Yesterday, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray was arrested alongside members of the City Council protesting the riders attached to the budget bill, which revives the D.C. school-voucher program, bans the city from using its own money to pay for abortions, and eliminates the city's clean-needle program.
Setting aside the merits of each of these programs, the issue here is, as Mayor Gray put it, "All we want is to be able to spend our own money.” Democrats in Congress and the White House didn't even bother to inform the mayor that they were trading away the city's autonomy to stave off further budget cuts.
After two years of protests from conservatives complaining about federal interference, it's difficult to find a way in which the Republican Party's treatment of D.C. isn't violative of their most basic first principles. Republicans railing against the heavy hand of the federal government had no compunction about telling D.C. how to use its own money to fight HIV or ensure poor women have the right to choose when to have children. There is no humiliation too petty for Republicans -- they stripped Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of her near meaningless committee vote as soon as possible. Sure, the Constitution makes it clear the founders never intended the city to be autonomous, but it's hard to imagine that after fighting a war with Britain over taxation without representation they would shrug their shoulders the way Republicans do at the prospect of 600,000 people being disenfranchised even as they pay federal taxes. It's not as though Republicans are afraid of amending the Constitution; they just don't want to amend it in any way that might give Democrats a political advantage.
Gray getting arrested was a stunt. But stunts are really all the city has to register its displeasure, since it's not like we have representation in Congress that might be able to make a difference. So just as Republicans toss all those pretty tricornered hats right back into the closet when it comes to micromanaging the District's affairs, Democrats trading away D.C.'s right to self-governance is an afterthought.
