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DC license plate
President Obama is going to start off his second term with his limo’s finally featuring the official D.C. license plates that highlight a lack of voting rights.
The plates read “taxation without representation” to highlight the fact that the residents district still has no voting rights in Congress despite having a population large than Wyoming. The plates were featured on the Presidential limo when Bill Clinton was in office but George W. Bush had them removed. From the Washington Post:
President Obama announced Tuesday that the District’s politically charged “taxation without representation” license plates will be placed on all presidential limousines this weekend, a move city leaders have been waiting on for four years.
In a statement, White House officials said Obama will use the protest license plate because after living in the city for four years, he has seen “first-hand how patently unfair it is for working families in D.C. to work hard, raise children and pay taxes, without having a vote in Congress.”
I would first like to give Obama credit for keeping his promise. Over four years ago during his first campaign Obama said he would put the taxation with representation plates back on the presidential limo and now he has.
That said, I find this a depressingly perfect metaphor for how many politicians only actively back positions when they think they will never happen. During his first two years Obama had a very good chance of getting voting for the roughly 600,000 people of D.C. if he had really pushed for it. Back at the beginning of his first term a voting rights bill nearly won approval and Democrats could have even pushed through a full statehood measure if they were really committed.
Now that there is zero chance of a voting rights bill being approved by House Republicans, Obama has finally gotten around to taking this step to show his support for it.
Photo by Sean_Marshall under Creative Commons license
5 Comments
Instead of making DC a state, why not just give all of it except the part around the capital, white house, and the mall to Maryland? The First Family can be the only official residents of the the new district.
Good one.
It’s so exciting when o lives up to his promises. Now that he is out from under the problem of reelection he can be himself. That is, he can push for things that will never happen while he is in office and now mean nothing in terms of dim policy. It gives the lote voters another shred of nothing to clutch tightly to their fervently beating hearts.
The truth is, if he had lived up to his promises, both stated and implied, the repugs would have been driven into a corner and would not have been a threat to his admin. He could have had filibuster and voting reform in the senate and there would have been no problem with his reelection. There were many things that could have been corrected which would have given him a real legacy. Instead, his true identity is as a reagan repug and he gave that party life and control of the govt by his inaction and craven sellout.
Just what you would expect from an elitist hypocrite (hey the wool headed troglodytes at the NRA got something right).
The slogan from before the Revolutionary War was “No taxation without representation”. Obviously that was understood to be a demand for change rather than a satisfied description of the status quo.
So it’s bugged me for a long time that the D.C. plates reference that history, but without any sense of irony or even awareness use the precisely opposite phrase to communicate the same political argument: “Taxation without representation” is now the cry of the disenfranchised of the District, evidently wishing to explain the grievance rather than call for a solution.
In the abstract, the explanatory rather than the hortatory voice might not be wrong. But this resort to an ancient slogan because of its familiarity, but treating it as such a dead cliché that its original imperative impetus is now considered an inopportune indicative to be inverted, symbolizes to me something of how our discourse has degraded.