Effort To Secure D.C. Voting Rights Hits Lull As Legislation Dies

When Mayor-elect Vince Gray sits down with President Barack Obama for lunch this Wednesday, D.C. voting rights will surely be on the agenda. But even if Gray complains about Obama's inattentiveness to the issue, there's not really much that the President can do at this point to help the city in its quest to be something other than a modern-day federal colony.

As the Post reports today (following a similar write-up by Politics Daily two weeks ago), we're about to enter a new dark age for D.C. voting rights. As the era of the Democratic House comes to a close, the one piece of legislation that would have granted the city a token voting seat in the chamber (and that actually attracted bi-partisan support) has drifted into irrelevance.

The legislation, originally crafted by former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis in 2006, would have balanced the District's Democratic seat with a Republican one for Utah, which had long complained that it had lost out in the last reapportionment of congressional seats in 2000. But with the 2010 Census complete and Utah getting its seat, the one thing that would have attracted some Republican votes just isn't there anymore.

Over the four years that the proposal was in play, it passed the House and the Senate, but couldn't get through both during the same session. (The House endorsed it in 2007, the Senate in 2009.) And just when it looked like the stars were aligning for the legislation, the NRA flexed its muscles and managed to divide supporters over an amendment that would have gutted the District's gun laws and forbidden the D.C. Council from ever imposing new ones.

Davis and others have accused some voting rights advocates of not being flexible enough to accept that a seat in the House would likely only come with the gun amendment attached to it. There's certainly some truth to that. But the gun amendment was also so noxious that it would have forced residents to decide between two principles that are central to the cause -- Home Rule and voting rights. At the end of the day, that's not really a compromise anyone can realistically be asked to make. Sure, the District would have gained a voting seat in the House (though it could well have been lost over constitutional objections), but at the expense not just of a particular law, but the right to ever consider such a law in the future. That's not compromise -- it's capitulation.

Ultimately, it's doesn't seem worth the trouble to look over the last four years and fight about who was right and who was wrong. During the same period, the District made some substantial gains on Home Rule, including winning back the right to direct local funds to needle-exchange programs, implement the 1998 referendum on medical marijuana and legalize same-sex marriage. And while those could well be rolled back, the next year will likely see voting rights advocates fight to protect them while they argue about what the next larger step should be.

So what will Gray get from Obama, now that the one legislative mechanism for something approaching voting rights is dead? Maybe a pledge to put that damn license plate on the limo -- but we'd even be surprised if he got that much.

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http://dcist.com/2010/11/when_mayor-elect_vince_gray_sits.ph p

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