D.C. STATEHOOD

Since her election to Congress, she's been fighting to get her constituents the representation they deserve. In 1993, not long after being elected to the House of Representatives, Eleanor pushed for the first House vote on statehood. Almost two-thirds of the Democrats and one Republican voted for the bill, giving it a strong start, but the Democrats lost the House majority in the next Congress.  Since that vote, Norton was able to get the D.C. House Voting Rights Statehood Act through the House in 2007 and the Senate in 2009, which would have given D.C. a voting House member, had it not been derailed by a National Rifle Association-backed amendment that would have wiped out D.C.’s gun safety laws, and compromised its legislative autonomy.

 

On June 26, 2020, the House passed H.R. 51: The Washington, DC Admissions Act with a vote of 232-180. Upon passage, Norton said, “My service in Congress has been dedicated to achieving equality for the people I represent, which only statehood can provide.  My life as a third-generation Washingtonian has marched toward this milestone, mindful that my own family has never known equality in our own country.  My great-grandfather Richard Holmes walked away as a slave from a plantation in Virginia.  I continue on the walk that got my family to freedom in this city until all of us who live today in the District go the full distance to achieve the prize of equal citizenship with D.C. statehood.”