The Progressive Caucus: D.C. Voting Rights

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman not only for yielding to me, I thank the gentleman for his leadership. When people see me come to the floor, they are used to my coming to the floor for a bill on the District, often a bill I've sponsored.

This is what is known as a Special Order or Special Hour, but it wasn't a Special Hour that I requested. I cannot say enough about how much it meant to me to hear colleagues who could be on a plane now give up that time to come to the floor to speak on this matter.

The chairman of the Progressive Caucus could be halfway--is from halfway across the country in Minnesota; not to mention the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who has even further to go.

Indeed, it ought to be said that today the Congress let out early. So many hightailed it, of course, to their own districts, who would have otherwise been here.

The gentlelady from California has my thanks for another initiative she took, and that is the meeting that was held yesterday with the Speaker of the House.

The Congressional Black Caucus--of course, this is a largely African American city, but it's also a city

where the Black Caucus would be out in front for the vote if anybody was denied the vote. But the Black Caucus has carried this since it was founded. The Speaker, in fact, agreed to a meeting with us in her office. It was a very important and very gratifying meeting, all at the leadership of the Congresswoman from California.

I cannot thank her enough. It's very important to me what Mr. Ellison and Ms. Lee have done because it is their own initiative. It's very important to say that, unlike with so many issues, they are broadly representative of our House and of our Senate and of our country in believing that we should have the vote.

The poll that I think is duplicated perhaps in what Mr. Ellison had shows an unusual majority across all lines; most Democrats and Republicans. And think about it. What red-blooded American would oppose the right to be represented in the national legislature?

How many of us would want to be at the mercy of a group of people, however benevolent, where none of them was accountable to us, even by a single vote. That's been where the residents of the District of Columbia have been for 212 years now because the expectation of the Framers that Congress would in fact make sure that the vote continued after the 10-year transition period has not occurred. Congress dropped the ball.

Those who gave the land from Maryland and Virginia actually got in the first Congress legislation that assured them that the residents of Maryland and Virginia, who now, after 10 years, would be part of the Nation's Capitol, would be left with exactly what they had when they left Virginia and Maryland. They voted for Members of Congress. They voted in the same way all the other Americans did. It is a long, sad story as to why that did not happen.

Understand what my colleagues have been talking about--only the House vote. We are not talking about a vote in the Senate of the United States. Only in the people's House. We are seeking from the House exactly what the House gave us last time.

In an extraordinary vote, this House was the first to pass this bill and send it to the Senate. They fell three votes short because, remember, over there, 51 percent is not a majority. You need 60 percent. That's a new definition of majority that the Senate has created.

I want to thank my colleagues first for the leadership of my colleagues who have come forward as representative, I can truly say, of this House. But I want to thank for all of those who voted for this bill last year.

This bill originated with one of my Republican colleagues who thought of the idea of making it as bipartisan as possible in the hopes that that would draw members of his party as well as my party because the District, like every large city virtually in America, has more Democrats than Republicans.

So he teamed us with Utah, which had barely missed getting a vote because Mormon missionaries, who were out of the State on a religious mission, always had been counted, and they were not counted in the 2000 census.

Utah was only too happy to join. I want to thank the Governor of Utah, its own delegation, who have been with us from the beginning.

Two hundred-nineteen Democrats voted for this bill last time. Only six voted ``no.'' That is very extraordinary. And I am asking each and every one of them to repeat the vote they made last time.

I was in a meeting with a Republican Member who shares my view on the Capitol Visitor Center because there's some things we want to fix about how
staff can conduct their own tours. He came to me afterwards and said, By the way, I'm voting for D.C. voting rights this time.

I do expect that there will be more Republicans voting for the bill than last time. Twenty-two Republicans voted for the bill. They were under some pressure not to. I want to thank Tom Davis, who spearheaded this bill. He has since retired but is helping me even as I speak.

I do want to say that the bill carries a triple bonus. How often is it that we use the word bipartisan and it doesn't quite mean that each side gets exactly what the other side gets?

Look at what happens here. Utah felt cheated, and that is a good word that Mr. Cummings used for how residents who pay taxes and go to war here feel, and they have joined with the District of Columbia, which has never had a vote. If that isn't bipartisan. One for you, one for me. No compromises there. One each. If that is not bipartisan, I haven't heard a real definition of the word.

This vote does something for the House. It increases the House for the first time in 100 years. Every time that a new State has come in, you have the same 435 seats. You're going to have 437 seats now.

In addition to Republicans and Democrats each getting one, now they have one more seat that makes it easier for each to compete. You would think that Republicans would particularly welcome that since they are in the fastest growing areas of the United States. This failure of the House to permanently increase the House in 100 years has been broken if we pass this bill.

Before I ask another question of my good friend who has remained with us for a little while, I do want people to know what it is that moves most Americans by these kinds of margins, almost two-thirds of all adults, for example, being for the bill, almost 60 percent Republicans, almost 70 percent Democrats. What is it that moves them?

