Fast-forward to 1964, when Barry Goldwater, GOP candidate for president, voted against the bipartisan Civil Rights Act because of his Libertarian belief in private property. This vote by Goldwater doomed the Republican Party to but 10 percent of the black vote ever since. Some Republicans were using private-property arguments to deny fellow citizens access to lunch counters, toilets, drinking fountains and public accommodations with ugly, race-based ramifications.

Over the years the courts have validated legislation treating the district as a state, as in giving residents access to federal courts, residents' paying federal taxes and sending their family members to far-off lands to help defend freedom and promote democratic rights in Iraq and Afghanistan. What irony!

In November 2004, Viet Dinh said in his testimony to the Committee on Government Reform: "The right to vote is regarded as a fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights. Such a right is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government. Given these considerations, depriving Congress of the right to grant the district congressional representation pursuant to the District Clause thwarts the very purposes on which the Constitution is based.

Allowing Congress to exercise such a power under the authority granted to it by the District Clause would remove a political disability with no constitutional rationale, give the district, which is akin to a state in virtually all important respects, its proportionate influence in national affairs, and correct the historical accident by which District residents have been denied the right to vote in national elections."

To do anything less than passing this DC Voting Rights Bill is to confine the party of Lincoln, Douglass, Eisenhower, Reagan and George H.W. Bush to a minority status in perpetuity among people of color.

Wake up, House Republicans, before it's too late.