Photo by AlbinoFlea

It’s not hard to find someone who’s frustrated that District residents still don’t have full voting rights. But no one is as willing to act on that frustration as Doug Sloan, it seems.

Sloan, who is challenging D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton to be the District’s non-voting representative, proposed a radical idea today to get Congress’ attention — block the bridges carrying commuters in from Virginia.

“If you really want to talk civil unrest, if you want to talk about shutting the city down and doing something that’s really going to get Congress’ attention, there’s about six or seven bridges between D.C. and Virginia. You take about 40 or 50 concrete Jersey barriers and you shut those bridges down for a day. You get those people’s attention on Capitol Hill,” Sloan said during an interview on WTOP’s The Politics Program with Mark Plotkin.

Predictably, Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-Va.), who represents a district spanning Northern Virginia, wasn’t too keen on the idea, much less was former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who worked closely with Norton on recently stalled legislation that would have granted the District a voting seat in the House.

The last time anthing along these lines happened, it was when former Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly got herself arrested in 1993 during a pro-statehood rally on the Hill. (She joined Rev. Jesse Jackson and others in blocking Independence Avenue.) But even that wouldn’t come close to what Sloan has proposed, which would most certainly enrage members of Congress. The idea of a federal district without voting representation came about over 200 years ago because Congress was then afraid of the undue influence District residents could have on the legislative process. A move like this would essentially confirm those fears.

We’ll give credit where credit is due, though — while Norton has been a highly active advocate for D.C. voting rights, her impassioned speeches and hard work hardly rate on the aggressive meter compared to Sloan’s proposal.