Photo by Josh Novikoff

With the nation’s attention squarely focused on Washington in the coming days, the D.C. Council couldn’t have found a better time to make a visible statement about the city’s lack of voting rights.

Members of the council and the District’s shadow delegation today inaugurated an electronic billboard that lists the amount of federal taxes paid by District residents while not having a vote in the U.S. Congress. (Currently, that’s $5 billion a year, second only to Connecticut.) The “tax ticker,” which was endorsed by the council last year, is modeled after the electronic billboards in the 1980s that counted the national debt, dollar by dollar, to make a point about reckless government spending. The sign wasn’t working at the time of the unveiling this morning, but the display should be working later today.

The council’s legislation called for a sign to be placed outside the Wilson Building on Pennsylvania Avenue and near the new baseball stadium in Southeast, though the latter sign has been caught up in a dispute with the owners of the Washington Nationals, who deemed it “political” and “controversial.”

Proponents of the sign claim that it will make a point about D.C. voting rights that more easily resonates with many American taxpayers — if D.C. residents are paying into the system, why aren’t they being fully represented in return? Of course, such an argument also yields calls for D.C. to be exempted from paying federal taxes in exchange for not having voting rights. As nice as that sounds, I’ve always been skeptical of this argument. Rights shouldn’t be traded away for tax breaks, IMHO.

Those debates notwithstanding, it’s good to know that millions of people may well walk by the sign over the next four days and agree with what we know to be true — it’s patently unjust that 600,000 people who serve in the military and pay their federal taxes don’t have true representation in Congress.