D.C. Voting-Rights Debate Nears Do-or-Die Moment

The White House has made the same argument and threatened a veto if the legislation reaches President Bush's desk.

On the other side, legal scholars argue that Congress's broad powers over the District allow it to treat the city as a state for purposes of House representation.

Hatch said opponents were raising a legitimate constitutional concern. "But that argument should be debated on the floor," he said. "It shouldn't be stopped by a filibuster" before the bill's merits can be considered.

Lobbying on both sides has been intense. Proponents have published opinion pieces, organized call-in campaigns and even gotten rabbis to urge congregations at Jewish holy day services to pressure their 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.

The campaign against the D.C. vote bill is taking place largely behind the scenes. McConnell spoke out against the measure in his regular lunch with Republican senators last week, officials said.

Even Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), a co-sponsor of the D.C. vote bill, told the Deseret Morning News that he was feeling pressure from McConnell, a close friend. Bennett said in a statement Thursday that he worried that the legislation could "become a covert way to give D.C. two senators."