James Taranto has this interesting story:

Last week, by a razor-thin vote of 209-208, the House passed an amendment to the District of Columbia appropriations bill providing federal funds for vouchers that would allow some 1,300 Washington schoolchildren to escape the district's miserable public schools. The New York Times denounces the plan in an editorial titled "In D.C., Taxation Without Representation"--a bizarre headline, since the editorial isn't about taxation. The Times asserts that the voucher proposal is "tyrannical" because it is opposed by "the school board and a majority of the city's elected officials, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's nonvoting representative in the House." The editorial doesn't mention that Mayor Anthony Williams supports the proposal.

The Times editorialists lash out against the Constitution, which provides that the nation's capital, as a federal district, does not have the same sovereignty as the 50 states. Federal jurisdiction over Washington, the paper avers, is "dictatorial." The editorial also complains that the voucher amendment "erodes the wall between church and state by pushing children toward parochial schools"--never mind that the Supreme Court ruled last year that it is constitutional to spend public money on vouchers for parochial schools, provided the government does not favor religious schools over secular ones (or vice versa).

In addition, the Times faults Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, for supporting the measure, which it claims "would lead to an uprising were it tried in her home state."

What he doesn't say is that the bill would've been defeated if either Gephardt or Kucinich were doing the jobs the good citizens pay them to do. How many jobs can you just not show-up and still get paid?