One of the first and most proper acts of the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives was to end the Democrats’ practice of granting unconstitutional House voting “rights” to delegates from the District of Columbia, as well as Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas Islands, the Virgin Islands and Guam.
The Constitution is as explicit as it can be on this matter.
Article 1, Section 2, includes these passages about who may (and who may not) be a member of the House: “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States … . No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have … been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”
In other words, people who are not inhabitants of any of the “several States” may not be members of the House. And if they are not members of the House, it is plain that they are not entitled to various voting privileges in the House, as the former Democrat majority had granted them. (Not coincidentally, most of the delegates from the affected areas are Democrats.)
Neither the District of Columbia nor the islands mentioned above that have delegates in the House are states. As such, Congress had no business giving House voting rights to those delegates.
The House acted correctly in ending the delegates’ unconstitutional voting “rights.”