Representatives, nor does the District of Columbia have any voting representation in the United States Senate. Their legislation doesn't apply even to their nonvoting delegate in the House, nor does it apply, of course, to Presidential elections.
What we are talking about is should these 500 or so people in the District of Columbia be allowed to vote for advisory neighborhood commission, school board, and members of the D.C. Council and mayoral elections.
The practice of noncitizen voting, my friend may be interested to learn, is one that actually was adopted in the vast majority of American States at different points in American history, including, I checked, in Louisiana, where it existed for around a decade.
It started, as far as I could tell, with this basic premise, that when the country began, there was a race qualification, a gender qualification, and property, wealth, and religion qualifications in different places, but the basic logic of it was that if you are a White male property owner, it doesn't make any difference what your citizenship status is. That lasted really up until the Civil War.
The practice of alien suffrage at the local level was one that became hotly contested before the Civil War. The Southern States opposed it because they said that the immigrants who were coming in who were being given the right to vote were antislavery, abolitionists. The Northern States, specifically the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln, defended the practice of noncitizen voting. This was a major bone of contention geographically, sectionally, in the country with legislation like the Kansas-Nebraska Act and other statehood admission struggles.
When the South seceded from the Union and wrote their own constitution, the very first article of the Confederate Constitution banned the practice, which we are discussing in a very modified form today. They banned anybody from voting in the Confederacy who was not a citizen of the Confederacy. When the Union won the war, and secession was put down, alien suffrage spread across the country.
Again, the Republican Party championed it, and they championed it in the form of something called declarant alien suffrage, which is, for people who were permanent residents of the country who were on the pathway to citizenship, they were given the right to vote, especially in a lot of the Western States, as those States tried to attract population westward.
The practice appears to have been diminished and eliminated in a lot of places around the turn of 20th century and before World War I. It survives today in the form that the District of Columbia has fastened onto it for local voting on the theory that you want people at the local level to be involved in their kids' schools and you want people to be engaged in local government.
We ban noncitizen voting at the Federal level, which means we also ban it at the State level because they are linked constitutionally in Article I. So, what we are talking about is noncitizen voting chosen by a local government at the local level simply for municipal elections.
The basic logic of it there, as I understand it from just trying to read up on what the people in D.C. did, was that they saw that while noncitizens from Canada or Mexico, for example, shouldn't be able to vote in national elections because the interests of the United States and Canada and Mexico may diverge, at the local level, everybody presumably has the same basic interests in efficient garbage collection, excellent public schools, and so on.
That is why they have done it. It affects a relative handful of people. I am not quite certain why we would be engaging in legislative action to overturn it, except for the purposes of sending some kind of message about it.
The gentleman also mentioned diplomatic personnel and undocumented people. As for the diplomatic personnel, a foreign passport may not be used to register to vote in the District of Columbia. The person has to have a residential address in the District of Columbia, and it cannot be an embassy or another diplomatic site because you can't register at your place of work. I don't know whether the gentleman has actually any evidence of this happening. I think, if there were, that would be something we would be interested in.
The same thing with undocumented people. It would, of course, be crazy for an undocumented person to attach their name to a public and transparent document like a voter registration document. I don't know if they have any evidence that this has happened, but we were not able to find any evidence that there were any undocumented people doing so.
In other words, the District's use of this practice for local elections and local government functions appears to be in accord with the way it has always been used, which is for permanent residents who are part of the community who are on the pathway to citizenship.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, just a couple of quick points about the distinguished gentleman's remarks.
First after all, what we are talking about is making a Federal decision or a congressional decision for a locality.
The gentleman's native Texas had noncitizen voting from 1869 to 1921. For a half-century, Texas had it. That policy is one that was completely up to them. It was never overruled by the Federal Government.
