The executive director of DC Vote announced today that he was leaving the organization after 10 years at its helm.
DC Vote Executive Director Ilir Zherka just passed the 10-year mark as the organization’s executive director, so maybe this type of stuff shouldn’t surprise him anymore. But it does, and today he called out Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for his “stunning hypocrisy” in introducing a set of amendments that would dictate D.C. policy on guns, abortions and union labor.
A group of D.C. voting rights activists are protesting Republican Arizona Rep. Trent Franks’ Glendale district office this afternoon over legislation he’s introduced on the Hill that would prohibit abortions in the District after 20 weeks.
MORE 2:28 p.m.: D.C. Vote Executive Director Ilir Zherka just returned our call, and takes issue with our characterization that the D.C. House Voting Rights Act is “dead.” “We’re going to get this done, the question is when,” Zherka said. “We’ve got the time and we’ve got the votes. Any timeline is artificial, and it was artificial from the start,” he said. Despite today’s setback, Zherka said DC Vote is committed to the bill…
It was 234 years ago Sunday that American colonists dumped tea into Boston Harbor as part of a symbolic protest against being taxed by the British while not having a representative in the Westminster Parliament. Yesterday District voting rights activists remembered the event by holding their own tea party, this one to protest the union’s last standing example of taxation without representation. Though the wind whipped across the Potomac River, about 80 activists and…
Remember those billboards that popped up in the 1980s that counted up the national debt, dollar by dollar? Pretty scary, huh? Well, District voting rights activists want something similar for their cause. Today the D.C. Council held a hearing on legislation that would allow the city to place two large LED billboards — one outside the John A. Wilson Building and the other outside the new Washington Nationals stadium — that would display the amount…
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced yesterday that he intends to bring the D.C. Voting Rights bill (S. 1257) to the Senate floor during the week of September 17. The bill passed the House this spring and has already cleared two Senate committees, though Reid was unwilling to bring the bill to the floor before the August recess, expressing concern at the time that it had not quite secured the 60 votes it would need…
Breaking just now: The DC Voting Rights Act (now H.R. 1905) is scheduled to return to the House Floor tomorrow, Thursday for a vote. The move comes after a week of speculation that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had removed the bill from this week’s schedule for unclear reasons. Today it is now definite: the bill will come to a vote tomorrow. The bill originally stalled on the House Floor last month after three Republican…
It’s easy to dismiss yesterday’s Voting Rights March. Skeptics can point to the estimated number of participants (anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000, depending on who you ask) and claim that in a city of almost 600,000, that’s not very good turnout. They can point to the cause — a voting seat in the House of Representatives — and argue that the tough road it faces in the Senate and the veto it will likely receive…
Last year ended on a bit of a sour note for District voting rights, but activists aren’t letting a little bad news stop them. After being stymied by Republican leaders in the closing weeks of the 109th Congress, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton re-introduced legislation on January 9 to grant the District one voting seat in the House of Representatives. The legislation, known as the Fair and Equal House Voting…
