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Congress came together in a rare show of bipartisanship this week. What brought the opposing sides together? Well, it wasn’t figuring out the debt ceiling or the war in Ukraine, it was voting down Washington, DC’s proposed new criminal code.
The new code had been in the works for over a decade and would have been the first overhaul of the District’s criminal statutes since 1901. Many of the changes were uncontroversial, but federal lawmakers couldn’t get behind the update’s lower maximum penalties for some violent crimes.
Advocates said those changes simply would have brought the code into alignment with the penalties judges actually dispense. But that argument wasn’t persuasive to Republicans — and many Democrats — in Congress, where the proposal was excoriated as being “soft on crime.” DC’s mayor and police chief had also objected to aspects of the update for similar reasons.
Republicans in Congress rag on big-city mayors all the time, but they don’t have the ability to step in and change local laws — except in DC. Though the capital city has had “home rule” since the 1970s, by law, every bill passed by DC’s city council goes to Congress for a review.
Then the president has the final say; they can block Congress from disapproving of District legislation. In the past, President Joe Biden has been a vocal supporter of DC autonomy. But not this time.
“I support DC Statehood and home-rule — but I don’t support some of the changes DC Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” the President tweeted.
The saga has been a brutal setback for advocates of increased DC autonomy, said Martin Austermuhle, a reporter at WAMU in the District who has for years covered the proposed criminal code update.
“There’s usually a lot of noise from Republicans on the Hill where they dislike things that DC is doing, which is often because this is a Democratic city,” Austermuhle told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. ”But for it to get this far and for Democrats and Republicans to be united on this issue against the District is virtually unheard of.”
Below is an excerpt of the conversation between Austermuhle and Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity.
Sean Rameswaram
Can you just remind people how DC’s government works in concert with the federal government?
Martin Austermuhle
Yeah, it’s one of those very confusing things in the sense that nowhere else in the country is like DC. First of all, DC is not a state. And DC only got its own mayor and elected city council back in the mid-1970s. It’s pretty limited home rule. It’s not like, here, govern yourselves and we’ll just step out of the way sort of thing. It’s: Everything that DC does can be checked by Congress.
Essentially, Congress is the ultimate check and balance on the District’s local affairs. So any bill that clears the DC Council goes to Congress, Congress gets a chance to weigh in. Congress has the power to basically tell the district it can’t do certain things by putting provisions in the federal budget that say DC cannot spend money on needle exchange programs. It can’t spend money to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana. It can’t spend money subsidizing abortion for low-income women. And those are all things that Congress has done to DC and is currently doing to DC.
It’s a very kind of fraught relationship because DC did get the chance to govern itself — with adult supervision.
Sean Rameswaram
I think the marijuana example you quickly alluded to there is one of maybe the most illustrative of all of them because I think a lot of people across this country now had the experience of having marijuana legalized for either recreational or medicinal use at the state level, while it’s illegal at the federal level. But in DC, it’s a much murkier situation. Could you explain it to people who aren’t familiar?
Martin Austermuhle
Back in 2014, DC voters approved a ballot initiative that legalized the possession, home cultivation, personal use, and gifting of small amounts of marijuana. So everything but sales.
Sean Rameswaram
Which is to say that if you go into a marijuana dispensary in DC, you don’t buy marijuana. You give them like $20 for a painting or a bracelet and they give you some marijuana along with said painting or bracelet as a gift.
Martin Austermuhle
Yeah, it’s a very confusing, convoluted, and completely congressionally made reality because after DC voters approved this ballot initiative, Congress came back, congressional Republicans came back and said, well, listen, that’s great and good, but you’re not doing anything when it comes to recreational sales. So they put what’s called the budget rider, essentially a prohibition on the city saying you can’t legalize recreational sales. That was in 2015 and it still exists today.
So we have this market where literally dozens of stores across the city, you can pay 50, 60 bucks for a sticker or a cookie and you get your “gift of marijuana.” But like, let’s be honest, we all kind of understand what’s happening: You’re buying marijuana.
Sean Rameswaram
And, of course, there is a very active movement in the District of Columbia to change this status quo.
Martin Austermuhle
It ebbs and flows. There’s times where people say, listen, the ultimate fight is statehood, and that’s what we have to go for. And then there’s moments where they say statehood is never going to happen. Let’s go for something else. Let’s try for, let’s say, like a full voting representative in the House of Representatives because right now it’s just a non-voting delegate. Nothing has moved particularly far.
