Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A protest in support of statehood for Washington, D.C., February 2017.
During the course of the chaotic January 3 vote that ultimately saw Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, of Louisiana, win just enough votes to retain his position, Stacey Plaskett raised an existential question about American democracy—or the lack thereof. The Democratic delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands asked why she and the delegates and commissioners from U.S. territories and the District of Columbia were not permitted to participate in the selection of the leadership of the chamber where they sit as the duly elected representatives of millions of U.S. citizens. And why they will not be allowed to vote on any of the other consequential matters that will come before the House this year.
“Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry,” Plaskett announced. “I note that the names of the representatives from American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia were not called, representing collectively four million Americans.”
Raucous applause erupted as members of the Congressional Black Caucus—of which Plaskett is a member—and their allies rose to support the inquiry.
The delegate continued her address with a reference to the fact that America’s territories are the home to “collectively the largest per capita of veterans in this country.”
Some members, presumably foes of Plaskett’s inquiry, shouted, “The House is out of order!” The Clerk of the House, Kevin McCumber, then banged his gavel and recognized Plaskett, asking: “Does the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands have a parliamentary inquiry?”
The delegate asked, again, why these elected delegates and commissioners were not called upon.
Reading from a sheet of paper that had been handed to him, McCumber declared, “Delegates-elect and the Resident Commissioner-elect are not qualified to vote. Representatives-elect are the only individuals qualified to vote in the election of a Speaker.”
Plaskett, a House Judiciary Committee member, was an anti-apartheid activist while a Georgetown University student in the 1980s. She countered that “this body and this nation have a territory and a colony problem. What was supposed to be temporary has now effectively become permanent.”
The Clerk moved to silence her. Banging his gavel, McCumber declared, “The gentlewoman is no longer recognized.”
But Plaskett continued, arguing that, “We must do something about this problem so that these . . .”
“The gentlewoman is no longer recognized.”
“Four million—I may not have a vote, but I have a voice, and my vote for the Speaker of the Virgin Islands is for Hakeem Jeffries.”
And that was the end of the debate—if it could be called such—about one of the most profound, and yet least discussed, abuses of American democracy.
While Congress may not choose to acknowledge that the United States has a colony problem, that does not change the reality that Luna Martinez, who was then working as a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, explained in a landmark 2021 essay on Puerto Rico’s status.
“As a territory perpetually relegated to an extra-Constitutional realm, Puerto Rico remains without a path to either statehood or independence,” she wrote. “Just as a rose by any other name would not change its scent, calling Puerto Rico a sovereign but unincorporated state does not change the nature of its legal status: a colony in everything but name.”
The same can be said of other disenfranchised regions.
“The District of Columbia has been robbed for over 200 years,” the Reverend William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: National Call for Moral Revival, argued in 2021. “The people of the District of Columbia don’t have full voting rights as other Americans do.” He added: “We must talk about statehood in a moral atmosphere. The people of D.C. fought in our country’s wars for other Americans to have the right to vote but they don’t have it for themselves.”
The basic premise of the American experiment in representative democracy, as taught in school rooms and celebrated at patriotic gatherings, is that every citizen of voting age has a right to elect the officials who make and execute the laws of the republic. Though this aspiration has often been thwarted, it has been at the heart of those great moments where the United States has seen itself as progressing toward the goal of delivering “liberty and justice for all.”
That was the case during Reconstruction, when, under pressure from moral and political leaders such as Frederick Douglass, radical Republican Congresses and legislatures enacted and approved Constitutional amendments that permanently abolished slavery, clarified the definition of citizenship, secured equal protection under the law, and guaranteed that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
This guarantee opened the way for voting by Black men—though not women—in the states of the former Confederacy. That, in turn, led to the historic political breakthroughs of the period. During Reconstruction, sixteen Black men served in the U.S. Congress, and more than 600 were elected to the legislatures of Southern states.
But with the withdrawal of federal oversight in 1877, the project began to collapse. African Americans and other people of color were disenfranchised for decades under “Jim Crow” segregation in the South and beyond. Then, the elimination of the poll tax, via an amendment to the Constitution in 1964, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, began to renew democracy in the South.
But that was not the case for Americans living in the disenfranchised territories.
There were no Black Representatives from Washington, D.C., during the Reconstruction era because the district—with its multiracial population—had been established as the nation’s capital district by the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801. That measure failed to respect James Madison’s view that citizens of the capital city should enjoy representation “derived from their own suffrages.”
Instead, Washingtonians were, as a protest from the early nineteenth century noted, “completely disfranchised in respect to the national government” and “reduced to that deprecated condition of which we pathetically complained in our charges against Great Britain, of being taxed without representation.”
