Eleanor Holmes Norton: “I come to the floor today to celebrate the 41 District of Columbia elected officials and residents led by Mayor Vincent…”

“I come to the floor today to celebrate the 41 District of Columbia elected officials and residents led by Mayor Vincent Gray and five members of the D.C. City Council who were arrested in front of the Hart Senate office building yesterday evening, and hundreds of other residents who gathered to protest their second- class treatment as American citizens by the Republican House, the Democratic-led Senate, and the administration. The 2011 continuing resolution due on the floor this week contains a sinister trade that takes the District of Columbia's self-governing rights to spend its own local funds on abortion services for poor women, as many jurisdictions have long done. The CR also funds the start-up of a new, private school voucher program but only in D.C., about which no local elected official was consulted. It is the House Republicans who have been on an undemocratic warpath against the District's home rule. But yesterday, residents did not spare Senate Democrats or the President who, in the end, accepted Republican demands. The House will hear from me again as I try to remove these anti-home rule riders; but this body has repeatedly turned a deaf ear to me on violations of the city's most basic rights to local control.…”