Voting Rights For The District Of Columbia

Floor Speech

Voting Rights For The District Of Columbia

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, this week a historic vote to give the 600,000 residents of the District of Columbia here in the Nation's capital voting representation in the House was due on the floor and had to be pulled down but only for now. I come to thank the majority of Members of Congress, of this House, who have voted for the right of the people of the District to have a vote on this floor, especially the 22 Republicans and the 219 Democrats, who gave the D.C. House Voting Rights Act a straight-up vote in 2007 when it passed 241-177.

I thank Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer for their invaluable and unfailing support until the very end. I thank Majority Leader Harry Reid for bringing a historic first-time vote for the bill where it passed the Senate. I thank Chairman John Conyers for his unyielding support of D.C. voting rights. I thank former Representative Tom Davis whose idea it was to pair Democratic D.C. with Republican Utah, the most perfect example of a bipartisan bill ever to hit this floor where each side benefits equally. I thank Ilir Zherka of D.C. Vote and the coalition he put together and Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights, who were steadfast and creative throughout this process.

The Senate for the first time, in fact, enacted the bill, but it had a gun amendment that took down the District's gun safety laws, yet the District's gun safety laws have been held to be constitutional now by the courts. When the bill came here to the House, I sought a clean vote and almost got it. I thank the House for being willing to put the D.C. House voting rights bill on a must-pass bill. The Senate did not agree, so I spent months trying to negotiate a compromise that would have left at least some of D.C.'s gun laws intact.

Finally, and reluctantly, I agreed to the same amendment that passed the Senate to, in fact, alter the District's gun laws, but I had a set of strategies for returning the District's public safety laws.

However, we were hit with a new over the top revised gun amendment that gun forces sprung on us that was worse than anything we could have imagined. Ultimately, people would have been allowed to carry guns in the Nation's capital. The city could not prohibit guns in its own publicly owned buildings. Owners of residential and commercial property could not ban guns in their own property to those who rent or lease.

We expect the gun forces to return. We are ready for them. For the sake of post-9/11 Washington and hometown D.C., they must not succeed in overturning the public safety gun laws of the Nation's capital. I promise you this, we will redouble our efforts to finally give the American citizens who pay taxes at a rate of second per capita in the United States, the citizens who live in our own capital, the vote in Congress they have sought for two centuries and that every American who believes in the founding principles of the Framers and our country know must have. Let's do it, and let's do it this year.

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