"When in the course of human events..."
Those are just words to hundreds of thousands of American citizens, who still don't have the rights that the founders of this country fought and died for.
As I write this, I and 590,000 of your fellow American citizens - citizens who pay their taxes, whose children can be drafted for war, who are just as subject to all Federal laws and regulations as any other American citizen - are being denied our basic civil rights.
We are disenfranchised - we are allowed no representation in the body that makes our laws and taxes our income, and the laws our city's elected representatives make are subject to the veto of a Congressional committee that is completely unaccountable to us. We have one representative in the House - the solid progressive Eleanor Holmes Norton - but she is not allowed to vote. We have no representation of any kind in the Senate.
The worst thing about being denied civil rights - being disenfranchised - is that we are powerless to change our situation. The only people who can change our situation are Congress and the state legislatures through a Constitutional amendment - and we are not represented in those bodies.
Read More