Why didn’t the Fifteenth Amendment’s protection against the denial or abridgement of federal voting rights immediately enfranchise the voters of the District of Columbia? Why wasn’t the amendment understood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a vehicle for extending voting and representation guarantees to the residents of territories that were incorporated into the United States following land purchases, acquisitions, and military conquests? The simple answer is that these racially and ethnically diverse regions were historically treated more as colonies than prospective states.
They were also upended by interpretations of the Constitution that tipped the balance against democracy. In the so-called “Insular Cases” of the early twentieth century, federal courts denied Constitutional rights to people living in territories that were occupied by the United States following the Spanish-American War—with racist references to “alien races” that were not denounced by the U.S. Department of Justice until 2024.
In recent decades, courts have also determined that voting rights claims by American citizens living in disenfranchised territories are blocked by language, contained in Article One of the founding document, which says, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States.” The reference to “the several states,” as well as language that extends from it to define the makeup of the Electoral College, is regularly cited by jurists and legislators in rejecting the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise of federal voting rights for millions of Americans in American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia.
Long-disenfranchised territories that are populated primarily or substantially by people of color are still told that they have the option of seeking to address this “democracy deficit” by pursuing statehood. This has happened before. In the case of Alaska (purchased in 1867 from Russia) and Hawai‘i (an independent constitutional monarchy that was overthrown in a coup d’état organized by American businessmen and backed by U.S. military forces, before its annexation by the United States), citizens were eventually enfranchised by the hard-fought achievement of statehood in 1959.
But no new states have been recognized since Dwight Eisenhower was President. And no extension of full voting and representation rights to a nonstate jurisdiction has occurred since the early 1960s, when voters in Washington, D.C., gained representation in the Electoral College.
Over the ensuing six decades, as Plaskett pointed out during the January 3 vote, the millions of Americans who live in the so-called “insular” or “dependent” territories of the United States—all of them islands in the Caribbean Sea or the Pacific Ocean—have been left in an electoral limbo. This is despite the fact that other nations routinely extend full voting and representation rights to citizens living in capital districts and distant islands or enclaves. In France, for instance, Christiane Marie Taubira, a representative from French Guiana, has not only served as a member of the parliament for decades, but also as France’s Minister of Justice. She also sought the presidency.
The United States has had territories throughout its history, but the traditional practice was to organize newly acquired regions into territories with the purpose of integrating them into the United States as new states—with the same voting and representation rights as existing states. For American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia, however, that integration has been thwarted.
It is important to recognize that not everyone in these places wants statehood; for instance, there has long been an active independence movement in Puerto Rico. But, while other countries have extended voting and representation rights to regions with strong independence movements, that has not happened in the United States. The democratization process has not even been approximated with a status that might afford meaningful voting and representation rights to the U.S. territories—with the exception of the approval in 1961 of the Twenty-Third Amendment to the Constitution, which has allowed the voters of the District of Columbia to participate in presidential elections (although never with more electoral votes than the state with the smallest number of electors, and they were still denied full Congressional representation).
So the United States is stuck with the colony problem that Plaskett describes. American citizens in the disenfranchised regions are denied parity with American citizens living in the states—under what the delegate from the Virgin Islands aptly calls “a racist and colonial legal framework for the territories.” That framework has led to unequal distribution of federal resources, underdevelopment, and discrimination.
A 2022 New York Times article by political anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla noted that the inequity is so severe that Puerto Ricans were routinely denied disability benefits provided to citizens in American states. The article was titled, “For Puerto Ricans, Another Reminder That We Are Second-Class Citizens.”
That colonial legacy does not merely harm the people who live in the disenfranchised territories of the United States. It also warps national politics.
If the territories had full Congressional representation—either as newly admitted states or as jurisdictions that, via a Constitutional amendment, were treated as the equivalent of states—it could extend democracy in a way that might better democratize American politics.
Newly enfranchised voters could add as many as ten members to the U.S. Senate, and as many as eight members to the U.S. House of Representatives. They could add up to fifteen more votes in the Electoral College. In a closely divided country, that’s a big deal.
That’s one of the reasons why resolving the “colony problem” is so difficult. Republicans recognize that many of the new Representatives, Senators, and Electoral College voters might be Democrats—or, at the least, progressive when it comes to social and development issues. Beyond that, there are objections to giving full representation rights to jurisdictions with small populations—even though both Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have populations that are larger than existing states; even though states were historically admitted to the union with populations similar to those of today’s smaller territories; and even though other countries have figured these sorts of issues out.
Figuring out how to expand democracy is never easy, as the history of the Reconstruction era reminds us. But Plaskett is absolutely right that this country has a moral and practical responsibility to address its colony problem, which can only be addressed by a commitment to “self-determination, voting rights, and equitable treatment” for all Americans.