David Grosso, a top aide to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, has taken a job with CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield.

Grosso will be vice president for public policy for the region’s largest health insurer. He has been Norton’s legislative director since early 2007, when he left the employ of former Ward 6 Councilmember Sharon Ambrose after she stepped down. He had worked for Ambrose for six years, including a stint as clerk of the economic development committee.

LL has heard some grumbling about the move, given that in recent weeks Grosso, representing Norton, had sat in on strategy sessions with Wilson Building staffers and other stakeholders regarding a council bill intended to squeeze community benefits out of CareFirst—legislation the insurer has vigorously opposed. The meetings, LL is told, concerned strategies to avoid congressional meddling with the bill.

Ward 3 Councilmember Mary M. Cheh, who introduced the bill and is pushing it through the council, declined to comment directly on the personnel shuffle, but she did say that she plans to make several amendments to her CareFirst bill that she hopes to pass at the next legislative meeting, on Dec. 2. Those amendments, she says, are intended to allay concerns from suburban jurisdictions—and, in the unspoken subtext, to head off any possible congressional intervention.

Grosso had no comment, but CareFirst spokesperson Michael Sullivan says that his new gig isn’t a lobbying job, but “primarily a policy analysis, review, [and] development post.”

Grosso is leaving Norton’s office Friday and will start his new job on Dec. 1.

One of the bigger surprises on the gun bill vote today is that Tom Davis, the Republican representing parts of suburban Virginia, voted for it. Davis has been a strong supporter of District home rule in recent years, helping D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton fight off various bigfooting attempts first as chair, and now as ranking member, of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In 2004, according to a Post story, Davis stood up to an attempt by Indiana Republican Mark Souder to abolish the handgun ban. “No one should question the importance of keeping fully loaded assault weapons off the streets of the District,” Davis said. “There is an important place for debate on D.C. gun laws — that is in the chambers of the D.C. Council, not the Congress.”

As way of explaining Davis’ vote today, commenter KCinDC points us to the committee report. Some explanation: H.R. 6842 is the “National Capital Security and Safety Act,” which is the name of the substitute bill introduced by Norton; H.R. 6691 is the “‘Second Amendment Enforcement Act,” which is the stronger bill penned by Mississippi Democrat Travis Childers. What happened is that 6842 is what the committee sent to the floor, but Childers moved to amend by substituting his bill. So while the bill carries Norton’s name and number, the meat of the bill is Childers’.

Davis, to his credit, voted not to amend. (New Jersey Republican Mike Ferguson also voted against it before he voted for it.) Still, can anyone make sense of this?

This is an “Alice in Wonderland” moment for the Committee—and it just gets “curiouser and curiouser.” We’ve been taken down a rabbit hole and through the looking glass by the Democratic Majority. This Cheshire Cat of a bill is about to disappear except for its grin. Take a quick look at H.R. 6842—because it won’t be around for long!

Read the rest of this entry »

DENVER—Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was late arriving to the convention floor and was not able to give the D.C. delegate tally from the delegation’s floor microphone.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton filled in with impromptu remarks, which local Dems chair Anita Bonds says Norton composed, with the help of Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, within five minutes when it became clear Fenty might not make it on time.

Fenty, as mayor, is the official head of the District’s delegation, and Bonds says it’s “traditional” for the head to take the mike. It seems Hizzoner was delayed getting in to the arena, arriving less than 10 minutes late. After briefly greeting local delegates, Fenty roamed the convention floor before entering the bowels of the Pepsi Center, where he was whisked into the off-limits-to-press “Boiler Room” by his longtime political strategist Tom Lindenfeld to meet an unnamed VIP.

Fenty declined to explain his absence; the roll call vote had been moved up earlier in the day, Bonds says, and Fenty was trying to make it to the floor in time. “I was talking to John [Falcicchio, Fenty's political aide], every minute,” she says.

Fenty says he heard Norton’s remarks on his way onto the floor. “She said exactly what I would have said,” he says.

