[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 7]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 9713-9718]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        RECOGNIZING ILIR ZHERKA

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

                      of the district of columbia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 21, 2012

  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask the House of 
Representatives to join me in recognizing Ilir Zherka, Executive 
Director of DC Vote, who has been the outstanding leader of District of 
Columbia residents in the fight for equal citizenship rights in our 
country. Ilir will celebrate his tenth anniversary as Executive 
Director of DC Vote on June 24, 2012. Ilir has built DC Vote in 
membership and in the use of a wide assortment of sophisticated tactics 
and approaches. Under Ilir's leadership, DC Vote has sustained itself 
for 10 years without interruption, thus ensuring the sustainability of 
a citizen's movement here for the first time in decades. Ilir has been 
the major tactician of the movement, skillfully using approaches as 
varied as polling, lobbying, and civil disobedience.
  Most recently, Ilir was the architect of unprecedented civil 
disobedience on the streets

[[Page 9714]]

in front of the Senate and the White House last year, after Congress 
reimposed anti-home-rule riders on the D.C. appropriations bill, and 
after the District government barely avoided being shut down because of 
a federal budget fight in which the city was not involved. Ilir's own 
arrest was emblematic of the courageous leadership that he has given 
the movement.
  Ilir's earlier leadership in the fight of D.C. residents for a full 
vote in the House brought the city the closest to success in its 
history. Ilir brought a wide variety of approaches to the voting rights 
struggle with mounting success. His valuable work behind the scenes in 
establishing contacts to help remove an amendment that tied passage of 
the D.C. House Voting Rights Act (DCVRA) to the elimination of the 
city's gun safety laws is not well known. Years of diligent and 
systematic work brought passage of the DCVRA in the House and Senate, 
only to be undercut by the dangerous gun amendment. This disappointment 
after many years of hard work would have caused many to move on. 
However, on the heels of the setback for voting rights, Ilir 
immediately turned to leading a new fight for D.C. budget autonomy and 
building an expanded national coalition to protect the District's home 
rule from an unprecedented series of attacks.
  Ilir's aggressive creativity in building DC Vote has been matched by 
personal modesty, rare in a leader of a movement. Most who have worked 
with Ilir have been unaware that he was brought to this country as a 
child in an immigrant family from Montenegro, fleeing ethnic tension 
with Albanians. He rose from an underprivileged childhood in the South 
Bronx to attend college at Cornell University and law school at the 
University of Virginia. Ilir's work for justice before and during his 
leadership of DC Vote was chronicled in an April 2012 article in 
Washingtonian magazine, entitled ``Taking It to the Street.'' I ask for 
unanimous consent to place the article in the Record.
  Mr. Speaker, for 10 years, Ilir Zherka has been leading the fight for 
equal rights for the residents of the District of Columbia, within view 
of the U.S. Capitol. Ilir has visited the offices of many Members. His 
leadership has been in the great tradition of citizens who have 
petitioned for their rights and engaged in citizen action, including 
time-honored civil disobedience. I ask the House to join me in 
commending Ilir Zherka for his outstanding leadership of the movement 
for equal citizenship rights for the more than 600,000 Americans who 
live in the Nation's capital.

                        Taking It to the Street

                            (By Ariel Sabar)

