National Capital Security and Safety Act
Floor Speech
NATIONAL CAPITAL SECURITY AND SAFETY ACT -- (House of Representatives - September 16, 2008)
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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his principled work on the bill.
Tonight, just 7 years after the attack on the national capital region, not 7 days after our own tearful commemoration of that attack, the NRA has put a gun at the back of Members of this House and forced a debate, a late-night debate, on a bill that throws off of the roof of the Capitol all concern for homeland security that we have spent the last 7 years paying lip service to.
Now, the NRA may know how to write a bill to repeal gun safety laws, we have stopped that four times, but they certainly don't know how to write a gun bill. They forgot the indelible link when it comes to gun safety between the District of Columbia and the Federal sector, which are joined at the hip. They are twins. You can't get up without getting yourself, and so this time you step right in it.
Fortunately D.C. knows both sides because it has been in the business of protecting both for 208 years. Under the Home Rule Act, if it fails to protect the Federal sector, justifiably, its laws can be overturned. We have made in order, and I am grateful, boy am I grateful to the Chair of the full committee, Mr. Waxman, for putting his energy, the energy of his staff and his principled commitment to States' rights and to the sovereignty of all Americans, to the bill which is the Waxman-Norton bill.
It requires the District to respond adequately within 180 days. That's the
limits of what you are entitled to do. If they don't do it, then you are entitled to step in.
The fact is the District of Columbia has been working on a bill ever since a Supreme Court decision on June 26. They started the very next day. It's the Supreme Court, the final arbiter of all of this, that has required the District to rewrite the law. A narrow bill, 5-4, say you tailor it, each and every one of you, to your convictions. That's what has been done, has been done. So all of this talk about what it used to be before the Supreme Court, is used to be.
Now, what this District has done and signed, I am sure Members haven't even taken any note of. But it wasn't much influenced by the NRA threat, the way Members who support this substitute were.
Sure, it permits some of the things that were always intended, some of the things in the substitute, because it does allow--I read the Supreme Court decision--it allows unlocked semiautomatic guns in the home, as the Supreme Court required. But most of what is reckless in this substitute you won't find in D.C.'s bill.
Of course, the bill came down from the Supreme Court as the Council was about to recess for summer, so they had to pass a stop-gap bill just to allow registration. They did that in good faith, and what did they get for it? What they get for it is the Souder bill all over again, which he, of course, put in.
That's the mirror image of this bill. He put the mirror image of this bill in in March of 2007 before the law was overturned. Now they come back with it after the law has been overturned and after D.C. has already, in fact, passed the law signed by the mayor.
They fastened on to the substitute that keeps them looking like complete idiots, so they fastened on to the substitute knowing full well that it was a stop-gap measure. The bill that is before you, the substitute that you will have to consider, is not the idea of any Member, it was written by the NRA, mandated by the NRA. Most Members would not, I will say, in your behalf, have cosponsored this bill.
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