Autonomy for the District of Columbia

Floor Speech

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, we are approaching the end of the session, and I know Republicans--my good colleagues on the other side--recognize that they are on track to beat last year's session, where we had the distinction of being the Congress with the lowest productivity in recorded United States history.

There seems to be some Members who are looking around to make up for lost time as to what to do. There is always the District of Columbia.

If you want to fatten your agenda, why not introduce a bill having to do with the District of Columbia? That ought to be a free enough ride. After all, the District of Columbia has a Member of Congress who can't even vote against your bill; so why not try that?

I find, as I look at the record of Members who do that, that there is a pattern there. These are often Members who have introduced very few bills that would benefit their own districts.

Next week, the financial services appropriation bill will be on the floor. It happens to contain the District of Columbia appropriation.

Now, of course, unless you are familiar with this bizarre situation, you will wonder, what in the world is the District of Columbia appropriation doing here in the first place? Well, it shouldn't be here because it doesn't have a dime of Federal money in it. It is an undemocratic anachronism that requires this House to somehow approve the District of Columbia, budget although not a Member of this House except me is accountable to the voters of the District of Columbia.

How is that for democracy? Yet, nevertheless, it will be before this House. And until we get the same budget autonomy that every Member's district enjoys for its own local money, we will find that your time is encumbered by a District of Columbia appropriation bill.

The real difference between the District of Columbia, of course, and the other appropriations bills that you will have before you is that our budget is balanced. We have a surplus. The Federal budget is unbalanced and has a deficit.

There are a number of amendments. We had driven these amendments down to just one, what I will call the annual abortion amendment. It has become a kind of annual ritual.

Of course, there is lots of hypocrisy in the House, but it really shows up on the annual abortion bill. Seventeen States with Members who sit right in this body allow their own localities to spend their own local money on abortions for low-income women, recognizing that the Congress does not allow Federal money to be spent for abortions--that is even when a woman will be in distress. If she is low-income, she is out of luck unless the local jurisdiction, of course, allows for such funds to be spent. And, of course, that is regularly done, except for the District of Columbia where, again, unaccountable Members have stepped in to keep the District of Columbia from doing what 17 other States already do.

When the Democrats were in charge of this House, I was able to get all of the so-called attachments to the District appropriation eliminated even the abortion attachment. It has been the only one to return.

I want to thank the House that one of these attachments has not returned; that, of course, was the needle exchange attachment that had deadly effects. And I choose my words appropriately, because that rider, which was attached to the D.C. appropriation for 10 years, literally spread the HIV virus throughout the District of Columbia and is singly responsible for the fact that the District of Columbia has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the country.

Once I was able to get that attachment removed, we have seen injection needle-related HIV drop precipitously. That will give the House some sense of the great damage that was done by that attachment, and I am grateful--and I will say to this House how grateful I am--that that rider has not returned. I believe that one of the reasons it has not returned is that at least some Members are aware of its effects, and those effects have acted as something of a deterrent to adding that rider again.

This year, here comes the marijuana decriminalization rider. The District of Columbia was pretty late in looking at marijuana decriminalization, and I will get to the reason it looked at decriminalization in a moment. But there are 18 States that have gotten there long before D.C., the first in 1975.

I knew that there was going to be a problem because Rep. John Mica, in his subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, actually had a hearing on this matter. Now, he hasn't called a hearing on Colorado, for example, which has legalized marijuana, although he has looked at Colorado. He could have simply looked at the District of Columbia. He had a whole hearing on the District of Columbia. That is what the District of Columbia has to abide in this House.

Of course, I should not be surprised, and I was not, that there came a Member who decided that he would try to keep the District of Columbia from doing what 18 States have already done before it and block our marijuana decriminalization law.

I had hoped we were in good company because of a very recent vote on this floor. A healthy 49 Republican Members voted with many Democrats to block the government from prosecuting users and sellers of medical marijuana in States that permit its use. That happened within the last month or so. And I said, oh, my goodness, we are in increasingly good company. Republicans and Democrats alike see that, without condoning any form of marijuana, the tide has changed certainly on medical marijuana.

Well, I do not have any illusion that, because the House comes together even to consensus on any matter, that that means that it will apply that consensus to the District of Columbia.

I must say that it took me more than a decade to get another rider, a rider that blocked the District from implementing its medical marijuana law. Well, that law has now been implemented, and so now we have Members looking at D.C.'s marijuana decriminalization law.

