Nonprofits have had an enormous impact on the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009 (H.R.157/S.160). The bill passed in the Senate on Feb. 26 by a 61-37 vote and will soon come before the House. If the bill passes and is signed into law, it will give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives for the first time.

Currently, the District's congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, can only vote in committee. As part of a compromise, the bill would also temporarily give Utah an additional House seat based on an undercount of Mormon missionaries who worked abroad in 2000. If the 2010 census does not support the new seat, it would possibly go to the state next in line to gain a House seat.

DC Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization that strives for full voting representation for the District of Columbia, has played a huge role in the legislation that passed the Senate. Due to its efforts, as well as local citizens and elected officials, the District is closer to a voting representative than it has been since a constitutional amendment that would have given the District a House representative and two senators passed Congress in 1978. This current effort, however, is considered a more substantial move toward voting rights because the constitutional amendment had no chance of being ratified by the states, and it died as a result.

DC Vote has used a variety of methods to further the goal of securing voting rights for the District. It has produced educational documents on the voting rights issue. It has also engaged in activities designed to educate the American public and legislators around the nation. Recently, DC Vote produced the "Demand the Vote" music video that was shown in February at the Our City Film Festival in Washington, DC. They also held a Veteran's Day Rally in November 2008 to urge support for DC voting rights. Thirteen nonprofits signed on as organizational sponsors, including Common Cause, Friends of the Earth, and Public Citizen.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), a 501(c)(4) organization, has also played a huge role in the bill content as of late, causing the House to put the legislation on hold and possibly derailing a bill that seemed certain to quickly pass through the House. The organization is currently lobbying House members to press for amendments that would overturn DC gun laws. The bill that passed in the Senate already contains gun amendments that weaken DC gun laws.

After the gun amendments were proposed in the Senate, DC Vote organized an effort to have the public call their senators and urge them to vote against the gun amendment. The group set up a toll-free number and provided a sample script to assist people who wanted to make calls. Voting rights advocates were hoping that the House would pass a version without the gun amendments and that the amendments would be omitted when the two chambers met to reconcile the different versions of the legislation.

"Supporters of the vote bill had assumed Democrats would use their majority power to pass a rule that would bar gun amendments," according to The Washington Post. However, the NRA is threatening to score any procedural vote Democrats bring to prohibit adding gun amendments to the bill. Scoring procedural votes is a highly unusual move. Normally, legislation is scored on its merits, not on procedural maneuvers. According to Norton (D-DC), “People don’t score rules, they score bills.”

The NRA's threat to score the rule is a big dilemma for some pro-gun rights Democrats from conservative states who do not want to be listed as casting an anti-gun vote. Norton recently told the DC Democratic State Committee that the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a 501(c)(4) organization, told her that if the NRA scores the procedural maneuver as an anti-gun vote, then the LCCR will score it as a civil rights vote. This may neutralize the NRA's approach, as almost all of the pro-gun Democrats who are being targeted by the NRA have perfect scores on civil rights issues from the Leadership Conference, according to Norton. These legislators do not want to be seen as casting an anti-civil rights vote any more than they want to be seen casting an anti-gun vote.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) put the bill on hold on March 3 "after learning that the National Rifle Association was urging its members to use a procedural maneuver to press for amendments that would repeal many of the city's gun laws," according to The Washington Post.