Below The Beltway

On Tuesday, the bill that would give the District of Columbia voting representation in Congress faces it’s toughest test yet:

For the first time in almost 30 years, the full Senate plans to take up the D.C. voting-rights issue in a showdown Tuesday that could either give the legislation a strong push or kill it for this year.

Lawmakers will decide whether the Senate should consider the bill, laying the groundwork for a vote on the legislation itself. If proponents can’t muster the 60 votes needed to get through this stage, the legislation will probably stall for months, according to senators and staff members.

“This is the big vote,” said Lloyd Leonard, director of advocacy for the League of Women Voters, which is pushing for approval. “And so we are all making sure that anyone who knows a U.S. senator is going to talk to them.”

The vote could be a cliffhanger. Almost all of the Senate’s 51 Democrats and independents back the bill, as do at least five Republican members.

“We think unless something happens — arms are twisted — that we have it,” said Nancy Zirkin, a top official with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, another major backer of the bill.

But opponents, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), are pressing senators to stop the bill. They say it is unconstitutional and could give the District a foot in the door to get voting senators, too.

At the moment, it would appear that the bill’s fate rests with a group of uncommitted Senators:

The bill’s supporters are focusing on a small group of senators who are publicly uncommitted, including Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan).

They also are urging some senators who oppose the bill to let it reach the floor for an up-or-down vote. Proponents have linked the issue of voting representation for the majority African American city to the civil rights movement, recalling the notorious Senate filibusters of that era.

“We can only be stopped by a [filibuster] process that was used in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that the country forced the Senate to discard on civil rights bills,” said the District’s nonvoting House delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D).

Proponents had hoped that Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) would be an ally in getting the bill to the floor, despite his doubts about its constitutionality. But Warner said Friday that he would not vote for it to proceed and instead would draft a constitutional amendment on D.C. voting rights.

The House and Senate approved such an amendment in 1978 — the closest the District has gotten to attaining full representation — but the measure collapsed seven years later when only 16 of the required 38 states ratified it.

“Only a constitutional amendment . . . will resolve this issue, and thereby avoid interminable litigation flowing from an Act of Congress,” Warner said in a statement.

Warner is, of course, correct, but since when has the Senate paid attention to the Constitution ?