       The Headquarters of DC Vote have a lived-in feel, with 
     scuffed blue carpets and hallways lined with stacks of 
     cardboard boxes. The walls are a bricolage of candid photos 
     from protests and posters from the group's well-known ad 
     campaigns (I AM DC, I DEMAND THE VOTE). When I first visited 
     last summer, a couple of rumpled dress shirts hung over the 
     backs of chairs in the office bullpen. A staffer apologized, 
     saying they'd been tossed there by interns who had changed 
     into T-shirts before going out to leaflet.
       The corner office of DC Vote's executive director, Ilir 
     Zherka, was so tidy by comparison that I asked whether he'd 
     cleaned up for my visit. There was a stand for his leadership 
     awards, a single mounted news article, an impeccably trimmed 
     ficus. Zherka said the slim pile of papers on his desk was a 
     bit thicker than usual: ``I don't like clutter. It prevents 
     me from freeing up my mind to work.''
       A diagram tacked to the inside of his door added to the 
     picture of Zherka as the cool tactician bringing discipline 
     to the District's long and messy struggle for full democratic 
     rights. The nation's capital has more residents than 
     Wyoming--but no vote in Congress, which has the power to 
     overrule the District's leaders on local matters.
       The hand-drawn diagram, of X's and O's yoked by arcing 
     lines, looked like a page from a coach's playbook. Inside the 
     biggest loop was a list of what Zherka said were ``opponents 
     or problems.'' These included Power of Elites, Ignorance, 
     NRA, Republicans, Blue Dog Dems, Pseudo Strict 
     Constructionists. The list had the gravity of a voting-rights 
     Ten Plagues.
       The diagram, Zherka explained, was a postmortem inked after 
     one of the movement's most spectacular defeats. Legislation 
     that DC Vote had spent seven years fighting for--and that had 
     won historic votes in both the House and the Senate--came to 
     an ugly end in the spring of 2010, the victim of a fractured 
     city leadership and of deft politicking by the national gun-
     rights lobby. The DC Voting Rights Act would have expanded 
     the US House of Representatives by two seats. One would have 
     gone to DC, whose residents are overwhelmingly Democratic, 
     the other to Utah, a Republican-leaning state that had failed 
     by a whisker to win a fourth House seat through the 2000 
     census.
       In trying to regroup, Zherka--a tall 46-year-old man with 
     narrow features, a loping gait, and a salt-and-pepper 
     goatee--had organized a series of meetings to pick through 
     the wreckage. The movement needed to pivot, to find a new way 
     forward. At the front of everyone's mind was the one-word 
     question scrawled in big red letters at the top of the 
     diagram: How?
       As Zherka came to see it, the ``inside game''--of lobbying 
     Congress, of quiet meetings with elites--had to give way to 
     something more aggressive. The District had to make Congress 
     and the White House pay a higher price for denying greater 
     self-rule to the 600,000 residents of the nation's capital.
       ``Part of our strategy is to push this fight to the point 
     where Americans weigh in in large numbers,'' Zherka told me. 
     ``That's the way the civil-rights movement worked, when 
     people from the North called their congressmen and said, 
     `Stop those dogs, turn off those water hoses.'''
       We left Zherka's office and walked to the small break room. 
     Among the photos on the wall was one of Zherka wrapped in a 
     TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION flag and pointing skyward 
     with his right hand. The gesture managed to evoke both the 
     Statue of Liberty and Moses.
       Zherka said that the day after Barack Obama won the 
     presidency, he taped the Washington Post's front page to the 
     same wall. It was a totem to the man who was supposed to be 
     the movement's redeemer; the man who had backed the voting-
     rights bill as a US senator, who ate at Ben's Chili Bowl, who 
     played basketball with then-DC mayor Adrian Fenty and won 
     Fenty's endorsement in the Democratic primary; the man, an 
     African-American, who said he saw this historically black 
     city on the Potomac as something more than a seat of federal 
     power.
       That now felt like a long time ago. Last spring, Zherka 
     removed the Election Day front page and replaced it with one 
     more attuned to the times. Its centerpiece was a photograph 
     of current DC mayor Vincent Gray being handcuffed by the 
     Capitol Police on April 11 of last year, a day when 41 
     people, including Zherka, the mayor, and six DC Council 
     members, were arrested in the movement's largest act of civil 
     disobedience in decades. The arrests made headlines around 
     the world.
       The television cameras, the turnout among local leaders, 
     and the location--a tightly policed street near the Capitol--
     gave the appearance of significant advance planning. But 
     Zherka had put the entire demonstration together in about 48 
     hours. The catalyst was news that President Obama had agreed 
     to a Republican-sought ban on locally funded abortions in DC 
     in a last-minute deal to avert a federal-government shutdown. 
     ``John, I will give you DC abortion,'' Obama had told GOP 
     House speaker John Boehner, according to a Washington Post 
     article reconstructing the negotiations.
       From his iPhone that weekend, Zherka sent an e-mail 
     summoning his staff to a 10 AM conference call. This latest 
     attack on self-governance demanded a response, he said. They 
     would need to e-mail supporters, contact the media, work 
     Facebook and Twitter, and get permits from the Capitol 
     Police. Zherka and his deputies would need to track down 
     Mayor Gray and the council over the weekend and urge them to 
     attend. In less than three hours, an e-mail to supporters 
     announced a 5 PM demonstration that Monday, at Constitution 
     Avenue and Second Street, Northeast.
       Zherka's plan was to have speeches and then lead perhaps a 
     half dozen protesters into the street, blocking traffic and 
     refusing police orders to move. Zherka suspected that Obama's 
     concession would inflame DC leaders, particularly those who 
     had worked to elect him. But how many were willing to be 
     thrown into the back of a police van? Zherka had run into 
     Mayor Gray at a social function the night before, but Gray 
     had been noncommittal.
       The next day, after the speeches, Zherka was the first to 
     defy Capitol Police and set foot in the busy street. To his 
     relief, Gray was right behind him.
       When I caught up with him not long afterward, Zherka told 
     me that the 41 arrests were a ``huge turning point.'' But a 
     year later, the movement's prospects seem anything but clear.
       If Eleanor Holmes Norton--DC's nonvoting member of 
     Congress--and a string of the city's mayors have been the 
     public face of the fight for greater self-rule in the 
     District, Zherka is its chief strategist and organizer. He is 
     in many ways the movement's Zelig, a shape-shifter as 
     comfortable testifying before Congress as he is leading 
     chants through a bullhorn.
       His own obscurity belies the influence of the nonpartisan 
     advocacy group he turned from a once-flailing nonprofit into 
     a many-tentacled powerhouse. Before its advent, Norton says, 
     she often felt like ``a talking head with nobody, meaning a 
     body of citizens to back her up.''
       When he isn't emceeing rallies, Zherka is either on the 
     Hill or at DC Vote, in Dupont Circle, where he morphs into a 
     methodical puzzle-solver. At their Monday meetings, his half 
     dozen staffers turn in reports of their activities over the 
     past week, with a breakdown of successes and failures. Zherka 
     uses the reports as real-time intelligence--a ``dashboard,'' 
     as one of his deputies puts it--to identify trends and new 
     lines of attack.