It was only about eight years ago that the fight for statehood became kind of the main goal, the driving goal for city officials. And it actually got relatively far. I mean, the House of Representatives, when it was controlled by Democrats, voted twice on a bill that would have made DC the 51st state. Now, the Senate has never done the same because of the filibuster, basically. And so the city has been stuck without statehood still.
But it has made progress in making the issue more of a national issue and tying it to voting rights and saying, listen, if you believe in expanding voting access, expanding voting rights, you should also believe in statehood.
Sean Rameswaram
And when Biden came out last week and said he wasn’t going to support this crime bill, he wasn’t going to use his veto, his statement was — and I’m reading here — “I support DC statehood and home rule, but I don’t support some of the changes DC City Council put forward over the mayor’s objections, such as lowering penalties for carjacking,” which a bookstore in DC retweeted, saying, “Look, folks, I fully support the Rebel Alliance, but construction of the Death Star must proceed on schedule.” How complicated is Biden’s support of DC statehood made by his actions in the past week?
Martin Austermuhle
It’s got a lot of people confused because obviously they appreciate that President Biden supports statehood, has said he supports statehood. And last year, he tied the issue of statehood to his broader fight for voting rights, for access to the ballot and that sort of stuff. But now he’s effectively trying to please no one, apparently, by saying I support statehood and I support the district’s right to govern itself, except in this one case where I really don’t support the district’s right to govern itself. And this is why I’m not going to step into this fight that Congress is having with DC. So, yeah, at best it’s confusing. At worst, it’s gotten a lot of people pretty pissed.
Sean Rameswaram
What are the biggest barriers to DC achieving its sort of perpetual goal of being a state?
Martin Austermuhle
I mean, depends who you ask. There’s folks that just say, “It’s a city full of Democrats, which means it’s going to gain two senators that are going to be Democrats, which means it’s going to benefit Democrats in the Senate.” So there’s a very partisan angle to it. There’s also folks who could raise lesser concerns, stuff like DC is just geographically not big enough. And yes, it would be the smallest state by geography, though it would have more people than Vermont or Wyoming. Some Republican senators have raised concerns, including that there’s not enough miners and loggers in DC.
Martin Austermuhle
You know, there are some constitutional concerns where they say the founders wanted a place for the federal government that was insulated from the states, where Marylanders and Virginians couldn’t storm the Capitol. Ironically, you know, when January 6 happened, it was DC police officers that helped clear the Capitol. That’s notwithstanding this idea that DC has to exist in this kind of neutral territory, and so thus DC could never be a state because then it’s no longer neutral, and then the federal government is at the risk of being at the whims of just the District.
Sean Rameswaram
But meanwhile, you’ve got Biden saying he supports statehood. I think Trump at CPAC this year said the federal government should take over management of DC, and you got 700,000 people caught in the middle without much of a right to self-govern.
Martin Austermuhle
I don’t know that anybody could have foreseen this exact series of events happening the way it did. There was always an assumption that, okay, fine, this criminal code bill will go to the Hill. Republicans will vote to disapprove it. But we’ve got the Senate that’s run by Democrats and then that fell. Well, fine. We’ve got Biden. He’s the ultimate backstop. There’s no way that President Biden, a supporter of statehood, wouldn’t veto this. And then President Biden says, no, I’m not going to veto this.
There is some collective anger about the situation the District has always found itself in and continues to find itself in. But there’s also some finger-pointing internally of, was this a strategic mistake by us? Was this just the wrong time to debate criminal justice reform and reforming criminal laws? Shouldn’t we just wait till Democrats at least have maybe retaken the House so we can at least have that as a backstop? So there’s a lot of layers to this. It’s complicated.
Sean Rameswaram
And in the meantime, we have a joke on our license plate.
Martin Austermuhle
“End taxation without representation.” I mean, at least you’ve got that. You’ve got the license plate.
Sean Rameswaram
Yeah. Good. To be fair, I liked it more when it just said “Taxation without representation,” it felt sort of self-deprecating. Now it feels just like this hopeless slogan that’s never going to do anything, but ...
Martin Austermuhle
But that being said, the district is rolling out a new license plate this year. It’s going to come out soon. It’s going to say, ”We demand statehood.” So ...
Sean Rameswaram
Wow!
Martin Austermuhle
I know, there’s that.
Sean Rameswaram
The joke is over.
Martin Austermuhle
I mean, it’s not ... you don’t get a new criminal code, but you get a license plate that says, “We demand statehood.” So there you go.
