[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 58 (Thursday, April 22, 2010)]
[House]
[Page H2826]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               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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