Area Hoping to Cash In on Hill

Power Shift Could Bring D.C. and Region Long-Sought Change

Now, perhaps, the District of Columbia will finally get a token of respect -- its own commemorative coin -- to say nothing of full voting rights in the House and the right to elect a district attorney.

Under the new Democratic majority in Congress, Maryland stands to wield more clout for funding such programs as cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay.

Virginia's U.S. Sen.-elect James Webb is the toast of the resurgent Democratic Party. But Northern Virginia's congressional Republicans will lose influence, and there are fears of a potential federal budget battle that could hurt the local economy.

Although the full impact on the Washington region of the Democratic takeover remains unclear, many local aspirations have been raised by the change, along with a few concerns.

The highest hopes may be in heavily Democratic Washington, where the perennial push to gain a vote in the House has new life. Although backers are still hoping to get a bill passed next month, they are confident of success with the new Congress next year.

Proponents in the District have long dreamed of additional measures that would grant the city further autonomy from Congress, which still has oversight for city budgets and legislation.

"Voting rights is such an overriding issue, it tends to obscure the dozens of ways the District is treated as a second-class jurisdiction," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said Tuesday.

In July, for example, she introduced a bill now in committee that would allow city residents to elect a district attorney. The city's chief legal officer is a U.S. attorney named by the president. Norton also wants more budgetary and legislative independence.

Norton has also sought to have the District receive its own commemorative quarter. She proposed the idea almost a decade ago, when the District and the four U.S. territories were left out of the program to produce quarters for each of the 50 states. Her measure has died in the Republican Senate twice since, she said.

The bill is again in committee, and she hopes the District might now get its coin -- "a small symbol of dignity and of inclusion in your own country."

For Maryland, House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D) could be elected today as majority leader, one of the most powerful positions in the government.

"When you have the majority leader, you have someone who is in on every discussion that takes place at the highest levels of Congress," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.).