[[Page 9715]]

       In the halls of Congress, Zherka has a reputation for 
     relentlessness. When a hard-fought 2007 voting-rights bill 
     fell three votes short in the Senate, Zherka ``was absolutely 
     the first person who said, `We have to get back on the horse. 
     We have to get moving again. What are we doing? Who are we 
     targeting?''' says Deborah Parkinson, then a senior staffer 
     on the Senate committee with District oversight. ``Just when 
     you're tired and ready to take a break for 24 hours, he was 
     right there saying, `What are we going to do to make sure we 
     get three votes for next time?'''
       I accompanied Zherka one morning to a seminar he was 
     leading for staffers from other nonprofits. The course was 
     based on a how-to advocacy book Zherka is writing. Its 
     chapter titles have the ring of both a battlefield manual and 
     a self-help guide--Recruit the Right Champions; Communicate 
     at All Times in All Directions; You Lose Until You Win.
       The seminar was in a guesthouse at the villa-style DC home 
     of Daniel Solomon, a philanthropist who helped found DC Vote. 
     Zherka started with a lesson on issue-framing: why ``marriage 
     equality'' is a better phrase than ``gay marriage,'' why 
     ``climate change'' is more likely to get a politician's ear 
     than ``global warming.''
       He gave an example from his own movement: ``When someone 
     says `statehood,' people will ask, `Well, where's the 
     building going to be? Who's going to be the governor?' When 
     you frame it as `DC voting rights,' which is essentially the 
     same thing, people will say, `Oh, it's what everyone else 
     has.'''
       During a break, Zherka and I stepped onto the patio. ``When 
     I was in college,'' he said, ``I took one of those tests 
     that's supposed to tell you what career to go into.'' It was 
     some 150 questions but offered less clarity than he'd hoped. 
     ``I remember the results were actor, politician, professor, 
     and military officer.''
       When DC Vote hired Zherka as its executive director a 
     decade ago, it needed--and got--all four.
       A group of civic leaders and philanthropists established DC 
     Vote in 1998 to rouse public support for the plaintiffs in 
     Alexander v. Daley. The civil suit grew out of a legal theory 
     that Jamin Raskin--a star professor at American University 
     and now also a Maryland state senator--had laid out in a 
     Harvard law journal. A group of 57 residents, joined by the 
     DC government, argued that their lack of full congressional 
     representation violated what Raskin said were equal-
     protection and due-process rights to ``one person/one vote 
     without regard to geographic residence.''
       DC Vote's founders saw in the suit new hope for a struggle 
     winding back 200 years. The District was founded in 1790 on 
     land ceded by Maryland and Virginia. A year after Congress 
     moved to the new capital in 1800, lawmakers stripped 
     residents of their ability to vote for Congress and 
     President. When Philadelphia had been the capital, the 
     Pennsylvania governor had refused to protect Congress from a 
     mob of angry soldiers. Never again, Congress felt, should the 
     seat of federal power be subject to the whims of local 
     politicians.
       Washingtonians raised an outcry. They paid federal taxes 
     and fought wars but were denied the very democracy the United 
     States had just fought Great Britain to win. Yet for the next 
     160 years, little changed.
       Over the decades, resistance to self-rule took on more 
     cynical dimensions. For many in Congress, DC was simply too 
     liberal and too black. A history of local corruption didn't 
     help, though whether the District's scandals were any worse 
     than those in Congress or in the states remains a fair 
     question.
       It wasn't until 1961, with the 23rd Amendment, that 
     Washingtonians won the right to vote in presidential 
     elections. In 1970, the District was granted a nonvoting 
     delegate in the House. Three years later, Congress let DC 
     residents elect a mayor and 13-member council. Though the so-
     called Home Rule Act was a giant leap, Congress retained the 
     power to review the city's budget and all acts of the 
     council.
       The momentum the District had drawn from the broader civil-
     rights movement in the 1960s and '70s fizzled amid the 
     violence and corruption of the 1980s and '90s. After then-
     mayor Marion Barry's arrest in a crack-cocaine sting, public 
     animus toward the city crested. ``The whole idea of making 
     this little pissant city into a state is ludicrous, something 
     like a fly landing on an elephant's rump and contemplating 
     rape,'' the Philadelphia Inquirer's David Boldt wrote in a 
     1993 editorial.
       By October 2000, Anthony Williams--first as DC's chief 
     financial officer, then as mayor--had shored up the 
     District's finances and made friends in Congress. But the 
     civil suit hit a wall. The Supreme Court upheld a lower-court 
     ruling that under the Constitution only ``the People of the 
     several States'' could choose members of Congress, and DC was 
     not a state. The lower court had recognized the ``inequity'' 
     but said only Congress could fix it.
       By 2002, DC Vote was adrift and nearly bankrupt. Yet Daniel 
     Solomon and another founder, Joe Sternlieb, came to see the 
     legal defeat as an argument for the group's revival. As they 
