DC voting bill scrapped over pro-gun amendment
May 15, 2010
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The House of Representatives was expected to vote in late April on a bill that would have granted, for the first time, the District of Columbia’s 600,000 residents a voting representative.
But the Democrat leadership scrapped the voting rights measure at the eleventh hour. The reason: because of a strong pro-gun amendment that would have prevented the city government from adopting and enforcing its stringent brand of gun prohibition.
In announcing that the proposal would be scrapped, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said the “price was too high.”
Gun rights activists and organizations have complained that even in the wake of the 2008 Supreme Court Heller ruling, striking down the city’s long-standing handgun ban as unconstitutional, the city has deliberately dragged its feet on enacting all but the most restrictive handgun policies. The amendment would have forced the city to adopt less stringent regulations.
Democrats have long sought full congressional representation for the District of Columbia, but have balked at adopting a measure that would pair voting rights and gun rights.
The House DC voting rights measure is similar to legislation passed last year in the Senate. It would grant full voting rights to the District’s nonvoting House delegate and give Utah a fourth seat. But instead of representing a congressional district drawn by the Utah legislature, the new lawmaker would represent the entire state.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who is the District’s nonvoting delegate, has made voting rights a major congressional priority since her first election in 1990. After agonizing over the amended bill, she said supporters have to face reality and take the bitter with the sweet.
Of course, it’s not just anti-gunners who had concerns about the measure. Some Second Amendment champions have concerns, too.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT), a long-standing advocate of DC voting rights, had threatened to filibuster the bill if it reaches the Senate.
“Anyone who believes in what is left of federalism in America, regardless of their party or ideology, should oppose this legislation,” Hatch said. “Utah deserves an additional seat in the House, but like every other state, it should have the freedom to elect its House members from regular districts. The federal government has no business dictating to any state which approach they must use.”
Rep. Candice S. Miller (R-MI) said that while the measure is well-intended it contradicts the US Constitution on two fronts. She takes issue with states’ rights and constitutional mandates.
The debate over a measure that linked two very thorny issues drew considerable media comment, some of it from expected sources.
“Cravenness and horse trading are too often the political reality in Washington, but a deal now in the works is particularly cruel,” The New York Times editorialized on Apr. 15, just days before the Democratic leadership’s decision to scrap the DC proposal.
The Times’ headline for its polemic was “The Gun Lobby’s Colony.” It could just as well, and perhaps more accurately, used the headline “The Gun Grabbers’ Colony,” for that is what the nation’s capital has become. No state or territory has a more consistently anti-gun, anti-self-defense policy than the District of Columbia. And none has demonstrated more inability to deal with violent crime.
“Congress is poised, finally, to give the tax-paying citizens of the District of Columbia what they have been so long and so unfairly denied: a representative with the power to vote. But the gun lobby has extracted too high a price: the scuttling of vital local gun controls intended to keep the capital city’s residents safe,” The Times continued.
“The district’s—nonvoting—representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has reluctantly accepted this extortion. ‘The strength of gun forces in Congress has grown, not diminished,’ she declared in explaining why she felt forced to abandon her long fight for a measure free of gun lobby abuses. She estimates that her cause and the Democratic majority may only be weakened in the next election. And she feels the gun lobby is powerful enough to oppress the district with a stand-alone measure.
“That all may be true. But it is not inevitable and certainly not enough reason to hand the gun lobby this pernicious victory,” The Times opined.
“The legislation would intrude on home-rule prerogatives by repealing the district’s restrictions on semiautomatic weapons, rolling back requirements for registering most guns and even dropping existing criminal penalties for owners of unregistered firearms.
“House Democratic leaders previously opposed gun control attachments, but they, too, seem ready to accept the measure, inserted in the Senate’s version of the DC voting bill by John Ensign, a Republican of Nevada.
“As usual, bipartisan majorities stand by to do the gun lobby’s bidding. It has already been endorsed by the Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. It is a cynical, sickening compromise,” The Times whined.
The Times has plenty to whine about.
First, the newspaper has historically led the fight by the establishment elite—in the press, along Park Avenue and in conclaves of the wealthy and powerful—that only the people the establishment approves of should have the means to defend themselves. For years, while The Times supported the most restrictive gun laws in New York City, New York state and the nation’s capital, its publishers have been among the select few to obtain the rarest forms of concealed carry licenses—those approved by the NYPD.
Second, while The Times has always labeled the gun rights freedom positions of the NRA and other pro-gun groups as “wool-headed and dangerous,” it has seen those rights expanded greatly in the past two decades.
Third, The Times was a leader among those powerful newspapers that opposed unsuccessfully every right-to-carry law proposed and passed in states across the country during the last 25 years. They predicted the direst consequences whenever and wherever right-to-carry laws were passed. However, the laws were passed by popular legislative action and the doomsday prophecies of The Times editorialists have not come to pass.
All of the talk about how safe the District is because of the gun policies that disarm the law-abiding, didn’t mention the reality of life—and death—in Washington.
As the debate over voting rights and gun ownership was heating up, nine people were shot including five killed along one city block in DC, on the night of March 19 after shooters opened fire on a crowd, police said.
CNN reported that a tenth person was shot on nearby Galveston Street, but it wasn’t clear whether the two shootings were related.
After all, criminal gunfire is so common in the principle city of the gun control movement, it is difficult for police to know what’s going on.
The crowd sprayed with bullets in the drive-by shooting had just returned from the funeral of a man slain nearby a few days earlier.
Two men and a 14-year-old accused of driving the minivan the bullets were fired from were charged with first-degree murder. One of the suspects, Orlando Carter, also has been charged with second-degree murder in the March 22 shooting of Jordan Howe, whose funeral was conducted earlier the same day as the big drive-by shooting.
On March 23, Carter was shot in the head and shoulder hours after his brother was arrested in Howe’s death, according to court documents.
That’s the status quo in Washington, DC, with the anti-gunners in charge as The New York Times would have it.
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