UPDATE: The District cast 33 votes of its 40 votes for Barack Obama, and seven votes for Hillary Clinton. The Clinton voters were Evans, former Ward 8 councilmember Sandy Allen, Ward 2 gay activist Peter Rosenstein, elected Democratic National Committeewoman Marilyn Tyler Brown, DNC member Mary Eva Candon, Minyon Moore of America Coming Together, and DNC member Eric Kleinfeld. Evans, Rosenstein, and Allen were pledged to Clinton; the rest are unpledged superdelegates.

DENVER—The D.C. delegation to the Democratic National Convention came out in force this afternoon to support Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Among the elected VIPs on the scene were council Chairman Vincent C. Gray, Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser, Ward 5’s Harry Thomas Jr., and Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander (Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has yet to arrive). Together, they chanted, “We demand the vote.”

The impact of those demands was, well, debatable.

Norton was placed at the very head of the daily lineup, just after an overlong invocation, the colors presentation, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a local children’s choir singing the national anthem. Perhaps a few hundred press, delegates, and staff were milling about the floor during the speech, very few paying particularly close attention.

Norton had but three minutes, but she did a fine job presenting some of the greatest hits of D.C. voting rights rhetoric (a feat helped, no doubt, by the fact she had only three minutes). The founders, she said, “did not create a new nation to get the vote, only to turn around and deny the vote to the citizens of their own capital.” She also hit on the voting-rights’ crowd’s new favorite feint: focusing on D.C.’s veterans, for instance namechecking Spec. Darryl T. Dent, who in 2003 became the first D.C. resident to die in Iraq.

As Norton spoke, one delegate unfurled a No Taxation Without Representation flag, mildly flouting rules about signs on the convention floor. Earlier today, D.C. Vote outreach director Eugene Dewitt Kinlow had talked about smuggling in some of his organization’s advocacy signs, but few of those appeared.

Before taking a strangely Burkean turn—”Change is best achieved when wrapped in unchanging principles”—Norton called on Democrats to “finish [Martin Luther] King’s unfinished business” and extend full civil-rights to the District.

Of course, that doesn’t include statehood. Not surprisingly, Norton’s advocacy extended only to passing the D.C. Voting Rights Act, the bill that passed the House last year but failed to gain sufficient Senate support. “Tonight, we challenge the Senate, especially the Republicans, to match the House”—never mind that if all Senate Dems had voted for the bill it would have passed—and she said to “have no doubt [that] if George Bush wouldn’t sign the D.C. Voting Rights Act, its most prominent co-sponsor, our next president Barack Obama, will.”

What was the impact of Norton and D.C.’s few minutes in the spotlight? Back at the D.C. bureau, LL’s boss reports that none of the 24-hour news networks emerged from their reverie of wonkitude to cover Norton’s remarks. Inside the hall, a few joined in the Washingtonians’ chant of “we demand the vote.” Rather than drown out decrepit former Kennedy aide Ted Sorenson, speaking after Norton, the chant faded fast.

After Sorenson came DNC vice chair Rep. Mike Honda, David Gupp of North Dakota, who spoke on Native American issues, and Rep. Linda Sanchez of California. Make no mistake: D.C.’s franchise, like Native American affairs or Latino affairs, is just another issue or VIP to be given a token speaking slot. But no big surprise there—better to have three token minutes than no minutes at all.

Among the delegation the reaction was upbeat. D.C. Dems chair Anita Bonds called the remarks “stellar.” Gray said Norton “struck exactly the right themes—that this cannot be consistent with what the founders intended.” He rejected LL’s assertion that the District seemed to be an afterthought to convention organizers—”If it were an afterthought, it wouldn’t be here at all….That alone represents progress.”

But does it? Norton took the podium in 1996, 2000, and 2004 to press voting rights; in 1992, she spoke about the issue along with then-mayor Sharon Pratt and Shadow Sen. Jesse Jackson. Attitudes toward voting-rights have improved during that time, as the District’s political and economic reputation improved, but D.C. still has no vote.

On his way off the floor, LL checked out D.C.’s neighbors. The Maryland section was deserted; the Virginia section held about a dozen folks, few of them actual delegates. In search of some reaction, LL headed over to his home state, Indiana.

