Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Page 3 created as a federal district - the District of Columbia (the "D.C." in Washington, D.C.) and this unique status has been used a justification for the denial of this fundamental right. However, evolving standards of democracy in the United States make this argument increasingly untenable. The more insidious reason, however, is that for the past half century or more, African Americans have made up a majority of the residents of Washington, D.C., which evidence would suggest, has prompted some of the opposition in Congress to providing the nation’s capital with voting representation in the our national legislature. The Congressional record and other sources are replete with statements from members of Congress reflecting the racial animus that for far too long has been a deeply engrained element of American democracy. 4 The practical consequences of this disenfranchised are significant. Taxation without representation is the first consequence; and second, Congress can unilaterally overturn all the laws passed by Washington’s elected city council, all the actions of its elected mayor, and even all the interpretations of its laws by D.C. judges. Similarly, Congress must approve Washington, D.C.’s annual budget, including spending of the residents’ own local tax dollars, including 4 See, e.g., Sen. John Tyler Morgan (D-AL), Dec. 1890 (“The negroes came into this District from Virginia and from other places; I know dozens of them here now who flocked in from Alabama. They came in here and they took possession of a certain part of this District . . . and there was but one way to get out . . . and that was to deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being in the District and have every office here controlled by appointment instead of by election . . . in order to get rid of this load of negro suffrage that was flooded upon them.”), quoted in Michael K. Fauntroy, Home rule or house rule: Congress and the Erosion of Local Governance in the District of Columbia, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2003), at 93; also John N. Mitchell (fmr. U.S. Attorney General to Pres. Nixon), comparing in 1984 the existing D.C. government to the “Amos ‘n’ Andy Taxi Cab Co.,” Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports, (London: Verso, 1993) at 27.