How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [157]
Following the election of President Clinton, Norton again introduced a proposal for DC statehood. The bill’s supporters emphasized that the population of the District exceeded those of Alaska, Wyoming, and Vermont, that District residents paid taxes and served in the military just as other Americans did, and that the Constitution did not prevent Congress from granting voting rights to the District. Norton spoke to the issue’s core. “We are debating whether at last to grant full citizenship to a group of people on whom every duty of citizenship has been imposed,” she stressed on the House floor. “This nation was formed precisely because Americans paid taxes to a sovereign who afforded them no representation. The animating principle of American democracy has been no taxation without representation.”
Michigan Representative John Dingell, one of the most powerful Democrats in the House, spoke in opposition to DC statehood. “I have heard many, many complaints about people being denied constitutional rights,” he responded. “There is no constitutional right whatsoever that is being denied to the citizens here. If they do not like the way the government is run, they can pack up and move out.”
Dingell was not the only Democrat opposed to DC statehood. Though the Democrats constituted a majority of the House of Representatives, the measure failed 277 to 153.
This defeat was followed by another. The era’s political winds were propelling the Republican Party into increasingly conservative positions and, via those same winds, increasing popularity. In the 1995 congressional elections, the Republicans won a majority of the seats in the House and maintained that majority for the next twelve years. During this time, Norton knew she needed to adjust her tactics. Since a core belief of the Republicans was that the nation benefited from tax relief, Norton sought to persuade her Republican colleagues via that aspect of the District’s status. The Post reported this shift in February 1995:
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s representative on Capitol Hill, has long advocated D.C. statehood by arguing that the city’s situation constitutes “taxation without representation.”. Norton has come up with a new plan: no representation, no taxation. This week, she introduced legislation to exempt District residents from paying federal taxes.… Norton’s plan probably won’t become reality soon. The federal government … is not likely to give up $1.6 billion in revenue.
This effort failed, as the Post had predicted.
In addition to the challenges in Congress, Norton has also faced challenges from those residents in the District who believe she should pursue other avenues toward representation. “Eleanor Homes Norton is a 10-term delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.… Douglass Sloan is a Ward 4 advisory neighborhood commissioner.… He wants her job,” a neighborhood newspaper reported in 2010, quoting her challenger: “She’s been there 20 years … and she hasn’t gotten anywhere.” Despite an energetic campaign, Sloan won only 9 percent of the vote in the 2010 Democratic primary, and Norton again triumphed in the general election.
Eleanor Holmes Norton may or may not eventually succeed in achieving statehood for the District of Columbia. What is certain, however, is that if she does not, others will take up the torch—for it is the same torch that has been carried by every individual in this book. It is a torch that illuminates the lines inside us, that define who we are. The lines on the American map are also our interior portraits. Americans don’t always find each other attractive, but each of us desires to be acknowledged, to count. In this nation, that desire is a right. The quest for that right is the torch carried by Eleanor Holmes