Top Dem's past push for noncitizen voting rights revealed ahead of House vote

A senior House Democrat previously advocated for noncitizen participation in the U.S. election system, arguing that the framers of the U.S. Constitution did not "intend" for a citizenship requirement to vote, Fox News Digital has learned.

It comes as the House gears up to vote on a bill that would repeal a local law in Washington, D.C., granting noncitizen residents of the city the right to vote in local elections.

The bill advanced through the House Oversight Committee in a 23-19 vote last summer and is expected for a House floor vote Thursday afternoon.

Among the Democrats who opposed it was Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the Oversight Committee's ranking member, who authored a 1993 paper for the American University Washington College of Law, "Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical Constitutional and Theoretical Meanings of Alien Suffrage."

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"In this Article, I will argue that the current blanket exclusion of noncitizens from the ballot is neither constitutionally required nor historically normal. Moreover, the disenfranchisement of aliens at the local level is vulnerable to deep theoretical objections since resident aliens — who are governed, taxed, and often drafted just like citizens — have a strong democratic claim to being considered members, indeed citizens, of their local communities," Raskin wrote in the paper.

In another section of the paper, Raskin noted that the Founding Fathers considered citizenship terms for officeholders in the White House and Congress but did not include the same for voters.

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"It can be safely concluded from the