Norton Applauds Senate Testimony and Hatch Commitment to D.C. Voting Rights Bill (5/23/07)

Washington, DC -- For the second time, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) testified at a Senate hearing, this time before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the D.C. House voting rights bill today, at the request of Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Russell Feingold (D-WI). Norton said after the hearing that she was more encouraged than at any point during the more than four years that she has been working for the bill, particularly by the testimony of several of today's witnesses and the commentary from the dais of Utah Senator Orrin Hatch (R), a former chair of the Judiciary Committee. Norton said that Hatch gave compelling testimony for D.C. as well as for his home state at the prior hearing and said as much today, but he indicated, as well, that he would do everything he could to get the bill passed.

Norton was particularly heartened by the testimony of Utah Attorney General Mark L. Shurtleff, who spent the greater part of his time testifying about why the District should get a vote. Like Norton, he pointed to the violation of equal rights in the denial to D.C., elaborating from the Dred Scott decision. The Congresswoman also testified about the racial roots of the denial of the vote here. The District did not have a Black majority until the late 1950s, she said, but the city's significant African American population was a major factor in the denial of voting representation, as well as the denial of home rule. Norton said in her testimony, "The denial of representation was part of that pattern of racial discrimination that differed only, but significantly, in the fact that whites suffered the same fate." She testified that one southern Senator said, "The Negroes . . . flocked in . . . and there was only one way out...and that was to deny...suffrage entirely to every human being in the District."

In what Norton called "particularly illuminating testimony," Richard P. Bress, a law firm partner here and a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, rebutted Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University Law professor who has repeatedly testified against the constitutionality of the District's bill because D.C. is not a state. Bress was able to demonstrate that Turley's view was based on snippets of opposition from anti-Federalists during the debate of the framers. Bress methodically showed that the record indicates no intention to deny a vote to residents of the capital once the District's population reached 30,000.