Colleagues and friends say the District of Columbia’s 87-year-old nonvoting delegate, a civil-rights leader and veteran of fights over home rule, is struggling to do her job.
When Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democrat and nonvoting delegate for Washington, D.C., attended a recent gala to accept an award honoring her decades-long career in Congress, she appeared to be struggling to read her brief remarks.
Standing onstage at Arena Stage in April, Ms. Norton referred to the “National Environment for the Arts,” lauded the D.C. theater for contributions to “freedom of suppression and democracy” and half-said, half-spelled the name of a former board chair, Beth Newburger Schwartz, as “Ethel N – E – W Burger Schwartz.”
A pall fell over the audience as Ms. Norton stumbled through her speech, according to an attendee. The scene, which was reported earlier by Washingtonian magazine, was all the more jarring because it followed a video montage celebrating Ms. Norton’s many achievements through three decades in public office, the attendee said.
It served as a vivid reminder of what colleagues and friends said has been a notable decline for Ms. Norton — the civil-rights leader and law professor-turned congresswoman known as D.C.’s “warrior on the Hill” — that has quieted her voice, leaving her vastly diminished and struggling to fulfill her duties as a member of Congress. More than half a dozen of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly disparaging her, though some for years have privately pressed Ms. Norton to reckon with her diminution and decide against seeking re-election.
That message doesn’t appear to have sunk in.
“I’m going to run,” she told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday, after being questioned about a recent Washington Post report in which D.C. council members raised questions about her ability to do the job and said it was time for her to retire. “I don’t know why anybody would even ask me.”
The reasons are obvious to those who have watched her closely on Capitol Hill. Ms. Norton, who will turn 88 this week, is the oldest member of the House and has become frail.