District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007

Floor Speech

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 2007

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Ms. NORTON. It has been remarkable, in a debate where Republicans invoke democracy, to hear Republican after Republican come to the House floor and say that they want the District of Columbia ceded to Maryland, without indicating that the Maryland delegation has given permission to accept the District of Columbia. If you believe in democracy, I suggest you ask the State of Maryland before you cede back anything to that State.

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished chairman for yielding and for his ceaseless fight for the District's rights. During the rule, I thanked the many others who are responsible for this historic day.

Today's vote will allow the House to erase many deep historic wrongs from the Nation's conscience. As the House votes, District's residents are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in a shooting war, as they have in every war, including the war that established our Republic.

Andy Shallal, a District resident, said it best: ``People like me of Iraqi ancestry and even my son, who was born in the United States, are entitled to vote in Iraq elections due in large part to the service of the citizens of the District of Columbia and other Americans who have fought and died in Iraq.''

And today's vote will erase the slander that the Founders of our country who staged the revolution for representation would then deny it to the residents of their own capital.

Professor Viet Dinh, President Bush's former point man on constitutional matters, has wiped away the major argument that because the District is not a State its American citizens cannot vote in the people's House, by detailing the many ways in which ``since 1805 the Supreme Court has recognized that Congress has the authority to treat the District as a State, and Congress has repeatedly exercised that authority.'' My favorite is the sixteenth amendment, which requires only that citizens of States pay Federal income taxes. Why then have District residents continuously been taxed without representation?

And today's vote will relieve the House of the shameful racial burden that has been at the core of the denial of the rights of D.C. citizens. Congress required the same racial segregation here as in the Southern States, in schools and in public accommodations, until the 1954 Brown decision. As one Southern Senator put it: ``The Negroes flocked in, and there was only one way out, and that was to deny suffrage entirely to every human being in the district.''

Former Republican Senator Edward Brooke, a native Washingtonian and the Nation's first popularly elected black Senator, wrote: ``The experience of living in a segregated city and of serving in our segregated Army perhaps explains why my party's work on the Voting Rights Act reauthorization last year and on the pending D.C. House Voting Rights Act has been so important to me personally. The irony, of course, is that I had to leave my hometown to get representation in Congress and to become a Member.''

Today, I ask the House to abolish that irony and the tragedy for the many who have come to the Nation's Capital seeking freedom for 206 years, among them my great grandfather, Richard Holmes, a slave who ran away from a Virginia plantation in the 1850s and settled our family here. I appeal to your conscience and ask for your vote so that finally there also will be a vote for your fellow Americans here who have paid for this precious right many times over in blood and in treasure.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

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