Norton Hails Committee Passage of Legislative Autonomy (8/2/07)

Washington, DC-- The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today passed Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton's (D-DC) legislative autonomy bill today with an agreement to reduce to 10 calendar days the congressional layover period for reviewing laws passed by the District. Norton said the bill means that, for all intents and purposes, Council legislation will become law almost automatically because the review period is so short, and in many cases, has been discarded as a vehicle for overturning bills. Instead, Congress attempts to use the appropriations process when it wants to overturn D.C. laws. The change is very important, however, because it frees civil and criminal laws from layovers of 30 and 60 days respectively, which typically means more than three months for city statutes to become final. There are still some fine points to be worked out before the bill goes to the floor, but today's bill means the end of the Byzantine process of emergency, temporary and repetitive bills bogged down in the City Council.

Also today, Norton agreed to delay consideration of her budget autonomy bill when Republican members of the committee attempted to force their ideological preferences on the District with the same kind of attachments that they tried but failed to place on the D.C. voting rights bill before it passed the House in April. "We learned this morning that instead of having only two amendments, there were a half a dozen or more amendments on abortion, on medical marijuana, and several on repealing D.C. gun laws. The same attempt to block the D.C. voting rights bill moved Norton and the Democrats to delay floor consideration and fix the problem, and she chose that course today as well. Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has assured Norton that the Committee will come back to budget autonomy after recess just as the House did with the D.C. Voting Rights Act.

The Budget Autonomy and Legislative Autonomy Acts of 2007 are the two most important bills in Norton's "Free and Equal D.C." series of bills to address restrictions placed on the District that deny the city the right to self-government equal to that of other U.S. jurisdictions. These two bills are second only to voting rights in importance to the basic rights and independence of D.C. residents and would bring close to culmination Norton's push to end discriminatory and unnecessary congressional review of the District's criminal, civil, and budgetary laws. "My goal," Norton said, "is to urge Congress to make the 110^th Congress the most historic in the city’s 206 year history, with passage of these three bills that come close to eliminating our status as second class Americans.