Norton and Allies Gearing Up to Again Defeat Attack on D.C. Women and the Usurping of Local Authority

WASHINGTON, DC – Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) yesterday reintroduced a bill that would ban all abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks (with limited exceptions). Last Congress, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), her pro-choice congressional allies and a coalition of 100 national and local organizations defeated the House version of the bill in a vote on the House floor, while Lee's bill did not receive a hearing or a vote in the Senate. Lee's legislation, which is the Senate companion to a bill introduced last month in the House by Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ), would prohibit such abortions in only one jurisdiction, the District of Columbia, and broadens congressional attacks on women who live in the District and on home rule. Norton said, last Congress, women throughout the U.S. understood the attack on D.C. women to be a national attack on Roe v. Wade and women nationally responded accordingly. Attacks on women's reproductive health were a major issue in the 2012 presidential election.

"This is not Senator Lee's first attack on D.C. women or attempt to seize authority over a local jurisdiction," said Norton. "We have already begun mobilizing pro-choice women and organizations nationally to fight this bill in both the House and Senate. Even those who disagree with the views of our residents on abortion understand that neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court interpretations allow discriminatory treatment regarding the constitutional rights of the American citizens who live in the nation's capital. Senator Lee is trying to undemocratically usurp local authority outside his own state in violation of every founding principle of local control, and at the same time to introduce the idea that basic constitutional rights depend on where a citizen lives. There can be no justification for denying the federal-taxpaying residents of the nation's capital the same rights as other American citizens."

Last Congress, Lee, a strong Tea Party advocate for small and local government, put aside these professional principles and introduced the D.C. abortion ban bill and also filed it as an amendment to a cybersecurity bill. This Congress, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the groups that led the coalition fighting the D.C. abortion ban bill last Congress, informed Senators that they intended to "score" a vote on the amendment Lee filed to the Senate's budget resolution expressing the Sense of the Senate that Congress should pass legislation banning abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The organizations decided to score the vote without prompting by Norton, an indication that pro-choice groups do not intend to leave D.C. to special interests that use the city's women as part of their national anti-choice agenda. The Lee amendment was not brought up for a vote.

Following vocal opposition last month when Representative Franks introduced the House version of the D.C. abortion ban bill, Franks' said that he was "astonished" to hear opponents of his bill say it usurps local authority. "Representative Franks' assertion that he is upholding the Constitution in usurping a local jurisdiction's authority by intentionally violating women's rights is as egregious and groundless as the bill itself," said Norton. "In keeping with basic principles of local control and democracy, Congress delegated its legislative authority over the District of Columbia to an elected local government in 1973, except for a small number of enumerated exceptions. The right to reproductive choice was not among those exceptions."

Published: May 8, 2013