DC Voting rights Bill gets Yanked from Congress.

[Raine1967]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/dc-voting-rights-bill-get_n_544447.html



The bill would have increased full House membership from 435 to 437, giving District residents a vote while adding a temporary at-large seat for Republican-leaning Utah, which narrowly missed out on getting an extra seat after the 2000 census.

The House passed the bill in 2007 and the Senate approved it last year. But the Senate bill came with an amendment that would have forced the District to effectively eliminate its tough gun control laws.

House members, including the District's nonvoting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, have been trying for the past year to find a formula that would allow a vote while satisfying the powerful gun rights lobby in Congress. But in the end, no resolution was reached.

Norton said she and Democratic leaders in the House were "shocked and blindsided" over the weekend to receive what she said was a National Rifle Association-drafted gun bill to accompany the voting act.

She said the proposal was even stronger than the gun provision passed in the Senate, barring the district from prohibiting or interfering with the carrying of firearms, either concealed or openly, in public. She said it would also have made it easy for people to carry firearms without permits and would stop the district from prohibiting guns in city-controlled buildings.



I don;t know who I am angrier at, the NRA or the Dems for yanking this bill