There he found delegate Bonnie Reese of Winfield, Ind., which is about 10 miles from LL’s ancestral home in the northwest corner of the state. Reese said she had listened to Norton’s speech and asked LL to tell her more. He explained that D.C. has three electoral votes for president and a delegate to Congress, but no senators, and that Congress regularly tries to exert power over the locally elected leaders of the city.

Said Reese, “Well, that sucks!”

LL asked Reese if she planned to mention it to her colleagues. “I sure will,” she promised.

UPDATE, 7:03 P.M.: Pop Cesspool points out I forgot the video. Here it is:

DENVER—LL caught up with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin outside the DenverColorado Convention Center last night, on his way into a party honoring Hurricane Katrina relief organizations.

Nagin had kind words for D.C.’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. As head of the House subcommittee that oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Norton has been a big advocate of Katrina relief. “She’s wonderful,” Nagin said. “I visit her every time I come to Washington.”

LL asked Nagin if Norton had his ear on D.C. voting rights. “Absolutely,” he said. “I and the City of New Orleans will do whatever we can to advance the cause of D.C. voting rights.” He did not offer any specifics.

A brief perusal of Roget’s suggests a galaxy of promising adjectives for describing one’s reaction to a troubling Supreme Court decision.

For one, there is “troubled.” “Shocked,” “outraged,” and “concerned” come to mind. Further options include “chagrined,” “mortified,” “aggrieved,” “offended,” “incensed,” “riled up,” and “scared shitless.”

In their press releases, however, District politicos have been sticking to one word with alarming regularity:

Disappointed.

First, there is Ward 5 Councilmember Harry “Tommy” Thomas, Jr., who “expressed his extreme disappointment with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District gun ban, and indicated that the Council must now establish strict standards to regulate the sale of handguns in the District of Columbia.”

Then we have Fenty, Nickles, and Lanier, who weigh in as follows:

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles, and Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced their disappointment in today’s ruling of the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller…. “I’m disappointed in the Court’s ruling and believe introducing more handguns into the District will mean more handgun violence,” said Mayor Fenty.*

Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray includes the following in his statement:

Although I am disappointed by the court’s decision, working collectively with the Mayor, the Metropolitan Police, legal authorities, and residents, the Council will do all it can to prevent violence from escalating further as a result of today’s un-welcome weakening of our gun laws.

Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser:

I am disappointed in today’s Supreme Court action which ruled that the DC law banning private handgun possession at home violates the Second Amendment.

At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown:

My disappointment in the Supreme Courts ruling cannot be merely expressed by words. Every time I hear of another youth, another mother or child gunned down in our communities is yet another reminder of why we need these protective measures in place.

[Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton issued a statement in which the d-word was conspicuously absent, as did Adam Clampitt, Independent Candidate for DC Council At-Large.]

Come on, folks! Disappointed is when your team loses in spring training. Disappointed is when your kid doesn’t crack a B in algebra. Disappointed is when your dog relieves himself under the dining room table.

Whatever happened to “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

*The Post imputes “dismay” to Fenty. Over-editorialize much lately?

On Saturday afternoon, LL was watching the weather report with bated breath, as a line of thunderstorms threatened to put the kibosh on this year’s Capital Pride Parade, the centerpiece of the yearly gay-community celebration and the first chance for the players in this year’s campaign season to truly come out. (Yes, pun intended.)

Luckily, the show went on. The big news of the parade were the mystery signs:

All along the parade route, posted on lampposts were signs reading “Ask Carol Schwartz why she OPPOSES marriage equality” in Schwartz’ trademark yellow-and-white. The signs carried absolutely no indication of where they might have come from. Shady!

Gay activist Peter Rosenstein told LL he had seen folks on stepladders posting the signs earlier in the afternoon, but neither he nor anyone else LL consulted had any idea who they were. The challengers who marched in the parade—Adam Clampitt, Dee Hunter, and Patrick Mara—all denied having anything to do with the signs. (A Clampitt aide, in fact, phoned in a preemptive denial, before LL even showed up for the parade.)

