WHAT NEXT? Now that the election is over, leaders of both parties say that it's time to unify the country. So let's start by giving full Congressional representation to citizens of Washington, DC.

The population of the District of Columbia (about 563,000) is greater than that of Wyoming. Yet DC citizens, who pay federal taxes, have no voting representation in the national Congress, which can exert final say over much of their local legislation.

This ongoing disgrace is very well-known to politicians in the DC area, where license plates sport slogans decrying "Taxation Without Representation."

The conventional wisdom has been that Republican legislators and Republican-led states would never cede more power to heavily Democratic DC. Some whisper that racism is behind the reluctance to give representation to the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the nation's capital.

But surely the Party of Lincoln would not want another day to pass without bridging the representational divide that has long separated the tax-paying citizens of Washington, DC from the rest of the country. Giving them full representation is simply the right thing to do--and now, after the latest election, the Republicans should be able to do so without reversing the balance of power in Congress.

Here's DC Vote on various solutions to the DC identity crisis--including statehood, treatment as a state in Congress, and retrocession back into Maryland. And here's a source for this entry--the website of Paul Strauss, Senator of the District of Columbia.