D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton called on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan to restore some of her voting rights on the House floor as the 115th Congress convened Tuesday.
“This vote is a down payment for full voting rights to the more than 680,000 American citizens residing in the District of Columbia who pay the highest federal income taxes per capita in the United States and have fought and died in every American war, yet have no vote on the floor of the House of Representatives,” Ms. Norton said at a Capitol Hill press conference Tuesday morning.
Ms. Norton, the District’s nonvoting representative in Congress, can vote in committees but has no vote on final passage of legislation in the full House. Her request for expanded voting rights isn’t unprecedented.
Some previous speakers have changed House rules to allow her to vote on amendments on the floor in what’s called the Committee of the Whole. That committee, in which legislation is introduced and amendments are often placed before a floor vote, includes every member of the House.
“Nothing is more un-American than pulling a vote citizens have earned, something virtually unheard of in this country,” said Ms. Norton, a Democrat.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told reporters at the press conference that a Committee of the Whole vote for Ms. Norton would be the city’s chance to “speak up loudly and strongly,” saying it’s “the least [Congress] can do.”
Ely Ross, director of the Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs, said Tuesday that the 30,000 veterans living in the District deserve some kind of vote in the House.
“There’s an expectation that in a representative democracy, your voice is heard in the halls of Congress,” Mr. Ross said. “It defies logic that these men and women are denied the rights they deserve.”
The issue is largely partisan. Ms. Norton was granted voting rights in the Committee of the Whole during the 103rd, 110th and 111th Congresses — all of which were headed by Democratic speakers.
Starting with the 112th Congress in 2011, the Republican-led House stripped Ms. Norton of Committee of the Whole voting rights.
Mr. Ryan, a Republican, did not return emails seeking comment on whether he would consider Ms. Norton’s request.
Ms. Norton said she hopes Mr. Ryan will allow her the vote, noting that he voted in 2007 to approve the D.C. House Voting Rights Act, which would have given Ms. Norton a full floor vote on legislation.
The bill passed the Democratic-led House in April 2007, 241 to 177, with Mr. Ryan’s affirmative vote recorded with 21 other Republicans. But in September of that year, the Senate failed to invoke cloture on a companion measure and the bill died without a vote.
In 2009, there was another attempt to give Ms. Norton floor voting rights. As that bill made its way through Congress, House Republicans tacked on an amendment that would have barred the mayor and the D.C. Council from outlawing guns permitted under federal law and would have repealed the city’s ban on semiautomatic rifles.
That put D.C. voting rights advocates in a tough position: Get a full vote in Congress and let Republicans eviscerate the city’s strict gun laws or cede their position on voting rights and keep local gun laws intact. That measure was passed by the Senate in February 2009, but didn’t see a vote in the House.
For Ms. Norton, the move comes as hopes of D.C. statehood and budget autonomy wane. With Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House, she acknowledged little hope for those causes in the near future.
“Budget autonomy and statehood are for another day,” Ms. Norton said. “Today we claim the minimum of what has been bought and paid for in lives given in all the nation’s wars and in taxes paid to support the government of the United States.”
• Ryan M. McDermott can be reached at rmcdermott@washingtontimes.com.
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