Feb 23, 2007  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

A contingent of more than two-dozen gay activists joined Mayor Adrian Fenty, Washington congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and about 400 city residents last week in visits to offices of members of Congress, where they urged lawmakers to allow the District to have one voting member in the House of Representatives.

“This impacts us as much as anyone else, because our rights are on the line,” said veteran D.C. gay activist Phil Pannell, during a Feb. 12 meeting of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the city’s largest gay political group.

Pannell and others involved with the local group D.C. Vote used the Stein Club meeting as one of many recruiting sessions to line up gay community support for the Capitol Hill lobbying visits on Feb. 15, which they dubbed Congress Day 2007.

The congressional visits were aimed at building support for H.R. 328, the D.C. Voting Rights Act of 2007, which calls for creating a new seat in the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia, which currently has a non-voting Delegate to the House, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton.

The newly convened Democratic-controlled House recently gave Norton privileges to vote on the House floor when the House assembles as the Committee of the Whole, a parliamentary body that approves legislation on a preliminary basis. But Norton is barred from casting a final vote on all bills and resolutions, a development many political activists and reformist groups say disenfranchises D.C. residents from representation in Congress.

“For us, it’s a human rights issue,” said gay activist and former Stein Club President Brad Lewis. “We are in year four in the Iraq war, to promote democracy thousands of miles across the world. It’s important for people to realize that not everybody in this country has full democracy,” he said.

Lewis and other activists acknowledge that the Voting Rights Act would have little or no practical advantage in passing gay rights legislation pending in Congress. They say they support the voting rights measure for the collective benefit of all D.C. residents.

The Voting Rights Act, introduced by Norton and Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), includes a compromise provision that offsets the creation of a House seat for D.C. by creating an additional seat for Utah, increasing the number of Utah House members from three to four.

Norton and Davis said including the Utah provision was the only way they could line up enough support for the bill from Republicans to give it a reasonable chance of passing. Without the provision, Republican leaders said they would oppose adding a House member from the overwhelmingly Democratic District of Columbia, where the new member would be certain to be a liberal Democrat.

The Republican-leaning Utah would be expected to send a Republican to Congress to fill the new Utah seat, neutralizing the political impact of the District’s new House member.

But the Norton-Davis compromise had the unintended effect of drawing strong opposition from Democratic Party leaders in Utah, who claim the legislation could result in the loss of Utah’s only Democratic House member. Two of Utah’s three House members are Republican. The third member, Jim Matheson, from the state’s 2nd congressional district, is a Democrat.

Under the Norton-Davis bill, the addition of a fourth House seat would require the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature to redraw the boundaries of the existing three districts. Democrats fear the legislature would set the new boundaries in a way that would place Republicans in the majority in all four districts, leading to Matheson’s defeat in the next election. The Utah Republican Party supports the bill.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Norton and Davis that House Democratic leaders also strongly support the bill on grounds that D.C. has a right to have voting representation in Congress.

Stein Club President Mario Acosta-Velez said the club would urge gay Democrats throughout the country to ask their members of Congress to vote for the bill.

“It’s a matter of ending disenfranchisement for all of the citizens of the District of Columbia,” he said. “We think it’s the right thing to do.”