Late last September, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton requested that the District be allowed to place two statues in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, alongside those chosen by the nation’s 50 states. That idea may soon be moving forward.

The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities is asking the public for its input as to who the District should immortalize in Statuary Hall, allowing residents to either pick from a list of 30 prominent District figures or write in their own. The list includes usual suspects such as Pierre L’Enfant, Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass and Duke Ellington and some lesser-known though still important figures such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Brent, Nannie Helen Borroughs and Norton P. Chipman. Once voting ends on April 28, the District will use $200,000 to commission a sculptor and erect the statues temporarily at the John Wilson Building.

Of course, that’s may be as far as the statues get. A bill pending before the House Administration Committee on whether to allow the District to place the statues in Statuary Hall has yet to move, and some political analysts say that committee chairman Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) has little interest in the issue. WTOP Political Analyst Mark Plotkin is seeing red over the slight, writing today in an online chat at the Post:

These days the effective way to quell any protest or disturbance is to kill you with indifference. Nothing, except for the lack of actual representation in the House and the Senate of human beings, more illustrates our un-American status than our exclusion from Statuary Hall. If we don’t have any representative people there, we don’t exist. This perpetuates the real and symbolic statement of our country that there are no people in the District of Columbia.

Maybe Congress would be happier if that were the case.