Washington, D.C., city council members rebuked House Republicans who are moving to commandeer control over lawmaking in the capital.
Last week, House Republicans unveiled a package of measures that would strip the council of much of its governing ability. GOP lawmakers, who’ve uniformly supported Trump’s authoritarian, military takeover of the district, are scheduled to mark up the bills on Wednesday. The Hill explained what many of the proposals would mean in practice:
GOP lawmakers are proposing that D.C. Council legislation undergo a 60-day congressional review period prior to its passage, while preventing council members from passing bills that are similar to measures disapproved by Congress. […] A separate measure would repeal the Incarceration Reduction Act, which allows residents convicted of certain serious crimes committed before their 18th birthday to petition the court for a sentence reduction after serving at least 15 years in addition to other expungement opportunities.
These proposals would deprive the D.C. council — and more importantly, the people who elected them to serve — of their fundamental democratic function, dispensing with one of the few outlets for representative government available to residents of the capital.
In a letter to Republican House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and Democratic ranking member Rep. Robert Garcia, all 13 members of the D.C. council rebuked the proposals:
‘The council of the District of Columbia is aware that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is planning to mark up more than a dozen proposed measures that would severely and negatively impact the operations, public safety, and autonomy of the District of Columbia,’ they wrote. The council said the only reported measure they’d support is one they haven’t seen but believe would allow the council to transmit its legislation to Congress electronically. But the council says 13 other GOP-proposed measures that have been shared with them are completely unworkable, claiming they would ‘put our legal and Court system into chaos and directly undermine tools that focus on serious accountability and effective rehabilitation when a crime occurs.’
The letter requests an opportunity to discuss the proposals before they’re marked up, “especially in light that the committee will not hold public hearings on these measures,” and ends by urging members to reject the measures, “whether in committee mark up or before the full House.”
Conservatives in the House have long tried (and in some cases, succeeded) to roll back criminal justice reforms passed by elected members of the D.C. council after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. This latest gambit aligns with such anti-democratic efforts and fits a pattern we’ve seen in recent years of white lawmakers stripping power from officials in largely Black cities.
In Washington, congressional Republicans see an opportunity for a further power grab as aspiring monarch Donald Trump wages his authoritarian-style takeover of the district.
