The News
Republicans who’ve made a habit of using their power over DC to undercut progressive policymaking are mounting a new push to rein in the capital — and this one may have legs.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., told Semafor that he is inclined to support a House-passed bill that would bar noncitizens from serving in local office as well as voting locally in the city lawmakers call a home away from home. The bill passed the House with 56 Democratic votes in June.
“Voting in American elections should be limited to American citizens,” said Fetterman, whose wife Gisele became a US citizen in 2009. “I say that as a guy that’s absolutely very pro-immigration. The opportunity to vote, that should be for American citizens.”
A similar ban passed the House last year with support from two Democrats who’ve since ascended to the Senate, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin. While it’s not clear if they’d change their votes this time, should it come to the Senate floor, support from those three Democratic senators would put the GOP closer than ever to the 60 votes needed for passage.
Congress has substantial constitutional power over DC, which Republicans frequently deploy to undermine the city’s elected government — and point a finger at unpopular leftwing policies. After the GOP took back the House in 2023, it reversed a criminal justice reform passed by the DC council. Local Democrats expected then-President Joe Biden to veto it; he signed it into law.
Democratic control of the Senate had, until this year, stalled action on other Republican-passed legislation to rein in the DC government. But under complete GOP control of Washington, the capital’s government has taken further hits.
A stopgap government funding bill slashed $1 billion from the DC budget, and the House GOP continues to decline to take up a Senate-passed fix. Then this month, as the Senate focused on President Donald Trump’s tax-cuts bill, House Republicans passed a trio of proposals that would force DC to cooperate with Trump’s immigration enforcement, scrap another police reform, and remove noncitizens’ local voting rights.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office did not return a request for comment on the chamber’s timetable for taking up the House-passed bill.
The View From Republicans
Republicans sold the noncitizen voting ban as a defense of DC citizens’ rights. The city’s rules don’t affect voting in federal elections, which has long been limited to US citizens. But for the GOP, they raised the possibility that some Americans might be out-voted in DC elections by people who were neither born here or naturalized.
“The right to vote is a defining privilege of American citizenship,” said House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., during the bill’s markup this month. “Diluting that right, to its non-citizens, whether here legally or illegally, undermines the voice of DC residents.”
The bill’s proponents described reform as not just necessary but politically popular, and a mistake for Democrats to vote against.
“Once again, Democrats are taking the 20% side on another 80-20 issue,” said Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas. “The American people do not want illegal aliens voting. They shouldn’t be here to begin with.”
The View From the locals
For some local politicians, the legislation would hit home — in a very big way.
Last year, for the very first time, Mónica Martínez López decided to run for office. Born in Mexico City, she had lived for a while in DC’s Brookland neighborhood and gotten involved in the Vision Zero initiative to end traffic deaths.
When her member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission moved away, Martínez López ran for her seat. By a 734-341 vote margin, she won.
The House bill would remove Martínez López, along with fellow ANC member Jingwen Sun, from the voter rolls and from their posts on the commission.
“It’s another example of the lack of self-determination for our city,” Martínez López told Semafor. “The close to 1,000 neighbors/residents who registered to exercise their right to participate in local electoral processes now face the limits of Home Rule that US citizens who live in Washington DC have long faced.”
Sun, who ran for council while having a green card but not citizenship, said that he would stay in the city and keep up his work, even if his vote and job were erased initially.
“I’m pretty positive that I will speak to the DC council and mayor, and run for ANC again, whenever the time comes that I become a US citizen,” Sun said.
David’s view
Democrats have conducted a somewhat circular conversation about how their party needs to change, less about specific policies than about a battered “brand.”
What sort of policies could they moderate or jettison, if they wanted to move right? On paper, noncitizen voting could be sacrificed without much downside for the party.
The few hundred people who take advantage of it in DC can’t support the party in any other way (federal voting, donations) unless they obtain citizenship. Non-citizens are often less progressive than the Democrats who give them the franchise — as we saw three years ago in San Francisco, when opponents of left-wing school board members registered recent immigrants to help recall them.
So why would a majority of congressional Democrats vote with DC? They feel solidarity with the city’s residents, whose progressive votes are undermined whenever Republicans run Congress.
Some of them, in seats that are too blue to become GOP targets, are comfortable defending the concept that people who raise families and pay taxes in a city deserve some say in who runs their local government.
But other Democrats are less eager to make a stand for that idea. Which makes it a soft target for Republicans.
Room for Disagreement
The House-passed bill has vocal Democratic opponents, and it’s still an open question whether it would get the necessary seven votes needed to overcome a filibuster — and that’s assuming all Senate Republicans vote in favor.
DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., argued against the measure on the House floor in June, making the case that Republicans were being hypocrites and hurting American citizens as well as non-citizens.
“Republicans claim that voting is a core right for the privilege of American citizenship,” Frost said. “Republicans have fought tooth and nail to defeat legislation that would give the American citizens who reside in DC voting representation in the House and the Senate.”
Frost, like voting reform advocates in DC, pointed out that other cities let non-citizens vote in local elections, and that there was some history — not recent, but real — of letting people vote in US elections if they weren’t yet Americans.
That was at the heart of the reasoning when DC’s city council first passed the measure.
“The idea clicked for me when I realized DC has many people who live here, pay taxes, work locally, and don’t have a voice in even their local government,” said Charles Allen, the DC council member who chaired the committee that approved the voting amendment.
“My colleagues and I make decisions every day that spend their tax dollars and impact their work,” he added. “If they can prove they live here, why shouldn’t they have a say locally?”
Notable
- In the Austin-American Statesman, Tony Quesada highlights an investigation into noncitizen votes in Texas, which proved less than promised. “It turns out that a bunch of those people were naturalized citizens who were labeled possible noncitizens based on outdated — i.e., false — data.”
- For NPR, Mikaela Lefrak looked into how many noncitizens take advantage of these open systems, and how the people who control the rolls prevent fraud. “They know that one slip-up, like a presidential ballot being mailed to a noncitizen, could end up on the national news.”
- In The Washington Post, Olivia George and Meagan Flynn talked to the DC elected officials who’d have to resign if Republicans passed this into law. “The repeal would force special elections for those seats [and] the unpaid positions could remain vacant, leaving residents without representation.”