What Did the Founding Fathers Say?

Opponents of D. C. voting representation in Congress often claim that the Founding Fathers did not intend for residents of the District to have any voting rights. Not so! 

What is true is that, after the experience of being chased out of Philadelphia by an angry mob, the founders wanted a national capital that would be under the control of the federal government, and not of any state.  This is a separate issue from whether the residents of the new capital would be represented by voting members in the Congress. 

Except for the towns of Georgetown and Alexandria, the area that would become the federal district was mostly rural farmland and very lightly populated. It is likely that the failure to consider how or whether the residents of the future city would be represented in Congress was simply an oversight. The issue is not discussed anywhere in the published debates surrounding the drafting of the Constitution. Federalist Paper No. 43 does assert that “a municipal legislature for local purposes, derived from their own suffrages, will of course be allowed them.”

We know that at least one Founding Father did specifically address the issue of voting representation in Congress for residents of the District. During the 1788 New York convention called to debate and ratify the proposed constitution, Alexander Hamilton stated for the record that the matter of the election of a voting member of Congress should be given priority once the District of Columbia achieved a population equivalent to that of a state congressional district.