Dark times for D.C. voting rights

When Mayor-elect Vince Gray sits down with President Obama for lunch this Wednesday, D.C. voting rights will surely be on the agenda. But even if Gray complains about Obama's inattentiveness to the issue, there's not really much that the president can do at this point to help the city in its quest to be something other than a modern-day federal colony.

As The Post reports today (following a similar write-up by Politics Daily two weeks ago), we're about to enter a new dark age for D.C. voting rights. As the era of the Democratic House comes to a close, the one piece of legislation that would have granted the city a token voting seat in the chamber (and that actually attracted bipartisan support) has drifted into irrelevance.

The legislation, originally crafted by former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis in 2006, would have balanced the District's Democratic seat with a Republican one for Utah, which had long complained that it had lost out in the last reapportionment of congressional seats in 2000. But with the 2010 Census complete and Utah getting its seat, the one thing that would have attracted some Republican votes just isn't there anymore.

[Continue reading Martin Austermuhle's post here at DCist.com.]

Martin Austermuhle blogs at DCist. The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.