As the District struggles for statehood and full voting rights, we will not let any other right go unclaimed. The right to vote on the House floor in the Committee of the Whole is a down payment for full voting rights to the more than 680,000 American citizens residing in the District of Columbia, who pay the highest federal income taxes per capita in the United States and have fought and died in every American war, yet have no vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. Although we did not win this fight, our fight in the 115th Congress for equal citizenship rights for D.C. residents has only just begun.
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Happy New Year’s, D.C.!
The New Year is a good time for collective D.C. resolutions that set new plans and goals for D.C. statehood. There is no more worthy goal than building on the progress we made last year for D.C. statehood—the city’s effort that prepared for statehood by meeting all the prerequisites with a statehood vote and the largest number of cosponsors ever for our D.C. statehood bill.
Although we had a pro-statehood, Democratic president, our 2016 efforts came f...rom officials and residents in the city and the Congress, not from our president. And they came despite a Republican-controlled House and Senate. We need the president as an advocate using his or her bully pulpit, but there is no escaping the work that remains in D.C., in the nation, and in the Congress if statehood is to be achieved. Working with the tools we can control is our best alternative for 2017.
Fortunately, the disappointing 2016 election has little to do with the statehood challenges we still have to meet. Barring a revolutionary change in the makeup of Congress, we still would have faced striving, at minimum, for budget autonomy and setting new records for the number of cosponsors for D.C. statehood, no matter who was president. Both are goals, but neither of these is a plan. Now is the time to spell out new achievable statehood goals for 2017, just as we did for 2016. Reaching a consensus and buy-in on tangible plan for achieving these goals would build on the statehood progress D.C. made in 2016.
Eleanor Holmes Norton shared a link.
As the top Democrat on the House Highways and Subcommittee, I helped lead a standing-room-only roundtable today on the future of autonomous vehicles in the U.S. We heard from U.S. Department of Transportation officials, industry leaders, and the insurance industry. Many new cars already have the technology in them to help make us safer than today’s "legacy" cars. The industry is already ahead of concerns about braking—they have installed automatic breaking features in many... new cars, far ahead of the federal government’s 2022 voluntary deadline for doing so.
I asked whether autonomous vehicles and today’s legacy vehicles can coexist on the same roads, and it looks like they can, and that autonomous vehicles will enhance safety for both. I asked why the industry wasn’t drawing on decades of airplane industry experience in autonomous flying, and I was informed that leaders from the automobile and airplane industries will be participating in a joint summit early next year to share such information. The future is coming fast, and we want to be prepared to embrace autonomous cars to increase safety, relieve traffic congestion, and give another boost to the U.S. economy.
D.C. needs a 2017 strategy following last month's historic over-the-top vote by residents to make D.C. the 51st state.
Read my Washington Post op-ed on what residents need to do to help keep the momentum provided by the statehood vote going.
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