If you work on the Hill you might still have time to run over to the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rm. 342 for the hearing Equal Representation in Congress: Providing Voting Rights to the District of Columbia before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The hearing, scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., will include testimony split into two panels, the first with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), Mayor Adrian Fenty and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. A second panel will feature former vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp; Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Viet Dinh, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and former Bush administration official; and Jonathan Turley, a professor at The George Washington University Law School. Legislation sponsor Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) will preside over the hearing.
We’ve sent a DCist operative down to the hearing, and are at this very moment busy making sure we can get the either the live video feed from the Committee or the live audio feed from CapitolHearings.org. Ahh, there it is, we can hear the background noise in the room. We’ll update this post throughout the hearing as things progress — maybe not quite live-blogging like we’ve done for debate on the House floor, but we’ll do our best.
10:25 a.m. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) just finished up his testimony, which expressed strong support for the bill’s intent (to give the District a voting representative in the House), its bi-partisian spirit (of course), and his belief that it is absolutely constitutional. Sen. Hatch even went so far as to warn the Senate that this issue “will never go away” until the historical disenfranchisement of the residents of the District of Columbia is remedied — pretty strong words to hear from a Republican on this bill who isn’t Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.). Davis is testifying now.
10:37 a.m. D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is now testifying, and but she decided to open with anecdotes from her recent appearances on the Colbert Report, including Colbert’s accusations that she and Rep. Davis are having an affair. Norton admitted to having a “political affair.” Big laughs. Oddly, I was just typing a thought about how much classier this Senate hearing is as compared with the rancorous House debate.
10:54 a.m. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) have both just announced their intention to sign on as co-sponsors of the bill. This came after Del. Norton made an incredibly moving speech about the racist underpinnings of the legacy of D.C.’s lack of voting rights. Mayor Fenty is now beginning his testimony.
2 p.m.: Sorry for the delay, folks. Wanted to wait until the archived video of the hearing was available online — you can now watch the entire hearing by clicking here, and it’s almost exactly two hours long.
The second half of the hearing saw compelling, if a little more dry, testimony from legal experts Wade Henderson and Viet Dinh, who both argued rather eloquently for the constitutionality of the bill, (and Jonathan Turley, who argued against). In fact at one point Sen. Lieberman made a funny remark about feeling as if he was “ready” for law school now (Lieberman has a law degree from Yale). Former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp also spoke, somewhat more passionately, about his commitment to civil rights and how ashamed he is that his political party is on the wrong side of this issue.
We get a fair share of nasty comments from a handful of people every time we post on this issue, usually decrying the “unconstitutionality” of the bill and telling us to stop dreaming. We now dare any of those same people to watch all two hours of this hearing and still make a case that it’s a bad bill. Sure, the hearing was stacked with people who are in favor of the bill, but we’ll be damned if they didn’t make their case.
UPDATE: The WaPo’s Yolanda Woodlee reports Lieberman said he plans to have the committee mark up the bill by early June.
Photo by Kyle Gustafson