Schwartz called it “the work of a cowardly liar” and furthermore implored LL not to “rain on my parade” (har har) by giving the cowards any ink—sorry, Carol! (For more on the does-Carol-support-gay-marriage theme, read Washington Blade articles by Rosenstein and by Schwartz.)

LL thought he might have solved the mystery when, right on the middle of the 17th Street NW commercial strip, a spectator holding one of the signs in one hand and a drink in the other marched right out to confront Schwartz, who was walking behind her yellow Pontiac Firebird. From a distance, LL seemed to see Schwartz saying to the interloper, “I do! I do!” in response to the sign’s query.

After Schwartz passed, LL asked the man, Andrew Campbell of Dupont Circle, whether he’d been involved in the signmaking. Nope, he said—”I pulled it off the lamppost.”

LL quizzed him further on the reasoning behind his anti-Schwartz stance. “I dunno,” he said. “Look at what the sign says!”

The crowd rest of the crowd seemed not to care much. Take this spectator reaction to the confrontation: “Tell him to fuck off, Carol!”

Many more pix after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve still got my gay pride beads on from today’s rain-soaked parade. But here’s a question for the rest of the folks who lined 17th and P streets today: is it just me, or has Capitol Pride gone a little corporate?

The parade started with the Chief of Police and the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, followed by Mayor Adrian Fenty, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and a smattering of Councilmembers. But then it seemed like one business after another.

Citibank, Verizon, Bloom Grocery Stores all participated in the parade. Southwest Airlines had one of the coolest and biggest floats all day (they even gave out inflatable airplane toys). You should have seen the woman on the Maid to Clean float gyrate.

The D.C. Cowboys were great, and PFLAG’s “I Love My Gay Son” signs always make me a little teary. And far be it from me to judge how a marginalized community celebrates itself. But it made me a little sad that the guys in leather were so far behind SunTrust Bank’s ATM puppet.

Eleanor Holmes Norton has represented the District of Columbia in the United States Congress since 1991. Former chair of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and professor at Georgetown University Law School, Ms. Norton is a third-generation Washingtonian and longtime voting-rights advocate.

When planning this portrait, I decided to shoot Congresswoman Norton’s profile - an angle which I thought communicated the understated dignity of her unique position as a legislator without a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. However, she quickly nixed this idea.

“No woman wants to be filmed from the side,” the Congresswoman said.

Today, Politico has a nice little story about Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s congressional delegate, and her changing campaign finance strategies. The upshot: Norton’s pulling in a lot more money from real-estate developers than she used to.

Ace Hill reporter John Bresnahan lays out the facts nicely: Where Norton used to raise most of her money from unions and lawyers, real-estate interests—in particular, Forest City Enterprises and its D.C. principal, Deborah Ratner Salzburg.

So what exactly does that say about Norton’s reputation?

Hard to say. It seems that Bresnahan ran into one of the realities of District politicking: Looks like no one outside of Dorothy Brizill was willing to speak ill of Eleanor. (And even then, I wouldn’t exactly call Brizill’s comments “ill.”)

Back in February, LL detailed a horribly complicated but tremendously juicy jurisdictional squabble over the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority. Long story short: The suburbs, which hold five of 11 seats on the WASA board, were pissed that District had asserted control over the agency’s finances and passed a law granting hiring preferences to District residents. To settle things, suburban congressional interests had nearly tacked a rider onto a federal appropriations bill late last year.

The meddling isn’t over.

Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen introduced a bill last week that inserts language into the Home Rule Act that explicitly takes WASA out from under the CFO’s oversight. It’s the sort of bigfooting that the District hates, and usually the District’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, finds a way to make these things go away.

Not this time, though: Norton isn’t going to be on the District’s side. Yesterday, in a congressional hearing, Norton revealed she had sent a pair of letters to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray urging them to ease their hard line on WASA governance, citing her efforts to balance jurisdictional interests when the agency was established back in the mid-1990s.

“I write now to alert you that congressional action is imminent if recent Council bills remain in effect,” Norton wrote on March 14. “In the interest of maintaining WASA as a D.C. agency, I urge you to take the necessary steps that have allowed the Council to have continuing oversight of WASA as a D.C. agency.”

