As sent to the House of Representatives for review, Senate Joint Resolution 39 consisted of three unrelated constitutional amendments. The first, as originally proposed by the aforementioned Senator Kefauver, would have granted the governors of the various states the right to fill vacant House seats by appointment in the same manner as vacant Senate seats. The second, proposed by Senator Holland, would have abolished any and all poll taxes at the state and national levels. And the third, put forward by Senators Keating, Case, and Beall, would have granted the right to select presidential electors and elect members of the House of Representatives to the District of Columbia. As reported out of the House Judiciary Committee, however, only the last of these propositions remained, and even then, only in part. The committee had evidently been willing to countenance D.C. residents taking part in presidential elections. But gaining representation in the House was apparently more than the relevant Congressmen felt was strictly appropriate.
The exact reason for this drastic paring
down of S.J. Res. 39 is at once relatively clear and slightly obscure. Holland
had been proposing a constitutional ban on poll taxes since he first entered
the Senate in 1946. It had failed to receive approval numerous times before –
in large part due to the opposition of his fellow Southern Democrats – and it
would indeed fail to receive approval several times more before Holland retired
from professional politics in 1970. And while Kefauver certainly had precedent
on his side when he suggested that a congressman might be appointed on an
interim basis in the same fashion as a senator, the fact that the longest a
given district would have to wait before electing a replacement for its dead,
resigned, or otherwise incapacitated Representative was twenty-four months
doubtless rendered the whole idea something less than an urgent priority. But
why, exactly, had the Judiciary Committee determined that permitting the
residents of the District of Columbia to choose presidential electors was
acceptable while granting them representation in the House was not? Few
Congressmen who stood in opposition to the measure excised from the relevant
proposal spoke directly as to why this struck them as a particularly desirable
outcome. Perhaps they were sensitive of how actively denying democratic
representation to a community of American citizens would make them appear when
reported in the contemporary news media. Here and there, however, in certain
remarks that addressed the topic, one is able to piece together the general
contours of contemporary opinion.
Take,
by way of example, some of the remarks made by Ohio Republican Clarence Brown
(1893-1965) on June 14th, 1960. Brown was tasked with introducing
the amended resolution on behalf of the Judiciary Committee. And as he did so,
while he entirely failed to explain why it no longer included any provision for
congressional representation, he was exceptionally careful to assure his
colleagues that even the remaining proposal to allow the residents of the
District to select presidential electors would in no way interfere with the
exclusive legislative authority the Constitution granted to Congress. “Mr.
Speaker,” he said, addressing the illustrious Sam Rayburn (1882-1961),
I feel, as do most of the members of
the Committee on Rules, that the Committee on the Judiciary has not only worked
long and arduously, but has brought out a very simple and a very effective
resolution which will in no way take away from the Congress of the United
States the right and authority to control the affairs of the District of
Columbia as the seat of the Federal Government, or give to the people of the
District any powers except those which I have designated, to vote for electors
for President and Vice President.
Apparently, both
Brown himself and whichever of his fellow congressmen he felt the need to
reassure were substantially concerned that any amendment to the Constitution
which granted greater power or responsibility to the District of Columbia
risked diminishing the power that Congress held over the same. Gaining the
right to choose presidential electors would not have allowed the residents of
the District to suddenly throw off the authority of Congress and begin
legislating for themselves, of course. And yet, here was a member of Congress
making a point of assuring his colleagues that such an impossibility was,
indeed, impossible. Why, one is given to wonder, should he have felt the need
to do this? Why was congressional control over the District so precious to
Brown and those of like mind?
Virginia Republican Joel Broyhill (1919-2006)
definitely went the furthest towards actually answering these questions. Having
first entered the lower chamber of Congress in 1953 as the representative of a
new district comprising some of D.C.’s Northern Virginia suburbs, Broyhill
quickly made a name for himself as one of the foremost advocates for the
improvement of working and living conditions in the nation’s capital. Given
that the vast majority of his constituents worked in the District, this was
hardly a surprising development; his efforts to expand public transit, improve
local school systems, and raise wages for federal workers were all directly
beneficial to the people whose support he required to stay in office. But while
Broyhill’s consistent concern for conditions in D.C. certainly made him more
sympathetic than most of his contemporaries to those who called the capital
their home on a permanent basis, his sympathy was not without limits. Consider,
to that end, the distinctly mixed emotions with which he expressed his support
for the resolution introduced by the aforementioned Congressman Brown. “The
joint resolution which we will have before us [,]” he observed,
Is practically identical to the
resolutions I have introduced in previous Congresses. It is, however, somewhat
of a compromise, in that it limits the number of votes in the electoral college
to no more than those of the least populous State. Of course it is a
compromise. All major legislation gets through as a result of compromise. It is
unfortunate that while we are at it, going through the long, complicated
process of a constitutional amendment, we do not do the job right and give them
the full vote, the same vote they would have in the electoral college if they
were a State of the same population. Yet, as I stated before, sometimes a
compromise is necessary and I agree to this compromise.
But while these remarks would seem to make Broyhill appear deeply concerned for the interests and the wellbeing of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia, the next passage of his prepared oration showed the true nature of his attention.
“The right to vote for President and Vice President [,]” the congressman continued, “does not infringe on the rights of the other people of this great Nation. If we granted the people of the District of Columbia representation in the House and Senate, it would not infringe on the rights of the other people of this Nation.” Again, Broyhill seemed to be actively positioning himself as an ally of the inhabitants of the District and an opponent, at least in principle, of those who would endeavor to limit their autonomy. But then, as ever, came the turn. “However,” he continued,
If we attempt to turn over the
government of the Nation's Capital to the people who live within its boundaries
to rule and control, then we do impinge on the right of the other people of the
Nation, because all the people of the States have a stake and a vested right
and interest in the government of the Nation's Capital.
What could Broyhill
possibly have meant by this? What “stake and vested right” did the inhabitants
of the various states possess which could be said to outweigh the interests of
the residents of the District of Columbia in their own wellbeing? The answer,
as given voice by Broyhill, was stunningly smallminded. On the one hand, he
said, it was a known fact that decisions made within the context of the
administration of the District of Columbia had a direct effect on experiences
of the millions of Americans who visited the nation’s capital during the course
of a given year. Not only did this include the vast workforce of daily
commuters who lived in the nearby suburbs of Central Maryland and Northern Virginia
– the latter region, as aforementioned, being represented by Broyhill himself –
but also the countless tourists who journeyed from as far afield as California,
Oregon, and the newly-admitted states of Alaska and Hawaii. Surely, these
millions had a vested interests in things like transit, infrastructure, and
taxes in the District. Surely, they had a right not to be unduly taxed by a
home-rule administration interested only in draining the wealth of the
District’s daily visitors. Surely, they made more use of the District’s civic
infrastructure than its relatively small number of permanent inhabitants. Why,
then, shouldn’t the Representatives of these millions have the final say in
what transpired in the District over and above whatever its resident population
might desire to the contrary? Granted, they lived in D.C., but was it really their
city? Did it really belong to them more than it belonged to the nation
as a whole?
Broyhill’s litany of pettiness
continued from there. Of the approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand
people who comprised the average day-to-day population of the District of
Columbia, he went on to say, most were either members of Congress, commuting
federal employees, foreign dignitaries, or staff members attached to some
department, embassy, or governmental organization. Indeed, based on the turnout
of a recent primary election held in the District – hardly, it must be said, a
particularly accurate means of measuring population numbers – there were likely
only about twenty thousand people who lived in the capital territory on enough
of a full-time basis to identify its economic and political disposition as
being deeply tied to their own. From this rather dubious attempt at
establishing a logical correlation, Broyhill then went on to conclude that, “If
we granted home rule to the citizens of the District of Columbia, we would be
turning over the Federal interest and the Federal rights to a very small percentage
of the population.” Was there precedent for thus ignoring the democratic rights
of even this relatively small number of American citizens? Well, yes, as far as
Broyhill was concerned. “On all military reservations throughout the country,”
he explained,
We recognize the Federal interests
are dominant. People living on military reservation have rights as other
American citizens have. They can vote for President and Vice President, but
they do not have any control or say-so as to how the affairs on that military
reservation will be conducted.
So long as one thought of the nation’s capital as a de facto military base, therefore, the permanent inhabitants of the same could reasonably be expected to surrender their own interests on behalf of an overriding “federal interest” which they could in turn play no part in shaping. The District of Columbia was not a military establishment, of course. Despite the sheer volume of federal property that existed therein and the sheer number of people who, as on a military base, were required to work their despite having no intention of making it there home. It was a city in which thousands of people who had nothing in particular to do with the federal government lived and worked every day. They had not come to the District, many of them, in full knowledge of the political rights that they stood to lose. Rather, many thousands of them had simply been born there. Was an accident of birth reason enough to treat them as though they were military enlistees? Should they have been subjected to military logic despite never having chosen a military life?
Unspoken but inarguably underlying all of Broyhill’s arguments, of course, was the fact that Washington, as of 1960, was the nation’s first and only city with a majority Black population. Bearing this in mind, certain aspects of Broyhill’s record of public service would seem more than mildly relevant. The man was vehemently opposed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), for example, as made clear by his public remarks at the time. In 1956, he was one of only two Republican members of Congress to sign the reactionary Southern Manifesto, the purpose of which was to signal Southern institutional opposition to the integration of public spaces. And over the course of his time in the House, he voted against not only the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968, but also the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well. Bearing all of this in mind, in would seem more than fair to say that the man was not friendly to the burgeoning movement for civil rights. On the contrary, Joel Broyhill was a deeply committed racist and segregationist who did not believe that those of his fellow citizens who happened to be Black could or should be trusted to exercise the same basic rights as their white counterparts. And among his colleagues in the House, he was most certainly not alone. This, in essence, is what “happened” to S.J. Res. 39. The segregationists happened. The signatories of the Southern Manifesto happened. If men like Joel Broyhill found even the integration of public schools to be wholly objectionable, it was little wonder that they also opposed turning over control of the very seat of the American government to its majority Black inhabitants.
Federal representation, of course, was a different matter entirely. As Broyhill put it himself, granting the inhabitants of the District of Columbia, “The right to vote for President and Vice President does not infringe on the rights of the other people of this great Nation. If we granted the people of the District of Columbia representation in the House and Senate, it would not infringe on the rights of the other people of this Nation.” And certainly, the man was right. Allowing D.C. to select no less than three presidential electors would almost certainly have had no impact whatsoever upon the outcome of the presidential elections to follow. Since the first contested election in 1796, only on two occasions would the addition of three votes have altered the final outcome. In the first case, in 1796, a three-vote swing in favor of the Democratic-Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, would have left him and his Federalist opponent, John Adams, tied at seventy-one votes each, thus forcing the House of Representatives – where the Democratic-Republicans held the majority – to make the final choice. And in the second instance, in 1876, if D.C.’s three votes had gone to Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden, Tilden would have won the election regardless of how the twenty votes of the three contested states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were ultimately awarded. Absent these two fringe cases, no presidential election in American history up to 1956 had ever been decided by three votes or less. Knowing this as Broyhill surely did, it would therefore have been perfectly reasonable for him to have claimed that allowing the District of Columbia to choose presidential electors would make no difference whatsoever as far as the interests of the states were concerned. The most highly populated among them would still be the most highly coveted in presidential contests, thus permitting them to continue wielding the tremendous political influence to which they had since become accustomed.
Granting the District representation in Congress would almost certainly have amounted to much the same thing. One representative among four hundred and thirty-eight would have been incredibly unlikely to make any difference on any House vote that particularly mattered. And while allowing D.C. to elect two senators would have had a proportionately greater impact on the business of the upper house of Congress – given its relatively smaller size and the various unique powers possessed by the Senate – these two hypothetical senators would still have been vastly outnumbered by those who, if they have a mind to, could thwart their legislative priorities without very much effort at all. Consider, by way of example, a scenario in which the aforementioned D.C. senators attempt to introduce a home rule bill for the District. While simply being able to speak on their own behalf on the floor of the Senate would most definitely represent a significant gain compared to the influence and access previously afforded to the inhabitants of the District of Columbia within the context of the federal government, the thirty-two senators who then represented the various Southern, pro-segregation states could easily have prevented any such legislation from being approved. All of this is assuming, of course, that the members of Congress elected to represent D.C. would be chosen in such a such a way as to accurately mirror the population thereof. More likely – given the sentiments expressed and the opinions held by people like Joel Broyhill – those members of Congress who actively sought to prevent the nation’s capital from being governed by members of its majority Black population would use the power afforded Congress over the District to craft the relevant electoral laws in such a way as to effectively disenfranchise anyone that they believed could not be trusted to govern themselves “responsibly”. The final result was bound to be something that Broyhill and his ilk would have no cause to fear. That is, a D.C. congressional delegation that in no way represented the majority of the District’s population of its interests.
It would be difficult to imagine that any of this was lost on the members of the Senate who originally proposed and supported the joint resolution that the House then proceeded to cut down. Just as the likes of Senator Keating, Senator Case, and Senator Beall must have known full well that the greatest opposition to their efforts to enfranchise the inhabitants of the District of Columbia was bound to originate among the upper chamber’s Southern delegation, they must also have been aware that the same was true of the House. While the Southern states, as aforementioned, were represented by some thirty-two senators, their congressmen numbered in excess of one hundred and thirty. As a proportion of the whole number of congressmen then seated in the House, this amounted to almost one third. Banding together, this group of Congressmen had all the power and influence necessary to completely stymie the relevant resolution, or at the least render it sufficiently neutralized as to suit their purposes of keeping the government of D.C. out of the hands of its residents. Bearing all of this in mind, it is perhaps little wonder that the aforementioned sponsors of S.J. Res. 39 reacted with no more than resigned disappointment when they finally got around to considering what remained of their original initiative on June 16th, 1960.
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