Where were you on D.C. voting rights, Mr. President?

There's always next year.

Probably not.

I'm talking about the D.C. voting rights bill.

Last week, once again, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) told House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) to pull the bill.

There is no greater champion than Hoyer for the right of D.C. residents to become active members of our nation's democracy. He rightly considers the denial of a House vote to the residents of our nation's capital to be a violation of international human rights as set out in the Helsinki Accords.

But once again, the National Rifle Association carried the day. There were too many House and Senate members petrified of the consequences of saying no to the NRA. The bill couldn't go forward because the Senate's version, passed in February 2009, was laden with pro-gun amendments that were poison to local officials.

Many people -- I was among them -- urged Norton last year to accept the awful Senate gun amendments rather than try to move the bill in an election year. She must have known in her heart of hearts that the NRA was in the driver's seat, that it would not compromise or even negotiate. But she did not heed the advice, and this year the gun amendments got worse.

Norton has taken her lumps, but there is one person who has not been sufficiently been singled out for responsibility: the president of the United States.

I interviewed candidate Barack Obama in the summer of 2008 for WTOP Radio and asked him about the issue. He immediately said that if he won, he would "have a lot on his plate." He reiterated his support for the bill, but it did not take much to curb his enthusiasm for it.

After being elected, he made matters worse. When asked about D.C. voting rights in a meeting with reporters and editors at The Post, he called the issue "partisan" and "controversial."

What he should have said in no uncertain terms was that this was a fundamental component of democracy -- a statement such as "I can't wait to sign a bill that should remove this blight on democracy."

Then there is the issue of the "taxation without representation" license plate. Bill Clinton put it on the presidential limousine. George W. Bush took it off, and Obama could have immediately restored it to its rightful place. First his aides implied that they knew nothing about the plate. Then they said they were "working on it." Then they told us that the plate was not going on.