The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are planning, again, to take away some of the voting powers of the delegates from the territories and from the District of Columbia.
It is an ungenerous, minor, symbolic act, but the GOP has done it before whenever it had the chance.
Much of the business of the U.S. House is done within a parliamentary construct called the Committee of the Whole. It consists of all the members of the House, and sits in the regular House chamber, but it operates under more streamlined rules than the House of Representatives itself.
When Democrats are in charge, the island and D.C. delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico are allowed to vote in the Committee of the Whole, except that should one or more delegates’ votes decide an issue, their votes are not counted. It is an odd arrangement.
When the Republicans have been in charge in the past, they have denied these votes altogether to the islands and D.C. According to Thursday’s Washington Post, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has been informed that the incoming GOP majority plans to make this move next month when they organize the House.
There is a certain flavor of consistency, both ideological and historical, in this decision of the House majority.
Mainlanders are in the majority, and islanders are in the minority; and minorities do not fare well with the Republicans. Though the island delegates are not making the point, observers note that there are more straights than gays, and more legal residents than illegal ones, and in recent Congressional votes the Republicans, in both the House and Senate, have voted against gays serving in the military, and against a proposed legalization of some of the illegal aliens in the nation.
Hispanic organizations have charged that the GOP vote against the proposed DREAM Act, a legalization program, was a vote against the Hispanic minority as well.
Island delegates will continue to speak on the floor of the House, to vote in the standing committees of the House, and to vote in the party caucuses. All these delegates, incidentally, either are Democrats or sit with the Democrats in the chamber.
Island delegates have never had full votes in the U.S. House and have no representation at all in the Senate. Though it is seldom remembered, in some years, when Puerto Rico was still part of the Spanish Empire, its representatives had full voting rights in the Parliament in Madrid.
The historical parallel continues: when Spanish liberals were in power during the 19th century, the islands (Cuba and the Philippines, too) had seats in the Cortes [Spanish legislature], and when the conservatives held the majority, there were no such seats.
The whole arrangement of full voting representation for Puerto Rico came to a permanent halt with the Spanish-American War, which was conducted under President William McKinley, a Republican.
On the other hand, the U.S. Virgin Islands, as far as I can tell, was never represented in the parliament of Denmark, though Greenland and the Faroe Islands now each have two full, voting members of the Folketing [Danish Parliament].
David North collects, among other things, political trivia about islands.