Council to Challenge Congress on Voting Rights Funds

Call them merely symbolic acts, but the D.C. Council and Mayor Adrian Fenty have made a number of gestures this year to express their collective anger at the continued disenfranchisement of District residents. Today there's one more.

Via D.C. Wire, the Council is planning on removing a prohibition on spending federal funds on lobbying activities related to District voting rights from the city's fiscal 2009 budget. The prohibition has long been imposed by Congress (the District's local funds are effectively federalized when they are sent to Congress and then re-allocated back to the city on an annual basis) and has drastically limited any actions the District's government can take to push for voting rights, including paying its three-person shadow delegation for their efforts. According to Council Chair Vincent Gray, the prohibition has always been left in the budget under the assumption that Congress would insert the offending language regardless.

It's a small gesture, and one Congress will likely overturn, but then again, late last year Congress lifted a ban on the funding of needle-exchange programs in the District. Could the Democratic majority overturn this longstanding prohibition in the same spirit?

We don't imagine that throwing a few thousand dollars at the voting rights cause will make Congress that much more likely to see the error of their ways, but there is something to be said for having a full-time and fully-paid shadow delegation, not to mention an active lobbying campaign. Or, even better, getting the District to buy a huge spotlight that will constantly beam a pro-voting rights message into the sky a la the Bat Signal. We've been itching for one of those for years.