Today NRO’s editors have the goods on last week’s House passage of the patently unconstitutional “District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007.” Their rehearsal of the arguments against this absurdity is comprehensive. (I’ve weighed in on this matter, most recently here, with links to earlier comments.) Or nearly comprehensive: I would add just one thing. Supporters of the bill rely on the clause of the Constitution (Art. I, § 8, cl. 17) that gives Congress “exclusive jurisdiction” over the capital. As the editors note, this “is a classic case of proving too much,” since it can hardly be supposed that this plenary power can be used to violate other provisions of the Constitution.

But the argument is actually worse than that. It’s self-refuting. The reason the Congress is given exclusive jurisdiction over the capital is because it will not be and cannot be a state, and thus will have no state legislature, governor, or judiciary of its own. All government for the capital district must be provided by federal statute, therefore. But if there is no state government–because the capital is not a state or part of a state–then it follows that there cannot be any congressional representation. Eligibility to vote in congressional elections, the conduct and administration of congressional elections–all these things are the work of the states, the entities being represented in Congress. The cause of the Congress’s power over D.C. and the cause of its non-representation in that body are one and the same: that it is not a state. So the putatively best argument the supporters have at their disposal turns out be the worst one they could have used.

Oh, and my subject line above? That’s in honor of Rep. Tom Davis, Republican supporter of this little monster of illogic.