I previously mentioned that every state issued license plates. The city of Washington DC is not in any stats, so it issues its own plates. Recently, the motto on the plates has been changed to a distinctly political slogan; “Taxation without Representation”.
Let me give you some background to the reason for this appearing on the plates. The US Congress, roughly equivalent to the UK parliament, consists of two elected chambers. There is the Senate, with two members from each of the fifty states and there is the House of Representatives with each state having a number of members depending on population. The state of Wyoming, the least populous has one representative; California has fifty three representatives. Washington DC is not in a state, so its inhabitants have no elected representatives in Congress; this despite the fact that the population of DC exceeds that of the state of Wyoming. It is ironic that a country that prides itself on its democratic traditions deprives over half a million people in the capital city of their right to have elected representatives.
The slogan is a deliberate reference to a rallying cry of the revolution against British rule in the eighteenth century. Americans opposed the imposition of taxation by a parliament to which they did not elect members with the call “No taxation without representation”