     looked back at the history of the struggle, they noticed a 
     lack of continuity. Leaders came and went; passions burned 
     and cooled.
       ``There were these episodic moments of great interest but 
     nothing continuing, nothing being built,'' Solomon--whose 
     grandfather cofounded the Giant Food supermarket chain--told 
     me. ``As a philanthropist, I saw--we all saw--the importance 
     of building a structure that could keep pushing the issue 
     forward, even and especially in the lean times.''
       Board members recognized that DC Vote's survival--and 
     perhaps the movement's--depended on its next choice of 
     leader.
       Ilir Zherka was born in 1965 in Montenegro, then part of 
     socialist Yugoslavia. His grandparents were farmers who had 
     fought against the Italian and German occupation of Albania 
     during World War II. Disease and the ravages of war claimed 
     the lives of all but one of their seven children--Zherka's 
     father, Ahmet.
       After the war, Zherka's grandfather clashed with Albania's 
     new Communist leaders and fled with the family to Montenegro. 
     (Zherka's parents are Muslim, though Zherka now goes with his 
     family to a Unitarian congregation.) In their small town, 
     Ahmet, charismatic and handsome, earned a reputation as an 
     agitator against police harassment of Albanians. ``My dad was 
     very brash, very nationalistic, very unafraid,'' Zherka says.
       But after taking part in an ethnic brawl one day, Ahmet 
     feared for his family. They borrowed money from neighbors and 
     landed in New York in May 1968, when Zherka was 2\1/2\.
       Eleven people--Zherka and his six siblings, their parents 
     and grandparents--squeezed into a three-bedroom apartment in 
     the South Bronx. His father worked as a janitor and elevator 
     operator by day; his mother cleaned offices at night. Zherka 
     remembers feeling humiliated when his mother paid for 
     groceries with food stamps.
       When Marshal Tito or some other Yugoslav official visited 
     the United Nations, Ahmet hauled his children there in his 
     Pinto station wagon and helped lead hundreds of fellow 
     Albanian-Americans in protest. ``We, the kids, would march in 
     circles and would be holding signs and shouting out chants,'' 
     Zherka says.
       By the time Zherka was a teenager, in the late 1970s, the 
     South Bronx was a wasteland of poverty, racial tension, and 
     violence. His older brothers ran in a tough circle, and 
     several dropped out of high school.
       For awhile, Zherka stayed out of trouble. He got a black 
     belt in karate by sixth grade and started rap and 
     breakdancing groups. In the schoolyards on Friday and 
     Saturday nights, Zherka--as MC Rockwell or Il Rock--would 
     join the crews who set up turntables and performed for the 
     neighborhood.
       When the family moved to a slightly better-off neighborhood 
     in the North Bronx, Zherka fell in with a gang of Albanian 
     teenagers who robbed houses, sold drugs, and rumbled. Zherka 
     had to repeat ninth grade. When he transferred to Christopher 
     Columbus High School, the principal noticed the disparity 
     between his high test scores and his low grades and warned 
     him to get his act together. The message struck at the right 
     time. One of Zherka's friends was imprisoned for burglary; 
     another was found dead in a river, in what neighbors 
     suspected was a homicide.
       It was during an 11th-grade government class that he felt a 
     calling for public service. By his senior year, he was a good 
     enough public speaker that teachers picked him to give 
     ``scared straight'' talks to freshmen and to testify against 
     budget cuts before the board of education.
       With the help of a state program for underprivileged 
     students, Zherka won a full scholarship to Fordham 
     University. He drew straight A's his freshman year and 
     transferred to Cornell.
       The leap from the Bronx's mean streets to the Ivy league 
     necessitated a costume change: ``I went out and bought three 
     sweaters and a bunch of button-down shirts.'' He joined the 
     debate team and was elected president of the Cornell 
     Democrats. He interned in the office of New York senator 
     Daniel Patrick Moynihan and graduated from Cornell with 
     distinction and the school's John F. Kennedy Memorial Award 
     for public service.
       Back in the Bronx, Zherka's success became a source of 
     pride. Among former classmates, Il Rock had become Political 
     II.
       During his second year at the University of Virginia School 
     of Law, he met Linda Kinney, a third-year student from 
     Southern California, who would become his wife. They bought a 
     condo in DC's Cleveland Park in 1994, and Zherka landed a job 
     as a legislative aide to longtime California congressman 
     George Miller, a liberal from San Francisco.
       The night before a major hearing, Zherka helped labor 
     activist Charles Kernaghan prepare testimony accusing the 
     manufacturer of a Kathie Lee Gifford clothing line sold at 
     Walmart of forcing underage workers into long shifts at 
     Honduran sweatshops. ``I had no idea it would be one of the 
     sparks that would set off dramatic changes within the garment 
     industry worldwide,'' Zherka says.
       Despite a precocious start on the Hill, Zherka's past 
     tugged at him. The 1995 Dayton Accords settling the conflicts 
     between

