Yesterday, a bill that would have given the residents of the District of Columbia a vote in Congress for the first time in modern history was temporarily delayed before senators even had a chance to debate its merits.
This delay of the D.C Voting Rights Bill was the first filibuster of a voting rights bill since the days of legal segregation. The Washington Post called the filibuster, led by Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Trent Lott of Mississippi, “heartbreaking and infuriating.”
The Post is right, but we in the civil rights community who have been working this bill for years are heartened by the fact that a majority of senators – 57, including 8 Republicans who broke with their party – were in favor of bringing the bill to the floor for a vote. We are confident that the bill would have passed had it gone to the floor.
The bill has bipartisan support, including notable figures like Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, D. Nev., Sen. Joe Lieberman, I. Conn., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R. Utah, who championed the bill in the Senate. The House passed the bill overwhelmingly without incident in April.
So it is important that we understand that the bill’s delay in the Senate was not on its merits. It was a tactical move by the Republican leadership to kill a bill that President Bush had threatened to veto. By filibustering the bill, Republicans protected the President from a difficult decision – either become the first president to veto a voting rights bill or sign a bill that extended voting rights to our nation’s capital’s majority black population. Apparently, either decision is untenable for him.
Voting is the language of democracy; and the right to vote is an American birthright, not a partisan issue. It’s unfortunate to think that race could be a factor in the White House’s thinking on DC voting rights.
Even JC Watts, a former Republican member of the House from Oklahoma, and Michael Steele, former Republican lieutenant governor of Maryland, urged the President to aspire to a higher ideal.
This is the farthest we’ve come to passing a bill to enfranchise D.C. residents and that should be celebrated. And it is not the last chance we will get to rectify a problem that makes WashingtonD.C. the only Western capital whose citizens don’t have the right to vote in the nation’s legislature.
The LCCR is launching an 8-state campaign with organizations like the NAACP and the League of Women voters to turn this result around. Next year’s elections give us the perfect setting to challenge those who would deny a vote in Congress to the citizens of the nation’s capital.