The gentleman says that foreign agents could vote under this legislation. Of course, foreign agents can vote all across the country today. People who register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act or fail to register under FARA and are convicted for that still have the right to vote. I believe Michael Flynn is still voting despite the fact that he failed to register under FARA. Paul Manafort is still voting. Other people who have been foreign agents don't automatically lose their right to vote because of that.
In the District of Columbia, if somebody wants to register from a foreign country, they effectively have to renounce their right to vote in a foreign country because the District of Columbia says you can't be voting in another country.
Incidentally, that is not the rule all over the world. Under the Maastricht Treaty, Americans who are living in European countries and are effectively domiciled there, which is defined as having physical residence plus the indefinite intention to remain, are given the right to vote in European localities--again, in just European local elections, not in EU elections or national elections. If you are an American living in Barcelona or Spain indefinitely, you get to vote in local elections there. They have adopted basically the same logic that the people in D.C. adopted, which is that they want people who are living there indefinitely to be engaged in local government.
Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 20 seconds to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I quote Justice Scalia on what the very distinguished gentleman from California just described as a radical practice: In general, noncitizen voting ``has been open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic.''
What my Republican colleagues would like to portray as some kind of outlandish practice is one that has been used at various points in our history by a majority of the States, certainly at the local level. It was the Republican Party, again, I reemphasize, which was the great champion of noncitizen voting and stood up for it against the States that ended up seceding from the Union in the Civil War.
We were debating the very point that the gentleman fastened upon when we talked about the Census. The Supreme Court has been emphatic repeatedly that the Census counts everyone in America, citizens and noncitizens alike.
Now, we know Republicans don't like that. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been trying to get around it in a dozen different ways, but the Supreme Court has been perfectly clear that everyone is counted in the Census, even if they don't have the right to vote and even if they are not a citizen.
Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Ramirez).
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I am sorry that the gentleman from New Jersey has left the Chamber because I could reassure and console him very quickly. It is against the law for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections. That is embodied in Federal statute, and it is a crime for someone to attempt to do that. That is not what is on the table here today.
What is on the table is whether a locality, in this case, the District of Columbia, should be permitted to allow noncitizens to participate in local elections for things like school board and city council and advisory neighborhood commissions.
The gentleman from New Jersey should be apprised at some point that the great State of New Jersey allowed noncitizen voting between 1776 when the country began and 1820. For a half century, it was allowed in his State and obviously did not lead to the downfall of the Republic.
Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Stevens).
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her trenchant remarks. She makes an excellent point. Washington, D.C., is the only National Capital on the planet Earth disenfranchised in its own legislature, which is the vulnerability that is being exploited today by our colleagues.
Can you imagine if they told the people of Paris that they could not be represented in L'Assemblee nationale simply because they breathed the same air as representatives coming from other parts of France? You would have another French Revolution on your hands.
I will thank the people of Washington that Ms. Norton represents, who have a valid bona fide political grievance and yet did not come down here and beat the daylights out of our police officers, wounding and brutalizing and hospitalizing nearly 150 of them.
They have gone about it the right way. They have petitioned for statehood, and they are trying to defend their rights to govern themselves.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Robert Garcia).
Mr. ROBERT GARCIA of California. Madam Speaker, I thank Ranking Member Raskin for the time.
Madam Speaker, this is an incredible debate we have here. Of course, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 192. It is interesting that the majority keeps talking about fair elections, ensuring that elections are done the right way, when 147 of them wouldn't even vote to certify the last Presidential election that we had here in this country. A majority of the Republican Party won't even admit or certify the last election on who actually won the last Presidential election, yet you want to talk about an attack on local neighborhood councils here in Washington, D.C., and local elections.
It is hypocrisy what we are seeing here today in this debate.
This is nothing more than the majority's attempt to attack D.C. over and over again. They want to talk about Chinese spies voting in elections. The only Chinese spies that are here in D.C. are the ones being invited by the majority to come testify at our Oversight Committee hearing to actually attack the current President of the United States. This is a ridiculous debate we are having here by the majority.
