ASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that residents of the District of Columbia do not have a constitutional right to vote for their own representative in Congress or, as an alternative, to help choose Maryland's congressional delegation.
The ruling, coming in a brief, unexplained decision to uphold a lower court ruling, blocked an attempt to win from the courts what the capital city's residents have been unable to gain from Congress or a constitutional amendment. Justice John Paul Stevens was the lone dissenter.
The 8-1 decision leaves the city's voters with the right to select only a nonvoting delegate to the House - a position now held by Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat.
Amy W. Slemmer, executive director of D.C. Vote, an activist group that is seeking to gain full voting rights for district residents, said, ''We take this as a mandate for the work we're doing, to raise the tenor of the grass-roots debate so that the national Legislature will effect a solution. This requires a political fix.''
Congress, Slemmer said, has ample authority under the Constitution to extend voting rights to Washington residents.
Frustrated by Congress's unwillingness to do that, the city's government, joined by 71 residents, has been pursuing a new tactic for the past two years: a lawsuit arguing that the local residents' exclusion from full voting rights is a form of discrimination that violates their rights as citizens.
They wanted the courts to declare the District of Columbia a state - a move that would have immediately given the city a right to a representative in the House - or to rule that district residents should be counted as citizens of Maryland for congressional voting purposes.
The District of Columbia was carved out of parts of Maryland and Virginia in 1790, and its residents continued to vote in those states until the district gained its own local government in 1801. At that point, district residents lost their right to vote for a member of the House from any state.
The part of the district that originally had been in Virginia was returned to that state in 1846. What is left of the district came only from Maryland, and that is why district residents seek to vote there as an alternative to having their own voting representative in the House.
In their challenge, the city's residents preferred a decision that would make the district a state in its own right. As a fallback move, they argued that they should regain their right to vote in Maryland. Some of the residents added another claim: Because those who live in federal enclaves, such as national parks, have a right to vote in neighboring states, equality demands that those who live in the federal capital should be able to do so, too.
All of those claims failed when a special three-judge US District Court, splitting 2-1, ruled in March that the Constitution's grant of power over the district to Congress and a series of court rulings and federal laws mean that the residents have no right to vote for a full voting member of the House.
Although the lower court rejected full representation, it expressed sympathy for district residents, saying it was ''not blind to the inequity of the situation.'' But, it said, the courts had no authority to give them what they sought.
D.C. Vote's Slemmer, while expressing disappointment at yesterday's loss in the Supreme Court, said her group had been encouraged by the lower court's positive comment about the cause of district representation.
In a move to dramatize the D.C. Vote campaign, the local city council this year placed the words ''Taxation Without Representation'' on district license plates.
The Associated Press reported that the court yesterday agreed to decide whether Congress unlawfully required federal judges in office since at least 1983 to begin paying Medicare and Social Security taxes. (The court said it will hear the government's argument that imposing the tax on sitting judges did not reduce their salaries in violation of the Constitution.)
The court also agreed to settle a back-pay and taxes dispute involving major league baseball players that could affect the way taxes are assessed on all kinds of labor settlements.
