Let’s cut to the chase. Residents of Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, are enslaved by the national electorate and denied their basic human rights as American citizens.

For those of you who don’t know it, Washingtonians have no representation in Congress. For the privilege of living here, we give up our right to two voices in the Senate and one in the House. That puts us in the category of people who live in Guam and American Samoa. However, unlike all other American possessions, we also pay full federal taxes. That puts us in a category by ourselves.

Ironically, we can all hop on the Metro and go see the original documents that purport to give all Americans these basic rights. We can also see the original clause in the Constitution that takes them away from us. It’s somewhere near the Three-Fifths Compromise that said that black people weren’t worth as much as white people. One of these two transgressions has been reversed.

Now, if you don’t live here and you have a basic knowledge of urban politics, when you think of DC government, you’re going to think of Marion Barry, our infamous crack-using former mayor. For those of you who don’t know the man, he was our mayor for a while, then he was busted by the feds and sent to prison, and then he got out and we re-elected him. I’ve heard otherwise intelligent people say that this proves that DC doesn’t deserve to have representation in Congress.

Excuse me? What other American citizens lose their right to vote based on bad choices? If that were the case, there’d be no Senators from either Carolina.

Now, you might think that not having representation in Congress is no big deal — after all, how often does the federal government affect your life personally? That’s because you don’t live in Washington. Congress has subcommittees of people from all over the country who have the power to revoke any laws our own City Council passes. We once legalized marijuana for medical reasons — blown to hell. We’d like to have the power which every state enjoys to tax the two million people who work here but don’t live here — forget it.

If you’ve flown to Washington recently, you might have noted that “Washington National Airport” is now “Reagan National Airport”. This was passed by a Congress who decided to honor Ronald Reagan — the man who despised the federal government and championed local rights — by forcing us to change the name. The local governing board, appointed by elected officials, was unanimously against it. Documents showed that the airport was named after George Washington the president and not the city, so we swapped one presidential honoree for another. The result of this opposition? Welcome to Reagan National Airport.

Now Bob Barr, Representative from the DC suburb of the state of Georgia, wants to kill $60 million in desperately needed public transportation funds if the local transit authority doesn’t rename the airport stop after Reagan as well. He’s been blocked for now, but DC residents expect that it’s only a matter of time.

So — why don’t we have representation? The Supreme Court has upheld our situation as constitutional, because — well, it’s spelled out right there in the Constitution. Can’t argue with that. But the real issue is political. DC is incorrigably, hopelessly, capital-D Democratic. Give us statehood, and you’ll have three more Democrats riding the members-only elevators of Congress.

Personally, I’m not sure why the obvious solution isn’t in play. As you learned in ninth grade civics, DC was made up out of a totally unlivable block of malarial swampland that Maryland and Virginia had no use for. Virginia wised up to the fact that this had become some primo property and forced us to give it back a long time ago, so now every square inch of the District of Columbia is formerly Maryland.

So — why not vote for Maryland Senators? I’m sure we’d be properly balanced out by the gun-toting neofascists of western Maryland. There’d be another Democratic House member, but the GOP can make up for that by the fact that they utterly control Congressional redistricting this year.

Here’s the kicker. We need Congressional action on this one, and recent reports say that Congress throws out all mail that comes in from folks outside their districts. Washingtonians live outside everyone’s district. But maybe you don’t.