White House officials say this won't come up during the NAACP speech, but it would bring the house down. In May, the House Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), voted a surprisingly strong 29 to 4 in favor of his plan to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Representatives. The bill is cleverly designed: Utah, which supported Bush's reelection more strongly than any other state (72 percent), would get a fourth member of Congress, making the likely partisan impact a wash. It's not statehood, which the President has adamantly opposed, but instead is styled by supporters as "voting rights" for a city that is 60 percent black and went 89 percent for John Kerry and 85 percent for Al Gore. D.C. now has an elected but non-voting representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat.

Here's the most surprising paragraph in this dispatch: A Republican official familiar with White House views on the matter said Bush's aides have indicated they have "an open mind" about the Davis bill and "understand that it makes sense to do it, politically -- it's something tangible and doable that would be popular with the African American community." A second knowledgeable official said the White House "understands the political upside" and might support it if went to the President's desk but that the White House "isn't going to be a mover on this bill, ever," in part because aides do not want it to look like Bush has changed from past statements about representation for D.C.
The bill now needs to go through the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner III, who promised Davis in a March 24 letter that his committee would mark up the bill, a key step toward a vote, "within a reasonable time" after it passed the government Reform Committee. The bill, the District of Columbia Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act, would treat D.C. like a House district and would also permanently increase the size of the House by two, to 437. Utah is the state next in line for an additional representative, based on the 2000 census. The changes would not affect the Senate.

Bush has said he wants to be a good neighbor in the District. In 2004 at the National Urban League convention, where he has appeared in lieu of the NAACP, he saluted D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams as "my Mayor" and "a good man" who is a very good mayor. "I work with Tony," the President said, noting he had signed a bill creating taxpayer-sponsored scholarships for D.C. students. Williams has returned the love, saluting the First Lady at Christmas event in 2001 for showing "her friendship for our nation's capital in so many different ways."

White House officials say they haven't taken a position on the D.C. bill yet, since it's still working its way through the legislative stages. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow declined to preview the NAACP speech, saying at his televised briefing on Tuesday, "You'll have to wait and see. I'll let the President give his speech."

Snow had been asked about the D.C. bill during his first formal briefing, on May 16, and did not rule out support for it. "Why don't we wait and see what happens first?" he said. "If Representative Davis has success, we will be able to formulate a position."