Americans would have given us this vote before, I am sure, if we could have gotten the word out. We have an indigenous organization called D.C. Vote. We have got a leadership conference on civil rights with its 200 organizations spreading the word for one-half dozen years now. That is the only way that this has become visible enough so that people who didn't even know we didn't have the vote, which is most Americans, now know it and cannot conceive of it.

Who can conceive of somebody in our country paying taxes without getting any payback on that right to vote ``yea'' or ``nay'' on whether those taxes should be paid or not? And I know Americans cannot conceive of the experience I have had of going to Arlington Cemetery to bury residents from the District of Columbia in the Iraq and Afghanistan war, who have now succeeded in getting the vote for the people of those countries who did not have it before, and died without having that vote in their own Nation's capital, the only capital of any nation to deny the vote to its own residents. This is an anomaly. Don't blame it on the framers, and don't blame it on the American people. Now that they know it, they say do it; don't leave us in this way with this message that steps on our message of democracy around the world, a district the average size of congressional districts in the United States and a district that is larger than some States.

This point has been made, but let me drive it home when they say the notion of having everybody who can vote, except you. What Members are referring to is that among the things that the District has to do is to send its budget here before it can spend a dollar of its own tax-raised money; send its laws here, and let them lie over and see if someone wants to overturn them.

So, this House will see the D.C. appropriation come forward this year. That is another way of saying the taxes that the people who live in the District of Columbia alone have raised, they will see that come forward as an appropriation.

Now, my good friend from California is now a member of the Appropriations Committee. I wish you would describe what it means to come forward with this bill, knowing good and well that you are going to have a vote on it, every Member on both sides of the aisle are going to have a vote on it, but that no Member from the District of Columbia will have a vote for it. You are on that committee.

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Ms. NORTON. That is why I have been so pleased, that even Members who are far more conservative than I voted for this bill on the Republican side and on the Democratic side. On the Democratic side, we had many Members who come from districts, we are so pleased to have them, because we are the signature of big tent political party ever since FDR, and the unity that we have shown and the many Republicans who voted for me does say to me that people understand this vote to be just like the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a couple years ago.

Remember, in our country when in another part of the country almost nobody of color had the vote. We changed all that. So the only people who don't have that kind of representation here are, of all people, the people who live in plain sight of the Congress.

We feel very deeply about our people who have gone to war. We talk about no taxation without representation. That pales beside giving your life for a country that doesn't think enough of you to give you even a vote in the people's House. This time, I dedicated the bill to an unknown soldier and to the first soldier who died in the Iraq war.

The unknown soldier is a soldier who lived in the District of Columbia, who went to war on the war cry of ``no taxation without representation.'' That was the reason that you could get people to take up arms against the mother country, an act of treason. Imagine if they hadn't succeeded what would have happened to them.

The other soldier I dedicated the bill to is one whose name I know very well, Army Specialist Daryl Dent, 21 years old, a graduate of Roosevelt High School, National Guard. When you sign up for the National Guard, especially at the beginning of this war, a kid who I am sure did not envision that he would be overseas, he went the way Guardsmen and reservists and enlisted men and women have always gone, ready to do their duty for the United States of America. I am just asking that we do our duty to these veterans who leave me feeling the same way that all of you feel, only with a deeper hole in my heart.

I could have dedicated this to a lot of other men and women who have died for the District of Columbia. In World War I, this city lost--this is a city, now--lost more than three States. So there were three States that didn't lose as many men at that time as we did. World War II, more than four States from this one place. Korea, more than eight States. Vietnam War, more than 10 States. We have paid our dues. I don't think that can be doubted.

One of my constituents now is a man who owns a business here and lives here, and he was born in Iraq. He stood with me, and I want to quote from him. I don't think Americans know the facts as he told them. His name is Andy Shallal.

He said, ``People like me of Iraqi ancestry, and even my son who was born in the United States, are entitled to vote in the Iraqi election 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.'' I just think that says it all.

This country was so intent on making sure that Iraqis, all Iraqis, and even Diaspora, and people who could not even be counted in their Diaspora because they were in fact born here and raised here just like the gentlewoman and I, those people had the right to vote in the Iraqi elections. And that is what we in the District are told we are supposed to swallow. That is why I must give my thanks to Governor John Huntsman of Utah, who continues to support this bill strongly. If I could quote from him.

``The people of Utah have expressed outrage over the loss of one congressional seat since the last census. I share their outrage. I can't imagine,'' Governor Huntsman wrote, ``what it must be like for American citizens to have no representation at all for over 200 years.''