Outside the hearing yesterday, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, also a member of the WASA board, said he still holds out hope that the dispute can be resolved without congressional intervention. “The [Van Hollen] approach is different than one we’d advocate,” he said. “We’d prefer that changes come through the D.C. Council rather than Congress.” Such changes to the Home Rule charter, he says, are not uncommon—the council, for instance, did so when authorizing the mayoral schools takeover.

Van Hollen told LL he doesn’t see that solving anything: “What we’re all looking for is clarity. The only way you can clarify federal law is through congressional action.”

As for overturning the District-resident job preferences, Tangherlini says, “That’s something we’re going to talk to the council about.” The draft fiscal 2009 Budget Support Act submitted to the council last month includes a provision to exempt WASA from any job preferences.

At the hearing yesterday, Van Hollen said, “We need to put the conflicts regarding governance behind us.” Republican committee members Tom Davis (Va.) and Kenny Marchant (Texas) submitted statements in support of Van Hollen’s bill; suburban reps—including Fairfax County Executive Tony Griffin; Timothy Firestine, Montgomery County’s chief administrative officer; and Jacqueline F. Brown, Prince George’s County’s chief administrative officer—also spoke in support of it.

For her part, Norton didn’t question the suburban board members about the governance dispute during the hearing. Afterward, she told LL that congressional intervention is permissible in this instance because WASA is not a “true home rule agency.” Rather, she said, it’s more akin to an interjurisdictional entity like the Metro board. “The only difference,” she said, “is that this was once a D.C. agency.”

And, Norton says, her stand on Van Hollen’s bill doesn’t reflect any attenuation of her usual fieriness. “If it’s a home rule issue,” she says, “I may go down, but I’ll go down fighting.”

Loose Lips attends the Obama Victory Party after polls closed on the Potomac Primary.

Every month (sometimes more often) the D.C. Council meets on a Tuesday for its legislative meeting, where the full body sits in the chamber all day and actually passes bills and things like that. There’s usually some fairly interesting stuff, but there’s usually even more not-so-interesting stuff. Of late, Chairman Vincent C. Gray’s started doing a press conference the day before to get reporters acquainted with the concil’s business. LL goes to these things so you don’t have to, and he will now be rounding them up in convenient bullet form:

• The tally this morning: Four reporters (myself, the Examiner’s Michael Neibauer and Jonetta Rose Barras, and the Post’s Nikita Stewart), eight of 13 councilmembers (Gray, Ward 1’s Jim Graham, Ward 3’s Mary Cheh, Ward 6’s Tommy Wells, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, and At-Large members David A. Catania, Carol Schwartz, and Phil Mendelson), and approximately three dozen staffers and randoms. In other words, about a 10-to-1 nonpress-to-press ratio.
• Gray announced that he’s hired a new communications director to replace Denise Reed, a longtime Wilson Building fixture who left Gray’s office in December for a job with the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Her replacement is familiar face: Doxie McCoy, who’s served as the press aide to congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton since October 2001. She starts next week.
• Graham announced emergency legislation to force the mayor to issue rules implementing mandatory inclusionary zoning. (Here’s the whole complicated background on “IZ”—long story short, the rulemaking’s been delayed to give the development community a chance to weigh in.) Graham had introduced a nonemergency bill last month that would have given the mayor 30 days after enactment to issue the regs. This bill gives him until April 1.
• While we’re talking emergency legislation, there’s 10 emergency bills on the agenda coming out of the mayor’s office, all of which are contract approvals (the Council has to approve any contract greater than $1 million). Barras questioned Gray on why this stuff’s being done by emergency legislation. Blame, naturally, went to the mayor’s office and a blown contracting and procurement system. Good question, Jonetta!
• Mendelson announced a pair of bills coming out of his committee. One will require the sale of “fire-safe” cigarettes in the District by July 1. (Fire-safe cigs use a different type of paper that cause them to extinguish themselves if not actively puffed.) The other is the Motor Vehicle Theft Prevention Act of 2007, which creates a fund dedicated to fighting, yes, auto theft, funded mainly by a $5 hike in the yearly car registration fee. The money’s overseen by a mayoral-appointed board and can be spent on more cops, bait cars, public-awareness campaigns, and things like that.
• Schwartz got up to talk about her “Paid Sick and Safe Days Act of 2007,” which is now the “Accrued Sick and Safe Days Act of 2007.” The new name reflects the fact that the bill stands to be heavily amended, mostly to make it more palatable to folks who do the hiring. “We have really worked hard to win a buy-in from the business community,” Schwartz said. Despite the changes, the votes haven’t been counted yet (members of the Service Employees union rallied at the Wilson Building this afternoon, citing “wavering as Tuesday’s vote nears” in a press release) and there’s rumors of mayoral veto being bandied about.
• Gray gave some early, rough numbers on the budget surplus from FY07: Total surplus is about $248 million. About $50 million of that has been earmarked for spending, and another approximately $100 million was allocated in a December supplemental appropriations bill. Of the remainder, Gray indicated he’d hoped to put that money away for a rainy day, and given the economic outlook right now, looks like things could get rainy indeed. Revenue projections won’t be in from the CFO’s office for another few weeks—but LL did get this fun tidbit from Gray: “Dr. [Natwar M.] Gandhi has informed us it will not be like we’ve seen in the recent past.”
• The Fenty steamroll on school closings is all but complete. Last month, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry and Ward 5’s Harry Thomas Jr. introduced their “School Closing Fairness and Accountability Emergency Act of 2008,” which would have given the Council a chance to vote on the proposed school shutterings. On Friday, both Barry and Thomas stood behind Fenty as he announced the final closings list (as Marc Fisher pointed out in his column over the weekend). And today, Gray quiety announced that Barry and Thomas had withdrawn their bill.

