Congress abandons bill on DC voting rights

WASHINGTON (AP) - The District of Columbia has waited more than two centuries to get a vote in Congress, and now it looks like the city's roughly 600,000 residents will have to wait even longer...

TheGrio Staff

Apr 20, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — The District of Columbia, as the U.S. capital is formally known, has waited more than two centuries to get a vote in Congress, and now it looks like the city’s roughly 600,000 residents will have to wait even longer.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced Tuesday that lawmakers will not take up legislation this week giving D.C. residents a vote in the House of Representatives, and said he was “profoundly disappointed.”

The Democrat also said it was unlikely the enfranchisement bill, which became embroiled in a gun rights dispute and other issues, would be considered in the House later this year.

With Democrats, the main supporters of the legislation, expected to lose seats in the November election, the possibilities for resurrecting the measure next year were uncertain.

WATCH RACHEL MADDOW REPORT ON DC VOTING RIGHTS HERE:
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The bill would have increased full House membership from 435 to 437, giving District residents a vote while adding a temporary at-large seat for Republican-leaning Utah, which narrowly missed out on getting an extra seat after the 2000 census.

The House passed the bill in 2007 and the Senate approved it last year. But the Senate bill came with an amendment that would have forced the District to effectively eliminate its tough gun control laws.

House members, including the District’s nonvoting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, have been trying for the past year to find a formula that would allow a vote while satisfying the powerful gun rights lobby in Congress. But in the end, no resolution was reached.

Norton said she and Democratic leaders in the House were “shocked and blindsided” over the weekend to receive what she said was a National Rifle Association-drafted gun bill to accompany the voting act.

She said the proposal was even stronger than the gun provision passed in the Senate, barring the district from prohibiting or interfering with the carrying of firearms, either concealed or openly, in public. She said it would also have made it easy for people to carry firearms without permits and would stop the district from prohibiting guns in city-controlled buildings.

“The new sections will surely bring down the support we have had of anti-gun Democratic senators,” she said.

At least six of the 13 members of the District of Columbia City Council, including the body’s chairman, said they would not support the bill with any amendment that would weaken the city’s strict gun laws. The city’s mayor, Adrian Fenty, had said he supported Norton’s efforts to go forward with the bill. Fenty said he believed the majority of residents wanted to push forward on voting rights and that gun rights advocates would try to weaken the District’s gun laws even without a voting rights bill.

Democratic gun control supporters in both the House and Senate indicated they might vote against the voting rights bill if the gun provision remained a part of it.

“I believe the District will become much less safe, and the opportunity for criminals, mentally unstable persons and juveniles to purchase weapons will increase dramatically,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, said in a statement, adding she would vote against the bill if it repeals D.C.’s firearms laws.

Hoyer said there were a combination of factors in the decision not to take up the bill, but the bottom line was that “the price was too high.”

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Associated Press writer Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.