[[Page 9716]]

     former Yugoslav Republics left unresolved the status of 
     Kosovo, a predominantly Albanian province of Serbia chafing 
     under the brutal rule of Slobodan Milosevic.
       Albanians in the United States turned to Washington for 
     help. Joe DioGuardi, a Bronx-born Republican former 
     congressman from New York with a big personality, had founded 
     the Albanian American Civic League in 1989. But DioGuardi was 
     seen as part of the old guard. Zherka felt he could do 
     better. In 1996, while still working for Miller, he raised 
     money from Albanian-American business owners to form a rival 
     organization, the National Albanian American Council.
       ``It was a huge rift,'' says Avni Mustafaj, who grew up 
     with Zherka in the Bronx and became NAAC's executive 
     director. ``They're looking at Ilir Zherka and me and saying, 
     `We know your grandfather and father--what are you doing?'''
       For a few years, Zherka tried to keep an oar in 
     establishment Washington. He was tapped as national director 
     of ethnic outreach for President Clinton's 1996 reelection 
     campaign and left Miller's office for a job as a senior 
     legislative aide to Labor Secretary Alexis Herman.
       But by 1998, Zherka's thoughts had again turned homeward. 
     Milosevic had launched a violent campaign that forced 
     hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians from their homes. 
     ``I picked up the Washington Post and read a story about an 
     entire family that had been wiped out, including a toddler 
     whose throat had been slit,'' Zherka says. ``I remember 
     thinking to myself, `The person who killed this girl had to 
     be holding her.' I remember going home to my wife and saying, 
     `I can't work, I can't do my job.' So she said, `You have to 
     go to NAAC.'''
       As the Kosovo crisis deepened, Zherka became the go-to 
     American spokesman not just for Albanian-Americans but also, 
     it seemed, for Albanians in Kosovo. In 1999 and 2000, he 
     testified before the House International Relations Committee, 
     was quoted in the New York Times, and wrote op-eds in the 
     Washington Post, pressing for Western military intervention. 
     As a NATO bombing campaign got under way that March, Zherka 
     sparred with Oliver North and Sean Hannity on TV and warned, 
     on CNN, that ``acts of genocide are being committed in the 
     heart of Europe.''
       Zherka led an NAAC delegation to a White House meeting with 
     President Clinton to press, unsuccessfully, for a ground 
     invasion. NATO's bombing campaign ended in June 1999 with 
     Milosevic's capitulation. When Zherka visited the Albanian 
     capital of Tirana, people stopped him in the streets for 
     photos and autographs.
       But the long hours and days on the road were taking a toll. 
     His son, Alek, had been born in 1997 and a daughter, Hana, 
     three years later. By 2002, the wars were over and NAAC was 
     shifting into a new phase. Zherka was ready for a job closer 
     to home.
       As DC Vote's board sifted through resumes in 2002, it came 
     up with only one strike against Zherka: He lived in Bethesda. 
     (He and Linda had left their Cleveland Park condo for a 
     larger home just over the Maryland line in 1999.) In the end, 
     qualifications trumped residence.
       Zherka turned down an offer from a law firm for what he 
     suspected would be a grueling fight. A member of Congress he 
     knew from his work on Kosovo questioned his sanity ``Man, 
     Ilir, DC Vote?'' Zherka recalls the congressman saying. 
     ``Either you're really smart because you'll have this job for 
     life or you're really stupid because you actually think you 
     can win this.''
       I asked Zherka how he responded.
       ``I said, `I'm stupid enough to think I can win.'''
       A few months into the job, Zherka went to see Congressman 
     David Bonior, a Democrat from Michigan, which has a large 
     Albanian population. ``Ilir, you've got to give your 
     opponents something they want,'' Bonior said, according to 
     Zherka. ``Your argument can't be `Do this because it's the 
     right thing.' You actually need to give them something that 
     they want.''
       But what, Zherka wondered, did backers of DC voting rights 
     have to trade?
       In 2003, Congressman Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, 
     offered an answer: a GOP seat for Utah. Davis chaired the 
     House committee with District oversight and was popular in 
     his party. In making his case in an interview with radio host 
     Kojo Nnamdi, Davis had used all the right words: ``It's hard 
     to make a straight-faced argument that the capital of the 
     free world shouldn't have a vote in Congress.''
       But DC's Eleanor Holmes Norton and other Democrats in 
     Congress were skeptical. Davis had just finished a four-year 
     stint as chair of the National Republican Congressional 
     Committee, charged with electing GOP candidates to Congress. 
     What good-faith reason could he have for offering a heavily 
     Democratic enclave a voting seat in the House? Statehood 
     advocates also lined up in opposition, because the proposal 
     did nothing about DC's lack of representation in the Senate.
       Zherka, however, saw in Davis the sort of champion who 
     could rewire the GOP's opposition to DC voting rights. In 
     2004, Zherka and a group of leaders from DC Vote's coalition 
     told Davis that if he put in actual legislation, they would 
     back him.
       I asked Zherka if it was awkward to get behind a proposal 
