Norton Goes to the House Floor at Noon to Celebrate D.C. Protesters & Will File Home Rule Amendments

Norton Goes to House Floor at Noon to Celebrate D.C. Protesters and Will File Amendments to Protect Home Rule

April 12, 2011

Washington, DC -- Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) will speak on the House Floor at approximately noon today to honor the hundreds of District of Columbia residents, led by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and D.C. council members, who protested yesterday the anti-home-rule riders in the budget deal struck by the Obama administration, Senate Democrats and House Republicans over the weekend. Forty-one D.C. residents were arrested outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building during the protest, including the mayor and council members, while demanding equal treatment for D.C. "DC Vote, after learning of the details of the budget deal late Friday night, in no time flat, organized what became the largest protest for D.C. democracy in years," Norton said. "District residents have been under concerted, anti-home-rule attacks by Republicans since the first day of the new Congress, but, yesterday, D.C.'s local elected leaders and D.C. residents had had it with Congress and showed the Congress and the country what it means to fight back." The District was only minutes away from having to shut down last Friday, because Congress would not pass Norton's bill or several of her amendments to allow the District to spend its local funds for the rest of the fiscal year. D.C. became a pawn in the discussions that averted a federal government shutdown.

Norton will file amendments and speak at the Rules Committee today to urge the removal of the anti-home-rule riders from the final continuing resolution (CR) for fiscal year 2011 (H.R.1473), introduced early this morning. The bill prohibits the District, and only the District, from spending its local taxpayer-raised funds on abortions for low-income women. The bill also creates a new D.C. private school voucher program, despite official findings that the program did not improve student academic achievement. Norton's amendment would redirect the voucher funding to improve and expand the city's flourishing home-rule alternative to the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), public charter schools, which educate almost half of D.C. public school students, and to build on the recent successes of DCPS. Norton's amendment would maintain the compromise Democrats agreed to last Congress to allow the current voucher students to remain in the program until graduation.

Over the weekend, Norton fought the possibility of a deadly anti-home-rule rider that was in the earlier House-passed full-year CR, which would have prohibited D.C. from spending its local funds on needle-exchange programs. The needle-exchange rider was dropped from the final CR, but Norton said that D.C. officials and residents will need to keep up the fighting spirit they showed Monday, or these and other anti-home-rule attachments will be in the 2012 budget.