Senators moved quickly to cobble together a standalone bill to shield Washington D.C. from a $1 billion budget cut written into the House Republican continuing resolution that 10 Senate Democrats helped pass Friday.
The D.C. bill passed with unanimous consent on a voice vote, a sign of its bipartisan backing.
“This legislation will make sure that we take care of the residents of the District,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said from the floor Friday afternoon. “It will support law enforcement and firefighters and teachers and city services. The legislation is very good news for the residents of the District of Columbia.”
The slashing of the budget alarmed D.C. city officials, many of whom have been making pilgrimages to Capitol Hill in recent days to try to convince Senate Democrats to oppose the GOP CR. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) warned that such a draconian cut would affect schools, policing, sanitation and transit, including the Metro.
While D.C. has no voting representatives, senators from nearby Maryland and Virginia spearheaded the effort to address the D.C. attack.
“I’m working on a fix right now,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told TPM Friday afternoon, before the fate of the GOP CR was determined. “I’ve been working on it most of the morning.”
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) was part of the legislative effort too, warning TPM that the $1 billion shortfall would have “a really devastating impact on public safety, on education and other things that we kind of co-share with D.C. and Virginia.”
The cuts to the D.C. budget in the GOP CR are so drastic that some Democratic members initially thought that it was an oversight, or a mistake in the drafting. Indeed, head Republican appropriator Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) described the bill as rectifying a “mistake” just before its passage.
But in all of the many other CRs, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told TPM, “no other jurisdiction got stuck out and hosed this way, and the understanding we have is that when we asked ‘was this a mistake?’ and no, it was basically a pointed ‘screw you.’”
That animating spirit puts the bill’s chance of passage through the House on shakier grounds; it’ll need to attract some Republican support — likely from the Virginia delegation at least — to pass the lower chamber. The House doesn’t return from recess until March 24.
For some MAGA types, there are likely countervailing impulses at play: an instinct to punish D.C., a very liberal city, and its Democratic city government, clashing with the reality that members of Congress live in D.C. and use its services, at least some of the time. It’s also a feature of D.C.’s lack of statehood, that Congress can tamper with the city budget — even though, as many city leaders and senators pointed out, in this case, it would save the federal government no money.
Still, external forces can be everything: Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told reporters after the vote that the bill has the support of the Trump White House and the House Republican appropriations chair.
“The hit on the District is just mean-spirited,” Warner said.
I am refusing to start the weekend in a rage and so should you.
It’s a Republican controlled….everything.
Keep that in mind when you feel the need to take a shit on Democrats for the ills of all that is good and wonderful…even if you believe they are the reason for…
reasons
Does this mean anything? It’s not an amendment to the CR. It’s completely performative.
Probably not. If they thought it was really important, they would have put it into their version of the bill requiring the House to come back and vote, or go into shutdown. I won’t be the least bit surprised if this bill doesn’t pass in the House…will anyone?
Perhaps, the Republicans also targeted the District because the majority of residents are people of color.