U.S. House Democrats took up the fight again this week for the “people we care about most”: illegal aliens.
A strong majority of 143 voted against a successful Republican measure to overturn Washington, D.C.’s law that allows noncitizens to vote.
To their credit, not all the Democrats voted to let noncitizens have a say in the city’s elected officials and public policies; 52 voted the right way. But enough voted the wrong way to show just where the party stands on stopping foreign election interference.
The Bill
D.C.’s Public Law 24-242, the Local Residents Voting Rights Act, passed in 2022 and became law last year because the U.S. Senate permitted the expiration of a 30-day window in which to object to the bill. The House had already blocked the bill.
The bill allows not only noncitizen legal residents, but also illegal aliens to vote. That would include the “migrants” Joe Biden has imported since he took office who landed in the city. It would also include illegal-alien thugs, rapists, and murderers, and foreign agents and soldiers.
Last year on July 12, Republican Congressman August Pfluger of Texas introduced a measure to overturn the law.
“An individual who is not a citizen of the United States may not vote in an election for public office in the District of Columbia or in any ballot initiative or referendum in the District of Columbia,” the bill says.
Legislation in the District must pass congressional scrutiny because the city is not a state and under the control of Congress.
Yesterday, Pfluger’s bill passed 262-143, with 143 Democrats voting against it.
“The radical DC Council decision to allow noncitizens — including illegal aliens and foreign agents — to vote in elections dilutes the voting power of the citizen voter,” Pfluger said after the vote. “My legislation restores the sanctity of the voting process and ensures that only American citizens are voting in our Nation’s capital.”
In his remarks on the House floor, Pfluger said that elections in which noncitizens vote are more than just “local elections.”
“Yes, they are local elections, but they are democratic elections that regularly determine taxation, the criminal code, and the election of the very city council members who decide ordinances like who gets the right to vote,” he said:
Not to mention, many local elections are decided by close margins.
I find it inconceivable that this City Council, and now many other City Councils across the country, would intentionally dilute the voting power of their constituents (many of them from underserved communities) for noncitizens who otherwise would not meet residency requirements, don’t pay taxes, in some cases broke our laws to enter this country, and could even be employed by a foreign adversary.
Nonvoting D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said D.C.’s voting law is “not unique.”
More than dozen cities allow the same, and “there is a long history in the United States, including before its founding, of allowing noncitizens to vote in local, state, territorial and federal elections. Congress should keep its hands off D.C.”
Norton also appealed for Congress to give the city statehood.
Before the vote, Fox News reported, Maryland’s Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin’s 31-year-old apologia for noncitizen voting surfaced.
In a paper for the American University Washington College of Law, Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical Constitutional and Theoretical Meanings of Alien Suffrage, Raskin wrote that the Founders said nothing about noncitizens voting, and required citizenship only to hold federal office.
“The current blanket exclusion of noncitizens from the ballot is neither constitutionally required nor historically normal,” he wrote:
Moreover, the disenfranchisement of aliens at the local level is vulnerable to deep theoretical objections since resident aliens — who are governed, taxed, and often drafted just like citizens — have a strong democratic claim to being considered members, indeed citizens, of their local communities. …
It can be safely concluded from the juxtaposition of the Framers’ specific and varying constitutional conditions for federal office-holding and their complete silence as to a citizenship qualification for federal voting that they did not intend to create a U.S. citizenship suffrage qualification.
Raskin also argued that the Constitution specifies that states cannot prohibit a qualified citizen from voting, but says nothing about states’ allowing noncitizens to vote.
Spies Can Vote
Raskin might be right, but the Founders lived 200 years ago. The danger of millions of “migrants” altering public policy in one city after another didn’t exist.
After the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) chastised Democrats who voted against the measure.
“Under no circumstance should anyone other than American citizens decide any American elections. The radical policy from the D.C. city council to allow noncitizens to decide local elections is anti-American and dilutes the constitutional rights of D.C. residents,” he said:
This should have been a unanimous vote. Instead, 143 Congressional Democrats voted today to allow Russian spies, Chinese diplomats, and illegal aliens to influence elections in the Nation’s Capital. It is shameful.
Make no mistake, if it were successful, progressive Democrats would use this experiment as justification to encourage noncitizen voting in more communities across the country. Congress has a responsibility to prevent this, and the Senate must immediately send this bill to the President’s desk.
Even if the Senate does so, Biden will veto it.
The 143 Democrats who voted against the measure proved a point that Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut made on MSNBC in February.
On the immigration issue, Murphy worried that Democrats had failed to deliver public policy “for the people we care about most, undocumented Americans.”
They won’t fail to deliver on this issue, as Pfluger’s bill will not pass the Democrat-controlled Senate.