     then opposed by Norton.
       ``Absolutely, it was a little awkward,'' Zherka said. ``All 
     of us recognized that Congresswoman Norton's leadership on 
     the issue was significant and it would be hard for us to move 
     too far forward without her support. At the same time, we all 
     concluded within our organization that this compromise was 
     the best opportunity to actually achieve representation.''
       A few minutes later, Zherka added, ``I've always been a big 
     fan of the adage that you can't just keep doing the same 
     thing over and over again.''
       After arriving at DC Vote, Zherka pleaded the 
     organization's case to Washington foundations and soon 
     quadrupled DC Vote's budget, to $1.7 million. Republicans in 
     Congress had barred the District from using public money to 
     lobby for voting rights. Zherka obtained a pro bono legal 
     opinion arguing that the ban placed no such restrictions on 
     funding for voting-rights education. He gave the opinion to 
     Mayor Anthony Williams, who in 2006 authorized the first of 
     several half-million-dollar grants to DC Vote.
       For DC Vote to be effective, Zherka felt, Americans outside 
     DC--Americans who had a vote in Congress--needed to get 
     involved. He and his staff visited national organizations to 
     argue that they, too, had a stake in DC's plight. Common 
     Cause, the National Bar Association, and the United Auto 
     Workers, among a diverse group of others, joined its 
     coalition, lending their moral weight, lobbying muscle, and 
     hundreds of thousands of grassroots members who could be 
     called on to write or phone their representatives on Capitol 
     Hill.
       Zherka went after hostile or wavering Congress members in 
     their own districts. When GOP senator John Ensign of Nevada 
     sought to undermine the DC voting-rights act in 2009, DC Vote 
     launched Internet ads on websites in his home state. 
     ``Senator Ensign is focused on DC's affairs . . . and his 
     own--where does Nevada fit in?'' one read, alluding to 
     Ensign's admission of an extramarital liaison with a former 
     staffer.
       The group got hundreds of residents to burn copies of their 
     federal income-tax returns in Farragut Square in a ``Bonfire 
     of the 1040s.'' It handed out tea bags labeled End Taxation 
     Without Representation at Glenn Beck's 2010 rally on the Mall 
     and festooned lawns across Capitol Hill with signs reading 
     Congress: Don't Tread on DC! One of its most eye-catching ads 
     depicted two firemen, one in Maryland and one in DC. ``Both 
     will save your life,'' it said. ``Only ONE has a vote in 
     Congress.''
       Davis remembers Zherka during negotiations as an 
     understated pragmatist. With DC Vote, he says, ``we finally 
     had a group that wasn't going to be partisan about it. They 
     just wanted to get the job done.''
       Davis introduced the DC Fairness in Representation Act in 
     2004, and DC Vote went to work, writing editorials and 
     mounting public spectacles. As the bill gained traction, 
     Norton and leading Democrats expressed more support.
       In April 2007, DC Vote organized the biggest voting-rights 
     demonstrations in a generation. Mayor Adrian Fenty and 
     thousands of residents marched from the Wilson Building to 
     the Capitol. Less than a week later, the bill cleared the 
     House 241 to 177, with 22 Republicans in favor. But in the 
     Senate it came up three votes short.
       Heartbroken supporters turned to the 2008 elections. 
     Obama's ascension to the White House and the Democratic 
     takeover of Congress infused the movement with a new 
     optimism. ``I really can't think of a scenario by which we 
     could fail,'' Norton told the Washington Post just after the 
     election.
       Privately, though, Zherka warned advocates to take nothing 
     for granted. Davis had retired from the House, which would 
     make it harder to recruit Republicans. And Utah was just a 
     few years from winning a new seat anyway through the 2010 
     census.
       Very early on, Obama's willingness to expend political 
     capital on the issue appeared brittle. A few days before his 
     inauguration, Obama told the Post's editorial board that he 
     backed a House seat for the District. ``But this takes on a 
     partisan flavor,'' he said, ``and, you know, right now I 
     think our legislative agenda's chock-full.'' Unlike President 
     Clinton--and like George W. Bush--Obama declined to adorn the 
     presidential limousine with Taxation Without Representation 
     license plates.
       In February 2009, the former Davis bill--now called the DC 
     House Voting Rights Act--made it to the Senate floor, a first 
     for DC voting rights in more than three decades, and passed 
     on a largely party-line vote of 61 to 37.
       The euphoria was again short-lived. Senator Ensign had 
     slipped in an amendment eviscerating the city's gun-control 
     laws. Zherka says that in the run-up to the Senate vote, 
     advocates had mistakenly assumed that Majority Leader Harry 
     Reid, a Nevada Democrat, would oppose the gun amendment. But 
     Reid was facing his toughest reelection fight ever. As a 
     centrist from a gun-friendly state, he couldn't afford an 
     unfavorable rating from the National Rifle Association. ``Not 
     only did he vote for it,'' Zherka says, ``but he gave 
     Democrats''--particularly moderates from conservative 
     Midwestern states--``a green light to vote for it, so 
     everyone piled on.''

