All eyes were on Sen. Hillary Clinton as she made Tuesday night’s headlining speech. “No way. No how. No McCain. Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our president,” she said.

But for those of us in D.C., there was another speech to have our eyes on. One from our non-voting representative in Congress, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. As she did in a speech four years ago at the DNC, she once again made the case for the D.C. Voting Rights Act, which allows tax-paying District residents to have the same representation in Congress the 50 states enjoy.

The nation’s founders staked everything on creating a country where there would be “no taxation without representation” anywhere in America. In that tradition, Democrats proudly support the vote in Congress for the 600,000 citizens of our nation’s capital. The District of Columbia is not yet the 51st state, but no one can doubt that the revolutionaries who invented America’s most quoted national slogan 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.

→ See also: full text of Del. Norton’s 2008 speech.

To further drive the point, D.C. Vote will hold a rally at the U.S. Mint — sans permit — in Denver on this morning at 10:30 MT. The group plans to distribute bumper stickers and wooden coins to draw awareness to the cause. Their announcement stated, “American democracy isn’t worth a wooden nickel without a vote in Congress!”