Tuesday 03 March 2009
by: Marisa Katz | Visit article original @ The Washington Post
DC voting rights activists protest. (Photo: The DC Examiner)
The nation's capital is close to getting a much sought-after voting rights bill. But "close," as the saying goes, counts only in horseshoe games, and in throwing hand grenades.
While the Voting Rights Act of 2009 nears enactment, the version that passed by the Senate last Thursday, by a vote of 61-37, is not a bill that President Obama should sign into law.
The Senate's version gives the District a vote in the House of Representatives. That's fine as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the Senate also loaded the bill with a pro-gun amendment blessed by National Rifle Association and sponsored by Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign. The Ensign amendment, as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has noted, would gut the District's new gun law entirely, eliminate the city's firearms registration system, legalize assault weapons and allow D.C. residents to buy guns in Maryland and Virginia without D.C. government oversight. And to further twist the knife in the city's back, the amendment prohibits the D.C. Council from enacting any gun restrictions.
Washington D.C. deserves a voice and vote in Congress, but also the right to fashion gun laws consistent with the Second Amendment. The Senate-passed bill grants the former, but bars the latter.
The House can remedy the Senate's wrongs. And it will, provided the city and its House supporters have their act together. That means adopting a strategy that keeps the bill free of the poison gun pill that the Senate swallowed last week.
The city faced similar obstacles when the Home Rule bill was enacted in 1973. I was a Senate staffer at the time, serving as the District Committee's minority staff director under Maryland Sen. Charles Mc. Mathias, Jr. We had to fend off killer amendments on the Senate floor - e.g. one that gave the president exclusive right to appoint the D.C. chief of police, essentially removing police powers from the mayor and council. And in order to get a home rule bill adopted through conference with the House, the Senate was forced to eliminate a provision that would have given the city complete autonomy over its budget without congressional approval.
So supporters of D.C. voting rights should be ready for a fight.
The House leadership, with city backing, should push hard for a rule that disallows a gun amendment from being offered. Simply put, if the House adopts a gun amendment with language identical to the Senate's, the ball game's over. Because there wouldn't be any differences to resolve in conference, there would be little chance of changing, let alone dropping, the gun provision from the bill.
And even if House leaders are successful in blocking such amendments, they should be prepared to resist attempts by their NRA-supporting colleagues to instruct the House conferees to accept the Ensign amendment. That would be a backdoor way of keeping the gun language in the final bill.
Finally, if Congress does send to the White House a voting rights bill with a pro-gun rider, it should be greeted with a presidential veto.
What's the sense of having a voting rights measure that comes with provisions that put the voting D.C. member of Congress - and everybody else in the nation's capital - at risk?
That's what the reckless gun measures would do.
1 comment:
This is a prime example of the problems with this DC Voting Rights bill--it does nothing to change the relationship between Congress and the parts of DC that people actually live in--all 600,000 of us. At the same time that the Senate seems to give DC something they also exercise their complete control over our affairs. The only way out I can see is to grant statehood to DC, as the citizens of DC voted more than 15 years ago.
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