Photo by ellievanhoutte.

When Mayor-elect Vince Gray sits down with President Barack Obama for lunch this Wednesday, D.C. voting rights will surely be on the agenda. But even if Gray complains about Obama’s inattentiveness to the issue, there’s not really much that the President can do at this point to help the city in its quest to be something other than a modern-day federal colony.

As the Post reports today (following a similar write-up by Politics Daily two weeks ago), we’re about to enter a new dark age for D.C. voting rights. As the era of the Democratic House comes to a close, the one piece of legislation that would have granted the city a token voting seat in the chamber (and that actually attracted bi-partisan support) has drifted into irrelevance.

The legislation, originally crafted by former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis in 2006, would have balanced the District’s Democratic seat with a Republican one for Utah, which had long complained that it had lost out in the last reapportionment of congressional seats in 2000. But with the 2010 Census complete and Utah getting its seat, the one thing that would have attracted some Republican votes just isn’t there anymore.

Over the four years that the proposal was in play, it passed the House and the Senate, but couldn’t get through both during the same session. (The House endorsed it in 2007, the Senate in 2009.) And just when it looked like the stars were aligning for the legislation, the NRA flexed its muscles and managed to divide supporters over an amendment that would have gutted the District’s gun laws and forbidden the D.C. Council from ever imposing new ones.