DC-AL: 88-Year-Old House Democrat Says She's Running Again: 'I Am Not Going To Step Aside'

[Celerity]

35. I never said she was a full voting member, but she can introduce/sponsor legislation and before the Rethugs took it away

each time they took the House back, she (as the DC delegate at-large) could vote on amendments, procedural issues, and non-binding resolutions. She also has franking privileges, floor privileges and can participate in certain other House functions. Non-voting members may, as I stated above, also introduce legislation and may vote in a House committee of which they are a member.

Republican-led Congress denies D.C. delegate a vote. Again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/republican-congress-denies-dc-representative-a-vote-again/2017/01/03/a8e32760-d1c8-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html

https://archive.ph/Gsem5

On the first day of the 115th Congress, members buzzed Tuesday about the repeal of President Obama's health-care law, tax reform and whether to gut the ethics office. All Eleanor Holmes Norton wanted to discuss was a vote. And a symbolic one at that. For the fourth consecutive session, Norton (D), the non­voting D.C. representative, formally asked the speaker of the House for the ability to vote on amendments and procedural issues. Again, she was thwarted.

This time, she brought D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and a veterans advocate with her. Norton pushed for a vote in the Committee of the Whole as “a down payment on full voting rights for the more than 680,000 American citizens residing in the District of Columbia, who pay the highest federal income taxes per capita in the United States and have fought and died in every American war, yet have no vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, ‘the people’s house,’ ” she said.

When Democrats have controlled the House, Norton, the other non­voting delegates — from American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands — and Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner were given the courtesy. In Norton’s quarter-century of service, that has happened in congressional sessions starting in 1993, 2007 and 2009. The privilege was revoked each time Republicans took back control of the House.

For Norton, the ability to cast a vote as part of the Committee of the Whole is largely symbolic — it would allow her to vote on amendments on the House floor but not on final legislation. And, in the past, if a vote by a delegate would determine the outcome of a particular measure, the House voted again — without them.

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