I’ve seen a fair amount of performances in the Kennedy Center’s grand concert hall. Andre Watts banging out a Beethoven piano concerto, the Chieftains, and if memory serves, the NSO playing some strange composition by Witold Lutoslawski.

None of them lit the hall up quite like last evening’s celebration of MLK Jr. Day. There was Denyce Graves, a young violin duo called “Nuttin’ But Stringz,” and the “Let Freedom Ring Choir,” not to mention a decent orchestra.

The concert was free, though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a price to be paid. The sponsors of the show–who won’t be named here because they promoted themselves just fine at the show itself–orchestrated an award for great work in the civil rights arena. It went to D.C. congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. Just as Norton was getting into a discussion of how an award in the tradition name of MLK places an even greater responsibility on her going forward, my 4-year-old started squirming and saying he had to go to the bathroom. Point being, don’t mix ceremonies with tunes.

We got back just in time for some fine music-making. Denyce Graves sang a lot and well. The choir, too, was amazing, singing “We Shall Overcome” and some great gospel stuff. This from a choir that had at least one pretty green voice on the risers.

How do I know that? Because my wife was among the robed, by way of full disclosure. In the best spirit of MLK, the “Let Freedom Ring Choir” was open to just about anyone who could make it to a few rehearsals, and my wife leapt at the opportunity. She later said it was the “coolest” thing she’d ever done. That may raise a few questions about all the things she’s ever done, but hey.

Maybe it was the free tea bags. Maybe it was the chance to wear funny colonial hats. Or maybe, people are actually amped up again to fight for DC voting rights, after September’s disheartening Senate vote. Whatever the reason, 80 people showed up to DC Vote’s Boston Tea Party reenactment yesterday, according to an article in the Washington Post. The organization says the turnout was closer to 140 people, and they have the video to prove it. Either way, it was cold out there! And probably pretty damn windy, since the event took place by the Georgetown waterfront. DC Vote has its eye on several senators, in particular Max Baucus of Montana and Gordon Smith of Oregon, both of whom, says Communications Director Kevin Kiger, changed their vote last minute. DC Vote staffers are planning on heading out to Montana during the third week of January to meet with residents to make their pitch for DC voting rights. There’s also a scheduled trip to Oregon in February. Besides that, the organization is starting to launch letter writing campaigns in various states, including New Hampshire and Montana.