Providing for Consideration of HR 1433, District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007

Floor Speech

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 1433, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 2007

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman for yielding, Mr. Speaker. And I really had not intended to come forward since I will be managing in a few minutes but I must say that I have been virtually driven to the floor by the abstractions of the discussion. I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia.

Would the gentleman from Virginia engage in a colloquy with me?

I will have more to say about the specific legal and constitutional issues, but I do want to say something to those who are such literalists that they would deny us of the right to vote citing the Framers and the Constitution. Is it not true that the State of Virginia and perhaps as many as half the Colonies were not States, but Commonwealths? And is ``Commonwealth'' mentioned anywhere in the Constitution?

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman. And the gentleman has clarified something further concerning the right to vote in the people's House.

The reason I come is not, frankly, to engage early in the discussion we will be having on the bill itself; but because the discussion has been such an abstraction. I have come because that discussion has been as if the Framers set up a place, not a city with real people. It is as if you can discuss these rights without referring to whom these rights would belong.

Members have come to the floor with the hubris to believe that the Framers intended their constituents to have full rights under the Constitution, but not my constituents because we happen to live in the Capital of the United States created by the Framers.

I do want to let you know who you are talking about so that this discussion will not be all about constitutional and legal abstractions that can only be settled by the courts of the United States. You are talking about Kathryn Ray, who lives here and is a mom and a librarian and a PTA president. You are talking about Larry Chapman, who is a D.C. firefighter, putting his life on the line for emergency response here and throughout the city. You are talking about Liz Allen, an attorney who has had her first child and has decided to raise this son here in the District of Columbia even though her family is denied a vote.

You are talking about Wade Henderson, like me a native Washingtonian, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who has fought every day for civil rights around the world but has never had a vote in Congress. Like me, he is an African American who grew up in this city when it was a segregated city. Like me, he understood that the composition of this city then and for centuries has had much to do with the denial of voting rights in this city. And so, like me, he has argued in these Halls that all citizens of the District of Columbia, of every background, finally have the rights that all other Americans now take for granted.

This bill is about Evelyn Curtis, a nurse at one of our hospitals, who would love to have a say on health care issues. She can talk to me, but I can't talk to you about what she believes by voting.

This bill is ultimately about 650,000 American citizens. When you are asked to vote on this bill in the middle of a war, when our citizens are among the troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, remember that you will be voting not for my vote but for the votes of the people who live in the District of Columbia and especially for the votes of those Washingtonians who as I speak are serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world in service to the United States of America.

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Ms. NORTON. I just want to say, I will not object. I will not object, out of the sense of fairness that I hope that every Member will bring with them to the floor when the time comes to vote on this bill. I will not object, because Mr. Rohrabacher, who may disagree with my bill, has at least understood that the Republic will not go on as long as the residents of the Nation's capital are denied a vote in the Congress and has himself introduced his own version of a voting rights bill.

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