Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) It’s almost an annual tradition in Congress, but it’s one that D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton isn’t too fond of. Republicans in Congress have again attached multiple riders to the District’s appropriations bill, attempting to roll back District laws on topics ranging from guns, to abortions, to marijuana and more.
“They’re trying to make an issue that will resonate with some of their most conservative voters,” Norton told WMAL. “In other words, we’re being used. And we resent it.”
She counted twelve riders as of Friday. In addition to those hot-button issues, there are also riders looking to roll back the District’s physician-assisted suicide law, one dealing with the District’s budget autonomy, and another, curiously, that looks to invalidate a recently-passed law regulating what kind of wipes are safe to flush down a toilet.
“They’re going right at it the way they do every year,” Norton said. “We think we’ll stop these, certainly in the Senate where we have better success than we do in the House.”
Norton maintained the only way to avoid this process every year is to treat the District’s spending the same as any other state, which would likely mean statehood. That effort was stalled last year with the election of Donald Trump as President and a Republican-controlled Congress.
However, Norton noted she is pleasantly surprised by one thing: President Trump doesn’t seem interested in micro-managing District affairs.
“It’s really interesting to note that this President has not paid much attention to the District of Columbia,” she said. “We’d like to keep it that way.”
Copyright 2017 WMAL.com All Rights Reserved. (Photo: CNN)
