District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007

Floor Speech

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 2007

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Mr. ISSA. Madam Speaker, it is an unusual day in which the cosponsor of a bill, not in just this Congress but in the previous Congress, comes to oppose the final passage. It is not that I object to the people of the District of Columbia gaining a vote in this body, just the opposite. For two Congresses I have worked with Chairman Davis, now Ranking Member Davis, to achieve that.

It is that, for whatever reason, in this Democratically controlled Congress, we have lost democracy. In the regular order of the two committees, amendments were offered, some were passed, some failed. One that was passed was one of mine. It intended to make clear the Maryland relationship to the District of Columbia. It was a fairly small technical amendment. The Democrat majority, led by Speaker Pelosi, chose to strip that out of what was brought to the floor, to my amazement, but not amusement. And then when I offered the same amendment to the Rules Committee, they voted not to allow it. So that which was voted in the committee of jurisdiction was stripped out by the leadership and then refused to be considered in the body of the whole. That is without any democratic fairness.

I am not here to complain about process. I believed it was an essential piece of language when this legislation was considered. So without it, I feel I am compelled not only to vote against it, but to seek alternate remedies for future legislation.

We cannot, in this body, Madam Speaker, allow the Speaker of the House or the House majority leader to simply eliminate the tradition of how we do business in order to reach democratically produced legislation. So I will be voting against this bill, and it will be a vote against the kind of heavy-handedness that led to this bill being less than it could have been.

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