Eleanor Holmes Norton: “I have come to the floor this afternoon to take the opportunity to fully inform Members--and, yes, also members of the…”

“I have come to the floor this afternoon to take the opportunity to fully inform Members--and, yes, also members of the public--of the actual rights of the people who live in the District of Columbia, who demand respect for their local laws the way every Member would demand respect for the local laws of her own jurisdiction, and yes, if necessary, to call out Members who violate their own principles of local control of government against Federal interference. I am very pleased that very few bills that trample on the local rights of the people who live in the Nation's Capital have been signed into law and that very few have gotten out of this House even recently. Part of that is because we stand up and fight, but we are at some disadvantage. The District of Columbia delegation consists of me, and we have no Senators. But no red-blooded American would sit down while somebody tramples over her local jurisdiction without getting up and saying something about it and, yes, without doing something about it. I want to be fair to my colleagues because some of this, I think, has to do with simple ignorance. Some of it has to do with a blind spot. The blind spot is very troubling. The blind spot means that principles that easily soak into them with respect to every single district in the United States somehow haven't made it into their hearts or their heads when it comes to the District of Columbia.…”