Now it sounds also that the majority is obsessed, as they always are, with the local laws of D.C., and as I said before, if they are so interested in local government, they should resign from Congress and run for the local city council or mayor.
It is a great job. I was mayor of my community. I was on the local city council. That is what they seem to be most interested in doing.
Instead of wasting our time here, we should be focused on the real issues that Americans are facing. That is why today I will make a motion to recommit this bill back to committee and instead call up H.R. 16, the American Dream and Promise Act.
Dreamers have come to our country as children. They know no other country or have no other allegiance than to the United States, and we all know that this is true.
The American Dream and Promise Act is a landmark, bipartisan piece of legislation that would give these children and young adults a pathway to lawful, permanent residency. This is actually a transformational law that could impact our country. It would change the lives of nearly 2.3 million people in all 50 States.
Madam Speaker, I thank the countless Members who have worked to pass the Dream Act, including this year's sponsor, Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia, and advocates and community members.
Dreamers are our friends, family members, classmates, and coworkers. They are estimated to contribute about $45 billion a year to the American economy and $13 billion in taxes every single year. The data is clear: Dreamers, like all immigrants, make our country stronger.
I offer this amendment today to get this back on track and get this legislation through. Let's let the Dream Act come to the floor today and vote to protect these 2.3 million people.
For me, this is personal. As an immigrant myself, and as someone who has lived with immigrants, I know how important the Dream Act is to our country and to so many.
Instead of wasting our time on this bill, we should be focused on actually helping people in this country who are making our country better every single day. Today, Republicans and Democrats once again have the chance to work across the aisle to protect millions of people who have put down roots and invested in our country and our economy. It is the right thing to do.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Louisiana for a very substantive and dignified debate on this subject, which I know attracts strong views across the aisle.
I want to restate some essential points for people to keep in mind. One is that what we are talking about is local elections in the District of Columbia, so the question is who will get to vote for the school board members and the councilmembers and who will get to vote for the neighborhood advisory commissioners. That is an institution that I think is unique to the District of Columbia, where neighborhoods have elected representatives who get to weigh in on things like the times that bars close, restaurant licenses, and stuff like that. That is really what we are talking about here.
The people in D.C. have only one nonvoting Delegate for the District of Columbia, no voting representation here, no voting representation in the Senate, so the noncitizens, the 500 or so who are registered today, can't even vote for Eleanor Holmes Norton. It goes to the question of local elections.
I am certain that most Members of Congress and most Americans certainly didn't expect that the House of Representatives would be spending so much time debating this relatively minute matter and, I daresay, trivial matter in the context of all the national emergencies and crises we are facing today, but it does seem to be part of an election year assault on the District of Columbia.
It is a lot easier to kick D.C. around a little bit than to solve the gun crisis, which has gotten to the point where gun violence is now the leading cause of death in America for young people under the age of 18. It is a lot easier to kick D.C. around a little bit than to confront the climate crisis, which is bearing down on all of us across the country.
The gentleman has made one very powerful point, which is, constitutionally, we have the authority to do this because the people in D.C. are still under the authority of Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 17. That is why they want out. They want us to use our power over the District in all cases whatsoever to modify the boundaries of the District of Columbia and to yield the residential areas to the creation of a new State.
The power of Congress to do that was established in 1846 when Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax County were retroceded to Virginia. We have the power to redraw it. We can redraw it, and D.C. would actually be larger populationwise than two other States in the Union.
They want to exist on a plane of political equality. They want to be able to have the right to go through the same political experience the gentleman talked about in Texas. At one point, they wanted to grant noncitizens the right to vote in local elections. At another point, they didn't. That is all they are asking for, the right to make their own decisions for themselves.
I daresay, no matter how benevolently motivated the gentleman from Louisiana is, or I am as a Representative from Maryland, no one is more interested in the welfare of the people in the District of Columbia than the people who actually live there.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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