Norton to Testify to Restore D.C.’s Vote on House Floor, Tomorrow
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The day after asking the Senate to give the District of Columbia statehood, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today said she regretted that she must go to the House Rules Committee tomorrow to try to retrieve a vote on the House floor in the Committee of the Whole, a vote she won shortly after being elected to Congress. House Republicans took that vote away when they regained the majority in the 112th Congress. Yesterday, Norton testified at a Senate committee hearing on her bill to make D.C. the 51st state, which has a record number of House and Senate cosponsors. The hearing on D.C. statehood was the first in more than 20 years. Tomorrow's hearing, on the proposed rules for the next Congress, will take place on Wednesday, September 17, 2014, at 11:00 a.m. in H-313, The Capitol.
"In their first day as the new majority in 2011, Republicans voted to take away the voting rights of American citizens, an extremely rare action in American history," Norton said. "Republicans have no basis to oppose D.C.'s vote in the Committee of the Whole, other than animus toward the right to representation of the 650,000 American citizens who live in the District. The federal courts have upheld the constitutionality of D.C.'s vote, and D.C.'s vote has had no negative impact on the operations of the House. At Monday's Senate statehood hearing, the hundreds of D.C. residents in attendance demonstrated that they want any and all of their rights now, however they can get them."
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 under Article I of the U.S. Constitution by both a federal district court and a federal appeals court. 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.