Introduction of the District of Columbia Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act of 2007

January 9, 2007

Mr. Speaker, today Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-VA) and I keep our promise to reintroduce the Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act as our first bill of the 110th Congress. Rep. Davis was the chair of the Committee when we worked together for four years to get Republican and Democratic agreement on this bill to give one voting representative to the mainly Democratic District of Columbia and another to the largely Republican state of Utah. The idea arose after Utah narrowly missed getting a seat following the last census and later failed to get the Supreme Court to rule in the state's favor. The bill also would permanently increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 to 437 members. I want to thank my colleague Tom Davis, the original author of the bill, for his indispensable persistence, and for his bipartisan spirit that afforded me every opportunity to significantly contribute to the bill during the 109th Congress, when he was in the Republican majority and I was a minority member.

Democrats have long been outspoken in their commitment to D.C. voting rights, and I appreciate their unwavering support. The bill we introduce today reflects the political history of our country that inalterably demonstrates that additional representation has been granted only on the basis of exact political equivalence, assuring neither benefit nor disadvantage to either party. This bill meets the necessary standard. Party, of course, should not matter when it comes to a democratic right as basic as representation in the legislature that taxes citizens and sends them to war. However, it is the undeniable reality that party equivalence in one form or another has driven decisions for adding voting representation. Many remember the most recent additions of Alaska and Hawaii, when these states entered the union because their voting records eliminated party advantage. However, this pattern was set throughout the nineteenth century as each state entered the union, most dramatically, of course, when no slave state could be admitted unless a free state came in at the same time.

Preserving all their rights as American citizens to voting rights in each house, the people of the District of Columbia and our civil rights and civic allies have nevertheless concluded that there can be no serious attempt to achieve the vote for our citizens that ignores precedents woven so tightly into our history. The linchpin of this legislation is its bipartisan balance, and we are grateful for the rare opportunity we believe will not come again soon, but that the Utah-D.C. bill offers District citizens now, to follow the unerring path to the vote laid out by American history.

A similar bill approved by the Committee on Government Reform last May called for the additional seat in Utah to be at-large until the 2010 census, but when the bill was referred to the Judiciary Committee, then-chairman James F. Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI) insisted that Utah adopt a redistricting plan that allowed for four seats before he would approve the bill. The Utah's legislature met in early December and quickly adopted a four-seat plan, which is provided for in today's bill. However, House leadership declined to address the issue in the closing days of the 109th Congress. We now seek our seat to vote in the 110th Congress.

Although we came close to securing passage in the 109th Congress, the District's vote was already long past due. We're in overtime in the 110th. We will proceed based on the same win-win approach that carried us through last Congress. In the spirit of the partnership promised by the new Democratic House majority, I am optimistic that Democrats will see the bill as a historic opportunity to make good on promises for voting rights and equality for the people of the District of Columbia.

Finally, I ask to be forgiven a personal allusion. Throughout this process, I have never referred to the District's vote as my vote or to what the vote would mean to me personally because the vote will not belong to me. I have never mentioned the special reason I personally wanted to be the first to cast the vote because the Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act is for D.C. residents now and in the future, not for me. However, my 16 years in Congress has been defined by the search for a way to achieve full representation for the city where my family has lived since before the Civil War. That search has included the two-day debate followed by a vote on statehood more than 10 years ago that Speaker Tom Foley afforded me, and the vote I subsequently won in the Committee of the Whole because of the long commitment of the Democratic majority to D.C. voting rights and the commitment of my party to maximize the rights of the citizens who live in the nation's capital until voting rights could be achieved. The struggle has been driven by its own terms, by the here and now, by the residents of the District of Columbia for over 200 years. Yet, I cannot deny the personal side of this quest, epitomized by my family of native Washingtonians, my father Coleman Holmes, my grandfather, Richard Holmes, who entered the D.C. Fire Department in 1902 and whose picture hangs in my office, a gift from the D.C. Fire Department, and especially my great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, a slave who walked off a Virginia plantation in the 1850s, made it to Washington, and began our family here. I cannot help but think today of this man I never knew, a slave in the District until Lincoln freed the slaves here nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation. I am mindful of my great grandfather, who came here in a furtive search for freedom itself, not the vote in Congress. I wonder what a man who lived as a slave in the District, and others like him would think if he could know that his great-granddaughter might be the first to cast the first full vote for the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives. I hope to have the special honor of casting the vote I have sought for 16 years. I want to cast that vote for the citizens of this city, whom I have had the great privilege of representing, who have fought with me every step of the way, and who have waited interminably for justice. Yes, and I want to cast that vote in memory of my great-grandfather, Richard Holmes.

[Check Against Delivery]

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Contact: Doxie A. McCoy
202.225.8050 office
202.225.8143 cell
doxie.mccoy@mail.house.gov
www.norton.house.gov

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