D.C. was close. So close that Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) appeared on "The Colbert Report" in February to boast that she would be voting on the House floor in a month and offered to give Stephen Colbert the key to the city when she finally did.

But, once again, Washington's hopes of greater representation in Congress fell flat.

It's been a month since Democratic lawmakers shelved the D.C. Voting Rights Act -- which would make Norton a full voting member of the House -- after a poison pill amendment was inserted that would have overturned most of the District's gun control laws. Since then, true believers on both sides of the issue have dug in their heels, making it harder to imagine a path forward for the legislation.

D.C. voting rights advocates have put on a brave face since the gun amendment, inserted by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., made the bill too tough for Democrats and District officials to swallow. Despite the setback, there's still a sense that, given firm Democratic control of Congress and the White House, there won't be a better time for action than this legislative cycle.

"We feel like we're in a very strong position," said Ilir Zherka, executive director of D.C. Vote. "We had a bill move through the Senate, and we're only six months through a two-year congressional cycle."

But former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who co-sponsored the D.C. Voting Rights Act in the last Congress, isn't sure advocates have that long. The bill gained bipartisan support by promising Utah an additional representative, which the state narrowly missed out on after the 2000 census. But Utah looks likely to pick up that extra seat after the 2010 census anyway.

"You have a window of opportunity, and that window is about to close," Davis said. "That Utah thing kept it bipartisan, and without that it's not going to pass."

D.C. officials have already made clear that they don't want the bill made law with the gun amendment intact. So the question becomes who will guide the D.C. Voting Rights Act down from its holding pattern and in for a landing.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who took the lead on the issue because of his congressional district's proximity to D.C., would like to take another crack at the bill this year. But with a health care fight looming, it's not near the top of his legislative to-do list.

Ditto for President Obama, who has professed to support congressional representation for the District but has been largely silent on this bill. His inaction hasn't gone unnoticed. Press secretary Robert Gibbs got testy recently when asked at a press conference why the Ben's-Chili-Bowl-eating, Wizards-game-attending president hadn't put the city's "Taxation Without Representation" license plates on his limousine.

"Well, I guess I would ask you to ask people in Washington whether they'd like to have that status changed or that symbolism screwed on to the back of a limousine," Gibbs shot back.

Even as it languishes in legislative limbo, the bill is energizing partisans on both sides who oppose a compromise. Before the recent impasse, voting advocates and congressional Republicans backed the bill, but for different reasons: For some supporters of enfranchisement, the bill represented a stepping stone to eventual statehood. GOP lawmakers, on the other hand, reasoned that giving the District a vote in the House would, in addition to giving Utah another legislator, effectively end the D.C. statehood debate -- important because a 51st state would most likely mean two more Democratic senators.

"If Congress passes this legislation, they will consider this matter effectively closed," said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School and a regular fixture at voting rights hearings on the Hill. "There is little chance that Congress is going to create this unique status and then return to this issue for another approach. And once this thing is passed, it's going to be in the federal courts for years, and there's no way Congress is going to touch this while it's in the federal courts."

Turley supports some form of representation for the District, though not necessarily statehood; he argued that the notion of the current bill as a pathway to statehood is "unbelievably naïve."

There are also those in the D.C. voting rights community who see Norton -- the face of the city's disenfranchisement since she was first elected in 1990 -- as part of the problem. David Schwartzman, a Howard University biology professor and a D.C. Statehood Green Party candidate for city council last year, argued that Norton is more interested in casting a vote on the floor of the House than broader issues of District self-governance and representation.

"Eleanor Holmes Norton has played a role that has impeded our struggle for full self-determination," he said.

Turley is more sympathetic, but agreed that two decades spent as a non-voting delegate may have increased her appetite for compromise.

"She's had a frustrating career trying to get a vote in Congress," he said. "One can understand why she jumped at a legislative fix. In constitutional law, the shortest path is often the most difficult."

Norton's office did not comment by press time.

The continuing disarray has even emboldened some GOP lawmakers to put forth their own measures which would have the effect of stymieing D.C. statehood. A January proposal from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., would have let D.C. residents vote in Maryland elections for House and Senate candidates but remain its own separate political entity. (There's precedent for some form of retrocession: Present-day Arlington was part of D.C. until 1846, when it rejoined Virginia.)

With the D.C. Voting Rights Act floundering, Rohrabacher Chief of Staff Rick Dykema said his boss is interested in renewing his push for a hybrid Maryland-D.C. voting system.

"They complain all day about their lack of representation, but at the end of the day it's all their fault, because they keep opposing these proposals," he said.

So with the legislation shelved, little agreement about how to proceed and the 2010 census threatening to cut the bipartisan legs out from under the bill, when will the nation's capital have its day? D.C. Councilman Michael Brown, who chairs the Special Committee on Statehood and Self-Determination, isn't sure. But he does know there's a lesson tucked away in the gridlock.

"I can't say by 2020 we'll be a state," Brown said with a laugh. "That's part of the problem -- when you're looking for self-determination, you can't control it."

CORRECTION: The original version of this report misspelled Ilir Zherka's name.