I want to say to the gentlelady what I believe most Americans don't know. The schools of the District of Columbia were integrated as a result of Brown versus Board of Education just as I was about to leave high school. The District of Columbia was one of five Brown versus Board of Education States, right along there with South Carolina and the rest of them. Why? Because the Congress of the United States saw to it that all public accommodations, that public schools, were indeed segregated. They went further. The Congress of the United States left these American citizens for 150 years without any mayor or city council. Instead, the President, with the consent of the Congress, appointed three commissioners. These three unelected people ruled the city for more than 150 years.

There can be no doubt that while race has very little to do with this today, it seems to be all about partisanship. I say to my colleagues, my colleague who chairs the congressional black caucus, it was your party and mine that denied the vote to the people of the District of Columbia, denied any kind of self-government.

We were denied any kind of self-government. It was the capture of our party then by southern Democrats who are today gone and forgotten, because there is a new South, white and black, that looks very different because they could not conceive of a denial on race alone. Of course, what particularly hurts this third-generation Washingtonian is that for most of that time, the city was a majority white jurisdiction. The presence of a significant number of black people was enough to rally the anti-civil rights forces to keep all people from getting representation and from getting any right to govern themselves until the civil rights movement broke through in all.

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Ms. NORTON. To show you the shame on us, we were granted, for a brief period, a delegate, we finally got the delegate and home rule, as we call it, at the same time. But Madam Chair, there was a brief period where when in the 19th century we got the delegate and the right and a mayor and a city council. And that was when the Republicans came to power after the Civil War. Again we are talking about a city where they could see the reason for the disempowerment. And this, of course, is why so many African Americans nationally became Lincoln Republicans and why you would expect the Republican party to be right here with me, as Tom Davis and so many Republicans here, have been.

The fact is that during Reconstruction, we had basically the same kind of home rule we have now. It wasn't an African American mayor. But that is not what we were after. We were after self-government for everyone here. Reconstruction ended. And I will say to my good friend and colleague who chairs the Black Caucus that one of the first things that the Democrats did in reclaiming power was not simply to resegregate the South. What the Democrats did was to wipe out what the Republicans had done with the District of Columbia. They wiped out the delegate. And the Democrats wiped out home rule.

We don't have clean hands. The Democrats got religion, finally, on matters of equal rights long after the Republicans had it and kept African Americans, of course, as a constituency, because they never forgot it until the New Deal came. And our party was still full of segregationists. But the bottom line of survival and the New Deal brought them here.

Madam Chair of our caucus, the thing has for me been a great ride for my constituents. But I tell them the truth that there is also something personal in this for me because I'm a third-generation Washingtonian, and my great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, got here shall we say the hard way. He walked off of a Virginia plantation where he was being held as a slave and got as far as the District of Columbia, and the Holmes roots got planted here. And so on the Holmes side, those who continued to live here have never experienced the same rights that others have seen, including rights that they saw people down South get just a few decades ago.

So Madam Chair of our caucus, this has racial roots. But those roots have been dug up. They are not there anymore. All that is left is a partisanship that exists here in the Congress but not in the country. I think we are close to bringing the two together, the people with the Congress.

I especially am pleased that the gentlelady from California has never ceased to carry this personally when she worked as Chief of Staff for Congressman Ron Dellums, who has gone on, as she said, to be the mayor of another great city, Oakland, and now is Chair of our caucus, I would like to say one word about the constitutional question which is raised. Well, I can't swear that any bill we passed is constitutional. All I know is we are not the ones who decide that question. We decide questions of right and wrong, of whether or not a bill should be passed or not. But I am not worried about the constitutional issue, not when former Court of Appeals judge Kenneth Starr appeared before us and testified in very scholarly testimony that the bill is constitutional. I am really not worried about it when Professor Viet Dinh who spent some years as the constitutional point man in the Justice Department, Attorney General for Legal Policy it is called, has been one of the prime constitutional advocates for the bill. I'm relying not only on people who usually agree with me on constitutional issues, but on scholars who will concede that any bill as unprecedented as this would raise constitutional issues. But in good faith, after more than 200 years, who are we to continue to deny these rights when the very Constitution they cite has ordained an independent institution to make that final judgment? We will be held accountable for this judgment. And so they say you are not a State, so how can you possibly have the rights of States? There is very scholarly testimony from former Assistant Attorney General Dinh about how in each and every instance, more than half a dozen, where the notion of treating the District as a State has been raised, each and every time the Congress and the Supreme Court had said the same thing, when it comes to the Commerce Clause, the fact that it says commerce among the States does not mean, said the Congress first, and then, of course, the court, does not mean it doesn't apply to the District of Columbia. There is not a case which extracts us from that line of reasoning, both congressional reasoning and, of course, the reasoning of the court.

I have to say to the gentlelady, the one that I think makes me smile most is article 1 section 2 clause 3 which provides that representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States. The court said, go away from here. When it comes to paying your income taxes, D.C., that means you. Don't take these words so literally that they are meaningless. You are not outside the United States. You are different from the States.

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