Photo by christaki

As we return from the Fourth of July weekend, many of us are still recovering from celebrating America’s independence and a system of representative government that guarantees that each and every citizen can have a voice in the policies and decisions that affect their lives. But of course, no Independence Day is free from irony for District residents — while one of the rallying cries of the movement for independence from Britain was a lack of representation (while being taxed, no less), the 600,000 or so of us in D.C. still live with that reality, some two centuries later. Somewhere, the Brits are smirking.

Plotkin Calls Out Norton: D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is about as close a political institution as you get in this town. In office since 1991, Norton is rarely challenged come election time, much less is she confronted on her leadership of the D.C. voting rights movement on the Hill. On Sunday, WTOP Political Analyst and voting rights agitator Mark Plotkin took Norton to task in a Post op-ed for her role in the recent demise of legislation that would have granted the city a voting seat in the House. “Since the bill passed in the Senate this year, Norton has had more than ample time to move the bill in the House. Instead…she has been consistently inconsistent. One day ready to go, the next day timorous. She is acting not like a ‘warrior on the Hill’ but rather a conventional politician who can’t and won’t act. For Norton, the status quo is far more acceptable than pushing ahead into possible opposition,” he writes.

I may not agree with his argument that the legislation needs to be passed whether or not a gun amendment is attached, but I do appreciate his finger wagging of an otherwise untouchable local pol. (Could we expect anything less from a guy who got booted from the White House two year ago and called President Obama an “ingrate”?) A rising chorus of criticism against Norton could signal an additional split in an already fractious local coalition fighting for D.C. voting rights.

The Gun Amendment That Never Goes Away: Thought that amendment stripping the District of its gun laws would have gone away by now? Yeah, so did we. But today DC Vote is warning that the amendment may be slipped into an appropriations bill for the District that is being marked up in the House tomorrow. “There is a real possibility that the NRA will attempt to add a gun amendment to D.C. appropriations,” said Ilir Zherka, DC Vote’s Executive Director. “We’re doing everything in our power to thwart these attacks on the District.” Historically, the D.C. Appropriations Bill — where Congress gives back the District’s tax dollars — has been used to make political points and impose unwanted programs on the city, so seeing the gun amendment thrown in there for good measure wouldn’t be much of a shock.