The Honorable Janet Reno
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Room 4545
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

June 23, 2000

Dear Madame Attorney General:

For two hundred years, the people of our nation’s capital have given their taxes, their loyalty, their service, and in times of war, their lives, to the United States. In all that time, those same people have been unrepresented in the very government that makes decisions about law, taxation, and war. It is time that this terrible inequity be corrected.

As you are aware, in 1998, two lawsuits were brought in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Adams v. Clinton and Alexander v. Daley, contesting the deprivation of the right to vote for the citizens of the District of Columbia. By a two-to-one decision, the special three-judge court denied the plaintiffs’ claims. The plaintiffs in Alexander are appealing to the Supreme Court to hear the case and seeking a hearing from the full court.

We represent a broad spectrum of organizations concerned about the welfare of the people of the District of Columbia. We are united in our belief that the continuing disenfranchisement of the people of Washington, D.C., is an egregious moral wrong that must be rectified. When half a million people, living in the capital city of the world’s greatest democracy, are denied a voice in that democracy, it is a blight upon the nation and the traditions of liberty and equality we value.

Therefore, we urge you not to oppose the plaintiffs’ request for a hearing by the full Court, but instead to support it. As attorney general and head of the department charged with ensuring equal justice under law, you are in a unique position to influence the Court to consider the case of the citizens of the District by recognizing the importance of the legal questions raised by the appeal and the anomaly of the continued inequity of the denying to the people of the nation’s capital the essential rights of participation in our democracy that are available to all other Americans.

Sincerely,

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
United Methodist Church Board of Church and Society
NETWORK: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby
Unitarian Universalist Association Washington Office for Faith and Action
Central Conference of American Rabbis^*
D.C. Catholic Conference^* 

This letter was organized by Mark A. Schaefer, Religious Affairs Committee, DC Vote and Foundry Democracy Project. Foundry United Methodist Church, 1500 16th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20036. 202/332-4010, 202/332-4035 (fax).

* Organization endorsed letter, but not in time to have signature included on printed version delivered to the Attorney General.