Norton Sends Letter to Boehner, Sessions Asking for Restoration of Delegate Vote in Committee of the Whole House in 114th Congress

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) requesting that the House rules for the 114th Congress permit the District of Columbia delegate to vote on the House floor in the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union. Both the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit have held that the delegate vote is constitutional under Article I of the U.S. Constitution. House Republicans took that vote away from the District when they regained the majority in the 112th Congress.

"The American citizens who live in the nation's capital have always been proud to fully participate in all of the obligations of citizenship, including fighting and dying in every war, beginning with the Revolutionary War, paying full federal taxes, and serving on federal juries," Norton wrote in her letter. "I ask only that the House, where I am privileged to serve, grant D.C. residents the modicum of respect the vote in the Committee of the Whole would afford."

In September, Norton testified at a Senate committee hearing on her bill to make D.C. the 51st state, a bill which has a record number of House and Senate cosponsors. The hearing was the first congressional hearing on D.C. statehood in more than 20 years. Two days later, she testified at the House Rules Committee to try to retrieve the vote in the Committee of the Whole, a vote she won shortly after being elected to Congress.

Norton first won the vote for D.C. in the Committee of the Whole in the 103rd Congress, under Democratic leadership. Norton, then in the majority, submitted a legal memorandum to her own leadership arguing that the District had a vote in standing committees under the rules of the House and therefore should have a vote on the House floor in the Committee of the Whole, which is also established by House rules. Republicans challenged the rule in federal court, but it was found constitutional. Since then, D.C. has been permitted to vote in the Committee of the Whole when Democrats have controlled the House, but the vote has been taken away when Republicans are in power.