Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
When the District sends its $13 billion budget to Congress this year, it might as well affix a note that reads “Dare you.”
For the first time since the Founding Fathers carved out the nation’s capital from swampland, the District will not ask the federal government for permission to spend its money.
Instead, it will use local tax dollars as it sees fit, just as 50 states do.
There is one problem — Congress treats the District as a federal agency, no different from the way it funds the Department of Labor or the Interior.
Congress has warned that an insurrection by the city would violate the Constitution.
So the city’s spending plan will serve a second purpose — a declaration of independence by the District of Columbia.
The city budget will be a clear challenge to the “absolute supremacy” that Congress has wielded over the District since it was created in 1790.
Unlike previous years when the District has been forced to wait for Congress to approve its spending as part of the federal budget, the city this year will begin spending its money unless federal lawmakers act to stop it.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is leading the fight, casting it as a monumental step toward making D.C. the 51st state.
Her effort has been bolstered by a diversifying local economy that is less dependent on federal aid, as well as waves of new, young residents who bristle at second-class citizenship.
A record number of D.C. residents want to see the District become a state, according to a Washington Post poll.
On Friday, the annual District holiday of Emancipation Day to mark the end of slavery, the mayor will convene a gathering of leading civil rights figures to highlight what she calls the country’s “biggest ongoing voting rights violation”: 672,000 U.S. citizens — many of them African Americans — without representation in Congress.
“One hundred and fifty-four years after President Lincoln abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, we remain at the mercy of those we did not elect to office,” Bowser said in a recent citywide address. “It is just not right, and we must stand together until our rights are recognized.”
Bowser, 43, a fifth-generation Washingtonian, said she did not fully realize her home town’s quandary until she reached the mayor’s office.
She pointed to a closed-door meeting Wednesday on Capitol Hill between the new head of Metro and senators from Maryland and Virginia.
“The first thing I said to myself is, ‘This is just disgusting’ — the District can’t be in that room,” Bowser said. “When we talk about the fact that we’re not a state, it’s a matter of us having our full rights as American citizens. But it’s also about the very practical effects of not having two senators in those meetings.”
In the push for D.C. independence, proponents generally discuss two levels: budget and legislative autonomy, and voting rights in Congress. If the city were to achieve statehood, it would get both.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/the-district-gets-ready-to-declare-independence--from-congress/2016/04/14/bc61776c-00d4-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html