DC may get representation

After over two centuries, the District of Columbia may finally get representation in Congress under a bill currently under consideration. The District currently has no voting member in either the House or the Senate. DC gets its funding as part of the annual budget process which is voted on by Congress.

The legislation crafted by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., and the District of Columbia's nonvoting delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes, balances the proposed addition of what would be a solidly Democratic D.C. seat with a new seat for Utah, a state that voted 71 percent for President Bush in 2004.

"It is simply inexcusable that residents of the District of Columbia, the capital of the free world … do not have a representative with a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, the People's House," Davis said at a news conference Thursday.

Davis said his House Government Reform Committee would vote on the measure soon, and that Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., would take up the issue. Davis and Norton have been promoting the D.C. vote issue for years, but this would be the first committee vote.

We may have to get used to saying there are 437 members of the House soon.