At this point, 23 States have legalized medical marijuana. We are getting close to half the States.

As I indicated, 18 States have decriminalized marijuana. Now, that just means you are not going to give someone a record for smoking weed. It doesn't mean you think it is a good thing to do, but it does mean it is not worth a jail record. Not so much jail, because people don't usually go to jail; they just get a record that keeps them from getting a job.

Two States have legalized marijuana, and the House should take note of this fact: A 2014 Pew Research Center poll has now found that 54 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization. The District hasn't legalized, most States haven't legalized. The American people are ahead of where we are.

But the same double standard that I encountered on medical marijuana I am seeing on marijuana decriminalization.

By the way, marijuana decriminalization isn't new. The first was in 1975, and that State was Alaska. If you look at the map of States that have decriminalized in one form or fashion, you will not see any difference between so-called red and blue States. From California and New York to Mississippi and Nebraska--and of course the two States that have legalized marijuana, Colorado and Washington--we see that this approach to marijuana is spreading.

I think most young people don't see enough of a difference between marijuana and a substance that has done far greater harm, alcohol, to understand why there should be criminal penalties associated with marijuana, even if, like me, you don't think that it is a good thing to go around smoking anything, cigarettes, pot, you name it.

Now, nothing distinguishes the District's democratically enacted local laws, including this law, from the laws of those 18 States. We are all American citizens. But you will occasionally hear Members say something that only a tyrant would say. The Member will allude to the fact that the District of Columbia, before it had home rule, was subject in every respect to the Congress of the United States. In fact, all the laws were passed, essentially, by the Congress. What those Members will not tell you is that Congress repudiated that power 40 years ago when it gave the District of Columbia what we call home rule, self-government.

Essentially, the Home Rule Act says the Congress of the United States will no longer either pass or interfere with the local laws of the District of Columbia. We leave that to D.C. The Congress did indicate there were a few exceptions. The Height Act, which proscribes how high buildings can go in the Nation's Capitol, is an example. Another example is that the District can't pass a commuter tax, even though many other jurisdictions have commuter taxes.

Except for such examples, which are very few, there is no brand of local law that the Home Rule Act does not cover. So you can cite the Constitution all you want to, but you must also cite the Home Rule Act of 1973, which, in fact, repudiated the power of the Congress to interfere with the local laws of the District of Columbia or with the District of Columbia itself.

And why wouldn't it? Who are the unaccountable Members, Democratic or Republican, of the House or Senate to have anything to say about either money they didn't raise or laws that respecting only with local concerns?

Among those you would expect to be most familiar with the Home Rule Act would be our neighbors, those who live in Maryland and Virginia. And if I may say so, we have Republican Members, Democratic Members in both those States, and, for the most part, they have respected the integrity of the District of Columbia through its own local laws.

But Representative Andy Harris, I believe he is a second-termer, has not yet read the Home Rule Act; and though he lives in the region, he has not reacted as a neighbor.

Andy Harris is from the State of Maryland. The State of Maryland is one of those jurisdictions that has decriminalized marijuana. Now, Representative Andy Harris was unable to convince his own State not to decriminalize marijuana, so he steps across the border into the District of Columbia to try to tell us what to do.

He happens to be from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. District of Columbia residents are so enraged that the major D.C. rights organization, DC Vote, has called for a boycott of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You know what? The Eastern Shore of Maryland is, in a sense, a vacation spot. It depends on people from the region--the District, Maryland, and Virginia--to visit there, especially during this season. And the District of Columbia has many allies in this region who agree with us that the Congress shouldn't be in our business.

I don't know why Representative Harris would want to stick his nose into the business of the residents of the District of Columbia. I can't understand why he thought that would benefit the economy of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He is from Ocean City. They live off of the rest of this region, including the District of Columbia.

I looked at his productivity here to see, is he busy? Is he not busy enough? He has introduced only 10 bills. I have introduced 63. I am trying to take care of my residents. The 10 bills he has introduced is very low productivity. I have cosponsored three times as many bills as he has cosponsored because I try to attend to the business of my own district.

I don't know if Representative Andy Harris was fishing around for something to do, but he ought to fish at the Eastern Shore, and he ought to find something to do for his own residents because all he has done now is to outrage the people of the District of Columbia. And he has done worse. He has patronized us. He is saying, you know, I am a doctor. Well, you know, I am a lawyer. So what does that mean? Does that enable you to come into my district and doctor my people? ``I don't think marijuana is good for young people.'' Well, I don't either. I also don't think that young people ought to get a record for having used marijuana.

I don't know what motivated the 17, 18 States that have legalized marijuana. But let me tell why you the council of the District of Columbia decriminalized marijuana. Two studies were done. Each showed that in the progressive District of Columbia, where half the population is black and half is white and/or Hispanic, that blacks were arrested at a rate of eight to nine times that of whites for marijuana possession.

Do you know what that means for young blacks--particularly a young black man or boy in this country today? It ruins their lives.

They often live across the Anacostia, which is a low-income part of the District of Columbia. Black men in our country--regardless of income or education--are surrounded by stereotypes. Let one walk in with a ``drug possession'' stereotype on his record, and I will tell you, you are looking at a black man who, if he starts out in life that way, will have his life ruined because he has a ``drug conviction.''

I don't know why they decriminalized in Alaska or Mississippi. But I know why they did it in the District of Columbia, although it is none of the business of this House. They did it for racial justice reasons, and we are not going to have it undone by somebody who has no sense of my district.

An arrest or a conviction of any kind for a ``drug possession''--and that is what marijuana is--can lead a young man, particularly from poor neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, into the underground economy, even to selling drugs, where he was only possessing them before, because he can't find a job because he has got a ``record.'' So the District passed a marijuana decriminalization law.

I must say that this city is well aware of the effects of drugs. This is a big city. It has had its time with drugs, just like every other big city in the United States. Nobody in this city fools around with the notion of drugs. Drugs have promoted violence in our city. They have ruined lives in our city. It is the last place in America that would encourage drugs of any kind.

Also, we don't know what the effects of marijuana smoking may be. That is yet to be determined. I know this: millions of Americans are in their graves because we didn't know the effects of cigarette smoking. So the last thing I, or anyone in the District of Columbia is going to say is, go out and be free; smoke as much marijuana as you can find.

Marijuana smoking could prove to be as bad or worse than cigarette smoking. I only wish that we had known for the 100 years or so when people were ruining their lives smoking cigarettes. And the District of Columbia appears to have recognized that.

The bill requires the revenue collected from civil violations--that is, a civil violation of a fine--to be placed in a substance abuse prevention and treatment fund that is administered by the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health for substance abuse treatment and preventative programs. There are four D.C. prevention centers. They are funded by the Department of Behavioral Health. That serves all eight wards of the city.

This is what the city has already done, even though--it is interesting to note--all the polls show that penalties for marijuana use are not key to determining whether teenagers decide to use marijuana or not.

Nobody knows how to steer people away from marijuana. What they do know is that a record for having possessed marijuana can ruin your life. And if you are a person of color, it has an even greater effect.

It is important to note that all of the polls in the District of Columbia and in the country show that blacks and whites in the District of Columbia and in the United States of America use marijuana at the same rate. So why are blacks not only here but across the country given a record more often?

I would note also--and commend Councilmember Tommy

Wells, who has introduced yet another bill called the Marijuana Use Public Information Campaign Act of 2014. That bill, which was recently introduced, would establish a public information campaign to educate the public on the impacts of marijuana use.

I bet most of the 18 other States haven't gone to this extent in order to deter people from using marijuana at the same time that they have decriminalized it. The District of Columbia has been very responsible.

Who is irresponsible is Representative Andy Harris because the irresponsible thing to do is to mess with my district. You are not accountable to the voters of my district. You are seeking a free ride through an act of congressional bullying. And that is the way we take it.

And like anybody who is bullied, we don't know how to do anything but fight back. We don't like to be patronized. We will not be bullied. And we will not have a Member tell the residents of the District of Columbia, who have no way to hold him accountable, what we may or may not do.

So I ask the Members of the House to be consistent, particularly my Republican friends with your own small Federal footprint approach as a core value, because of your own notion of local control, as opposed to Federal control, the hallmark of your values, I ask you simply to apply the same principles to me and to the District of Columbia that you are insisting upon for you and for your own constituents.

I will remind you that we are all Americans, that there are no second-class Americans, and that the Americans who live in the Nation's Capital insist upon being treated fully equally with all of you, all of us who are fortunate to be citizens of the United States of America.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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