Norton Marks Historic First in Getting All Riders Removed on DC Appropriations Bill (12/10/09)

Norton Marks Historic First in Getting All Riders Removed

On D.C. