• Delegate to the House of Representatives from Washington, D.C.
• Member of the radical Progressive Caucus
• Used high-handed parliamentary gimmick to give herself unconstitutional voting power in Congress during the Clinton Administration
• Outspoken opponent of school vouchers favored by large majority of black parents in Washington, D.C.
• Biggest political contributors include teachers' unions and other government employee unions
• Evaded paying D.C. income taxes for eight years just prior to her election 

Eleanor Holmes Norton is the Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from the District of Columbia, Washington D.C. This district is approximately 60 percent African-American and 27 percent Caucasian in its ethnic makeup. In the 2000 election Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush won only 9 percent of votes cast here, while Green candidate Ralph Nader won 5 percent and Democratic candidate Al Gore won 85 percent. Conservative columnist Robert Novak has said that he registers as a Democrat in D.C. because in this one-party district Republican votes influence nothing. In 2004 Norton won reelection with 92 percent of votes cast.

Norton was born in June 1937 in the District of Columbia, where her family has lived for four generations. Her parents were both government employees, father Coleman a civil servant with the D.C. housing department and mother Vela a schoolteacher.  D.C. was a border Southern city where, in 1949 at age 12, Norton watched African-American activists picketing a department store where blacks were permitted to shop but not to use the store's segregated restrooms.

In 1955 Norton began attending Antioch College in southwest Ohio. This progressive college's founding president was statist educator Horace Mann, and its slogan is his saying: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." Other Antioch alumni include Coretta Scott King and the late radical paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who kept a photograph of Vladimir Lenin above his desk at Yale University. Reflective of its political environment, in 2000 Antioch College had left radical Mumia Abu-Jamal as its commencement speaker, via tape from the prison cell where he is serving a life sentence for murdering a policeman.

"Antioch pushed me, allowed me to push toward my more radical self," Norton is quoted as saying in her authorized biography Fire in my Soul: Eleanor Holmes Norton (2003, Simon & Schuster/Atria Books, written by fellow Antioch alumnus Joan Steinau, forward by Coretta Scott King), "the part that was already very skeptical about middle-class values." Norton headed Antioch's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), became a local activist working to desegregate theaters and other public accommodations, and graduated in 1960.

In 1960 Norton entered Yale University, where in 1963 she earned an M.A. in American Studies and in 1964 an LL.B.

In summer 1963, Norton went to Mississippi as an organizer for the radical Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  She also was one of the organizers of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington. In October 2004, looking back at her life, Norton told one interviewer: "I was radicalized by the Civil Rights Movement."

In 1964 Norton moved to Philadelphia to work as law clerk for a Federal District Court judge (1964-65) and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar as a lawyer in 1965 and to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. In 1965 she met and married Edward Norton. 

In 1965 Eleanor Holmes Norton became assistant legal director of the New York office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), working there until 1970. As an ACLU attorney she represented anti-Vietnam War protestors and Ku Klux Klan members, and she won promotions for 60 female Newsweek employees who accused this liberal magazine owned by the Washington Post Company of discrimination against women.

In 1968 Norton won the first case she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, defending the right of the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group, to hold a public rally in Maryland. She also went to court on behalf of Alabama's longtime segregationist Governor George Wallace, who as a 1968 third party presidential candidate had been barred by New York City's Republican Mayor John Lindsay from speaking at Shea Stadium.  

In 1970 Mayor Lindsay named Norton chair of New York City's Commission on Human Rights, a position she held until 1977. Norton also served as the Mayor's executive assistant (1971-74).

Republican President Gerald Ford appointed Norton to a panel examining America's welfare system. Among the ideas this panel endorsed was a "limit on the length of time that those who can work are entitled to welfare benefits."

In 1977 newly-elected Democratic President Jimmy Carter appointed Norton chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a position she held until 1981 when voters removed Mr. Carter after one term as president.

In 1981 Norton began a year as a fellow at the Urban Institute. In 1982 Norton was hired as a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a title she has held ever since.

In 1988 Norton was selected by the Rev. Jesse Jackson as his representative in shaping the platform at the Democratic National Convention. Ebony Magazine described her as a "national Democratic Party power broker."

In 1990 the District of Columbia's non-voting Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, Walter Fauntroy, resigned to run (unsuccessfully) for city mayor. Norton ran and narrowly won the Democratic primary race to replace him, then won this Delegate seat in November by 62 percent. 

During her 1990 campaign it came to light that Norton and her husband had paid no D.C. income taxes between 1982 and 1989. Norton blamed this tax evasion on her husband, although she is a Yale-educated lawyer required to sign joint tax returns; after her election, she divorced him and took custody of their son and their daughter, who has Down's Syndrome.

The District of Columbia was created by agreement between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson to be a politically-neutral seat of the Federal Government situated midway between the northern and southern states.  This Federal District, as the seat of government, was designed to have no seats of its own in Congress, and to be run by the Congress itself. 

Because the District of Columbia votes heavily Democratic, leaders of the Democratic Party have long proposed granting statehood to D.C., which would add one Democratic Member of Congress and two Democratic Senators to the national legislature. Without statehood, as Norton has argued since becoming D.C.'s non-voting Delegate and proposed in a 2001 bill, the people of the District of Columbia have no representation and therefore should pay no taxes. 

(Scholars have concluded that a better way to give the 600,000 residents of D.C. representation would be the "retrocession" of this district back to Maryland, whence its 69 square miles of land came originally, an idea spurned by Democratic leaders because this would give them no additional U.S. Senators.)

Since becoming D.C.'s Delegate, Norton has proposed legislation to turn her district into "the State of Columbia" (named for the politically-incorrect dead white European male Christopher Columbus). If such statehood were granted, creating the smallest state in the Union in size, the third smallest (after Vermont and Wyoming) in population and one of the tiniest city states on Earth, Norton would have an inside track to become one of its first two U.S. Senators.

In 1993, during a brief window when Democrats controlled the White House via President Bill Clinton and both the House of Representatives and Senate, Norton spearheaded a measure that gave herself and the four Delegates from U.S. territories (all Democrats) voting power on most legislation in the House. She sophistically parlayed her measure giving Delegates votes "in Committees" into voting power for herself in "the Committee of the Whole," a parliamentary mode in which the entire House of Representatives can pass legislation. This high-handed and almost-certainly-unconstitutional power grab by Democrats was repealed in 1995 after Republicans won control of both houses of Congress.

As a non-voting Delegate, Norton is a member of the radical Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues. Norton sits on the Government Reform Committee and the Select Committee on Homeland Security. She is the ranking member on the Economic Development, Public Buildings & Emergency Management Subcommittee of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee.

Because Norton does not vote on legislation, she has no voting record to evaluate as being either liberal or conservative. Nicknamed the "Warrior on the Hill," Norton is a self-identified left-liberal, but her often-strident and contentious leftwing ideological posturing does not always square with her partisan and pragmatic political compromises and deals.

In 2000, for example, the Al Gore-Joseph Lieberman Democratic presidential campaign recruited Norton to defuse liberal African-American anger at Connecticut Senator Lieberman, who in 1998 had supported a California ballot proposition that banned state-funded affirmative action programs. "I have my difficulties with Lieberman," Norton told the Washington Post, "but if we go off on a single issue, we lose the whole ballgame."

In 1997 Norton was a key player in removing budgetary powers from the District of Columbia's controversial Mayor Marion Barry. But Norton, an activist feminist supported by EMILY's List, avoided criticizing efforts by Barry's successor Mayor Anthony Williams' 2002 efforts to stage a revenue-generating boxing match in D.C. starring Mike Tyson, a match opposed by the National Organization for Women (NOW).

In 2004 Norton endorsed comedian-actor Bill Cosby's criticisms of irresponsibility and foul language evident in a small portion of the African-American community. Cosby, said Norton, "has been one of the great fighters for civil rights, and he is simply saying what African Americans - leaders, congressmen, parents and grandparents at home - say to each other all the time."

Norton, however, advocates most of the agenda of the "progressive" left wing of the Democratic Party, voicing support for proposals such as the "American People's Dividend" to give $300 to every person. She advocates stronger gun control and a moratorium on the death penalty.

Every year since 1994 Norton has introduced the Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act (NDECA), which would require nuclear disarmament by the United States and the diversion of tax money spent on such weapons not to tax and budget reductions but to social spending. "The time has come," said Norton in 2005, "to begin the transfer of nuclear weapons funds to urgent domestic needs."

Contrary to the wishes of a large majority of African-American parents in the District of Columbia, Eleanor Holmes Norton has been an outspoken opponent of school vouchers, a program supported by Mayor Williams, that would let working parents move their children out of the dreadful public schools of Washington, D.C.  Two of Norton's biggest campaign contributors are public school teacher unions opposed to such vouchers, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).

In the 2004 election cycle, nearly 63 percent of Norton's Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions came from organized labor. Her biggest single contributor was the American Postal Workers Union, and her second biggest benefactor was the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), which has a long history of corruption. Norton also receives sizeable contributions from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).  Others of her biggest donors are the gay-oriented Human Rights Campaign and the lending institution Fannie Mae.

Although "Gucci Gulch," the home of big money lobbyists, is inside the District of Columbia, more than one-third of Norton's campaign contributions in recent years have come from outside D.C.

Norton is a member of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation.