“There is not a consensus among the leadership of the District of Columbia on [whether to pass a bill with the anti-gun control amendment] as I understand it. And as a result of there not being consensus, I don’t think we’re going to be able to move the bill at this point in time,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said during a news conference last week.
Wait one minute. How did District officials get blamed for Democratic leaders’ failure to pass legislation that would have given more than 500,000 residents in the nation’s capital a voting representative in the House?
Admittedly, local leaders can be faulted for much — not the least of which was the shameless exploitation of the tragedy at the National Holocaust Museum. At-Large D.C. Councilmen Phil Mendelson and Michael Brown issued a joint news release citing the shooting as an example of why the city’s gun control, which congressional representatives and others have criticized, is appropriate and necessary.
“Loosening the District’s gun laws is a deadly proposition,” Brown said.
That’s true. But the councilmen’s assertion that gun control is the only way to prevent such horrific acts might make sense if the shooting was the first fit of violence in the nation’s capital. In recent weeks, more than a half-dozen people have been shot or murdered on District streets. Brown and Mendelson’s rhetoric treads dangerously close to being disingenuous.
Hoyer is equally guilty of being disingenuous. He knows the real reason the voting representative bill failed was that Democrats in Congress never fully embraced it. The legislation not only would have provided a vote in the House for the District but it also would have added a representative from Utah, who almost certainly would have been a Republican. Even D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton was a late supporter of the proposal, which initially was presented by now-retired Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia
Democrats also can’t honestly feign surprise at the attachment by Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, of an amendment to the voting bill, which essentially would have gutted the city’s gun laws. For years, there have been efforts to abolish District regulations.
And, they certainly can’t blame Republicans solely for the death of the resulting hamstrung bill. More than 20 Senate Democrats supported the amendment; 100 more reportedly had lined up to support a similar measure in the House. Those numbers serve as indisputable evidence that Republicans aren’t the only ones with a strong relationship with the National Rifle Association.
So, let’s just set the record straight: The bill didn’t see the light of day in the House because local leaders were divided over whether they wanted passage of the voting representation with the gun amendment. District residents’ second-class status persists because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hoyer couldn’t corral their members — far too many of whom are believers in Charlton Heston’s “cold-dead-hands” theology.
Jonetta Rose Barras, host of WPFW’s “D.C. Politics With Jonetta,” can be reached at [email protected].
