The Washington Post reports today: “House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said a D.C. voting rights bill will not come up this session, in part because of opposition to an amendment that would have eliminated most of the District’s gun-control laws.”

ANISE JENKINS
MALCOLM WISEMAN
Jenkins and Wiseman are with the Stand Up! for Democracy in D.C. Coalition (Free D.C.). Jenkins said today that the bill that Hoyer had planned on introducing “does not do enough to correct the lack of basic democratic rights in the nation’s capital.”

Stand Up! favors statehood for D.C., which the group says would be much sounder constitutionally. The group also states that the proposed imposition of gun laws by Congress is endemic to the undemocratic manner that the people of D.C. are treated.

Wiseman said today: “This bill only addresses voting rights — actually voting right, since it’s just one vote we’d be getting. But voting is just the tip of the iceberg for democratic rights; we need self-determination, we need statehood. We pay federal taxes and die in wars, but we in D.C. cannot determine our own budget — Congress does. We don’t have a district attorney. We don’t vote for anybody who prosecutes cases for us, or against us. When people from D.C. are sentenced to jail, they typically serve their time in California or North Carolina, further damaging families. However, I suspect that D.C. will get statehood some day — once it has been sufficiently gentrified.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167