[[Page 9717]]

       As the bill moved to the House, the NRA made clear that it 
     was putting everything on the line. To fend off a 
     parliamentary move to bar all amendments to the House bill, 
     the pro-gun lobby took the unusual step of threatening to 
     ``score'' the vote on any such tactic; a vote to disallow 
     amendments would count as anti-gun on lawmakers' political 
     scorecards.
       Despite months of lobbying, Zherka and Norton couldn't come 
     up with enough votes from conservative Democrats, many facing 
     reelection battles, to tilt the scales.
       Congress effectively gave Washingtonians an ultimatum: You 
     can have your vote, but only if you give up your gun laws.
       Among voting-rights advocates, the choice touched off a 
     bruising debate. In one camp were purists outraged at the 
     hypocrisy of having to surrender power in order to get it. In 
     the other camp were pragmatists who glimpsed a now-or-never 
     chance. Everyone knew the clock was ticking toward the 
     midterm congressional elections, which were likely to cost 
     Democrats a crippling number of seats.
       A gloom fell over the offices of DC Vote. ``Morale was 
     very, very low,'' Zherka says. ``The economy was tanking. A 
     number of our big donors either walked away or reduced their 
     donations. We had to let people go.'' Zherka was also 
     grappling with a string of personal losses. From 2002 to 
     2009, three of his siblings--all in their forties--died in a 
     cruel streak of sudden illnesses.
       For a short while, it looked as if the bill giving DC and 
     Utah House seats might pass. In Apri1 2010, Norton, who had 
     assailed the gun amendment the previous year, said she would 
     grudgingly accept it. House majority leader Steny Hoyer, a 
     Maryland Democrat, vowed to move the measure to the House 
     floor. Zherka threw his organization's weight behind Norton.
       But on Apri1 16, the New York Times editorialized against 
     any deal that scuttled the District's gun laws, calling it 
     ``extortion.'' The Washington Post's editorial page followed 
     suit two days later. Support on the DC Council was cratering. 
     Mayor Fenty had backed Norton's change of heart, saying the 
     city could undo the gun measure later. But it was an election 
     year, and his chief rival, then-council chairman Vincent 
     Gray, tacked in the other direction; Gray said he wouldn't 
     sacrifice public safety, and the council lined up behind him.
       Meanwhile, liberal Democrats in the Senate were threatening 
     a filibuster of any bill with the gun amendment. DC Vote 
     couldn't hold its own coalition together. Two of its 
     partners--the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the League 
     of Women Voters--broke with the group over its support for 
     the Norton strategy.
       Then Norton reversed herself again. In a press release, she 
     said that after seeing ``egregious changes'' in the House gun 
     language--allowing the open carrying of firearms--she could 
     no longer go forward.
       The 180s left DC Vote battered. And yet when the 
     legislation finally died, it was less disappointment than 
     relief that Zherka says washed over him. Whether or not the 
     bill with the gun amendment had passed--which was far from 
     certain--it risked so dividing city officials, advocates, and 
     lawmakers that further progress on voting rights and home 
     rule might well have stalled for years.
       In a series of sometimes emotional meetings in the summer 
     and fall of 2010, DC Vote's staff, board, and coalition 
     members sifted through the rubble. Out of that soul-searching 
     came the shift from an ``inside game'' to an ``outside 
     game'': civil disobedience aimed at embarrassing 
     congressional leaders and the President and winning national 
     sympathy.
       ``One of the lessons we learned from the fight was that we 
     need to increase the intensity of support from our allies,'' 
     Zherka says. ``Whether it's Reid or Obama, when given a 
     choice between the District and their own political fortunes, 
     they'll choose their own political fortunes.''
       In February 2011, Zherka and a group of activists stood up 
     at a House subcommittee hearing in protest with red gags in 
     their mouths. A week later, Zherka led a few dozen protesters 
     in a demonstration outside House speaker John Boehner's 
     Capitol Hill apartment. Zherka accused Boehner of hypocrisy 
     for intruding in DC's affairs while simultaneously backing 
     Tea Party calls for small government.
       Since the start of DC Vote's Demand Democracy campaign, 
     some 76 people have been arrested--two of them twice.
       Zherka believes that for the campaign to succeed, Mayor 
     Gray and other local officials need to take more of a lead. 
     But Gray, council chairman Kwame Brown, and other District 
     officials have been embroiled in scandals that could 
     complicate their case for greater independence.
       On The Kojo Nnamdi Show last May, Gray said he saw his 
     arrest as ``reigniting'' the movement but downplayed the 
     likelihood of a reprise. ``What we've got to see,'' Gray 
     said, ``is really a much broader commitment on the part of 
     the 600,000 people who live in this city.''
       Critics say Zherica has pursued too narrow a strategy and 
     that his success has sidelined other voting-rights groups. 
     Stand Up! for Democracy in DC, a volunteer group pressing for 
     full statehood, was founded in 1997, a year before DC Vote. 
     Anise Jenkins, its president and cofounder, labeled the Utah 
     compromise a ``single vote'' strategy because it did nothing 
     about Senate representation or statehood.
