Americans from all walks of life are gathering in Washington today to remind members of Congress that although DC residents pay federal taxes and serve honorably in our armed services, they do not have a vote in Congress or full autonomy over local issues.  And so I urge Congress to finally pass legislation that provides DC residents with voting representation and to take steps to improve the Home Rule Charter.

The bill — which also gives Utah another House member — passed the Senate last year, but not before Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) successfully attached an amendment scrapping most of D.C.’s strict gun laws. Realizing that moderate Democrats in the House would support that provision, liberal House leaders have refused to bring the bill to the floor, leaving it idle for the last 14 months.

Earlier this week, there was a breakthrough: Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), a fierce opponent of the Ensign amendment, reluctantly agreed to accept some version of it for the sake of giving the District more voice in Congress.

“It is now clear that the gun amendment can be passed as a stand-alone bill or attached to another piece of legislation, and we see no better opportunity in sight for voting rights for our residents,” she said.

The New York Times disagrees. In an editorial today, the paper argues that the elimination of the gun restrictions is too high a price to pay for the underlying bill.

“The legislation would intrude on home-rule prerogatives by repealing the district’s restrictions on semiautomatic weapons, rolling back requirements for registering most guns and even dropping existing criminal penalties for owners of unregistered firearms,” the Times says.”It is a cynical, sickening compromise.”

Today, Davis spokesman Brian McNicoll took exception with the implication that Davis used his years in the Capitol to land the plum position. McNicoll said Davis, a former counsel to a Virginia-based technology firm, “went out of his way” to find a position in which he wouldn’t be lobbying his former Hill colleagues directly. A statement from his new employer, Deloitte Consulting, indicates that Davis will offer “strategic guidance to help us better serve the federal government.”

Readers can decide if the “revolving door” label applies.

“This is not a revolving door for me,” Davis said. “I am basically doing what I did before I went into government.”

Deloitte, for its part, is being more forthright. In a statement issued Monday, the global consulting firm cites, as one of Davis’s strengths, his role as “an expert in federal procurement policy.”

Davis, who will serve as director of Deloitte’s federal government services division, starts his new job next week.

Committee chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) had previously considered holding Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey in contempt of Congress for not turning over Cheney’s interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The retiring Tom Davis, (R-Va.), the top Republican on the committee and who has a track record of skepticism toward the Plame leak probe, signed this statement:

The central document in this dispute is the report of the FBI interview with the vice president.  Both the chairman and the ranking Member are in agreement that the president’s assertion of executive privilege over this document was legally unprecedented and an inappropriate use of executive privilege.

The attorney general argues that the committee should not have access to the report of the interview because of the sensitive nature of the matters discussed. In this case, however, the committee is not seeking to examine sensitive questions of foreign policy or national security.  Rather, the committee is seeking information on the role, if any, played by the vice president and others in the White House in the leak of the identity of a covert CIA officer and what steps, if any, the vice president and others took to investigate and respond to the leak after it occurred.  There is no reason to believe that the special counsel’s interview with the vice president went beyond these questions and into areas relating to presidential decision-making about foreign policy or national security.

Davis, however, has not signed onto a document that said the president abused his claim of executive privilege in getting Stephen Johnson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,  to produce documents related to greenhouse gas regulations and ozone standards.

The committee will meet next week to vote on the report released today. What effect it will have this late in the Bush administration is not clear.

What is interesting, though, is that Davis, at the end of his congressional career, is expressing disdain for an administration he has largely defended.

He was also critical of the president in a recent New York Times magazine profile.

Such criticisms were largely absent during the bulk of Davis’s time chairing the oversight committee and also as its ranking member.