       Mark Plotkin, the Fox 5 political analyst and former WTOP 
     commentator, is a fan of neither Zherka nor Norton. ``Cairo, 
     Syria--people are willing to lay down lives,'' he says. ``And 
     here our response is DC Vote? A tepid, timid, timorous, 
     establishment organization that doesn't want to offend 
     anybody and, worse, is an appendage to Eleanor Holmes 
     Norton.''
       When four Occupy DC protesters went on a hunger strike for 
     District voting rights in December, Zherka issued a statement 
     praising their ``courage and conviction'' but didn't 
     explicitly endorse the action.
       At recent rallies, I heard young Washingtonians express a 
     willingness to ``shut the city down,'' perhaps by blocking 
     major roadways from Maryland and Virginia.
       I asked Zherka whether DC Vote would endorse such tactics. 
     ``Virginia and Maryland people are family, friends, 
     neighbors,'' he told me. ``There's no reason to inconvenience 
     and punish them.''
       Protests, Zherka said, ``have to be tightly tied to 
     injustice and the people perpetuating it.'' Hence the 
     demonstrations outside the Capitol and White House, which 
     offer not just the iconography of those buildings but the 
     sight of federal police--not city ones--carting away District 
     residents.
       The street protests seem to have chastened some in 
     Congress. GOP threats last year to ban the District's needle-
     exchange program, undo its gay-marriage law, and permit 
     concealed firearms were all thwarted, sometimes by other 
     Republicans.
       In November, Congressman Darrell Issa, the powerful GOP 
     chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform 
     Committee, drafted a bill to let the District spend its money 
     without congressional approval, a right local officials have 
     long sought. (DC Vote is opposing the Issa measure for now 
     because a provision would bar locally funded abortions. But 
     Issa has signaled he is open to finding a resolution.)
       In February, Obama released a 2013 budget request that 
     promised to ``work with Congress and the Mayor to pass 
     legislation to amend the D.C. Home Rule Act to provide the 
     District with local budget autonomy.''
       But first he has to be reelected. ``Right now we have a 
     President who isn't willing to expend a lot of political 
     capital but will sign anything that we get to him,'' Zherka 
     says. If a Republican wins in November, ``all of our calculus 
     will change,'' with public protests playing an even greater 
     role than they do now.
       DC has grown whiter in recent years, with census figures 
     last year showing blacks losing their historic majority. If 
     race had been a subtext of congressional opposition to voting 
     rights, I asked Zherka, shouldn't those demographic shifts, 
     however cynically, alter the political math?
       Zherka told me that they had not. The District remains a 
     place that lets gay people marry, permits medical marijuana, 
     and funds abortion for poor women. The city's liberal 
     politics is in some ways the movement's most intractable 
     handicap.
       ``If DC for some reason became more Republican,'' Zherka 
     says, ``absolutely there would be a different perspective'' 
     in Congress.
       Last May 11, a month after Mayor Gray was arrested, DC Vote 
     hosted another rally. It was at Upper Senate Park, a leafy 
     trapezoid across from the Capitol.
       As supporters gathered by a table piled with T-shirts and 
     bumper stickers, Zherka, in a gray suit and yellow tie, shook 
     hands with the assurance of a seasoned politician. A woman 
     had brought two young boys, and Zherka patted them on the 
     head. ``Ah, look at these protesters,'' he said approvingly. 
     When an aide identified an older man in a blazer and penny 
     loafers as ``our most loyal online donor,'' Zherka unfastened 
     a DC Vote pin from his lapel and pinned it on the donor's.
       After the speeches, the Capitol Police arrested eight 
     activists who had blocked a few lanes of traffic and refused 
     to move.
       But soon the crowds and police vans were gone. Zherka was 
     eager to get home to Bethesda. His son had a series of exit 
     interviews at Westland Middle School, from which he was 
     graduating. His daughter, a fifth-grader at Westbrook 
     Elementary, was recovering from a stomach bug. He also wanted 
     to catch up with his wife--a lawyer with the Motion Picture 
     Association of America--about a house they were remodeling in 
     Chevy Chase. (They moved in November.)
       Just when it seemed everyone had left, a young man in 
     shorts and a soccer shirt pulled up on a ten-speed. ``Are you 
     with this group?'' he asked.
       ``I'm the director,'' Zherka said.
       The man told him he wanted to get involved but had 
     questions: Why did the city's website give the impression 
     that the movement was divided, listing not just DC Vote but 
     two other organizations? If the District's population was 
     half black, why were protesters today mostly white?
       After Zherka's long day, I wasn't sure how much patience 
     he'd have with a halfhearted

[[Page 9718]]

     supporter who had missed much of the rally for a soccer game 
     on the Mall. But Zherka gave no air of hurry. The movement 
     was less divided than the website suggested, he said, and 
     many African-Americans have turned out at other rallies.
       ``Come help us organize and help us get out the word--do we 
     have your info?'' Zherka said, handing him a card as the sun 
     set behind them. ``Shoot me an e-mail. We need a lot of foot 
     soldiers out here.''

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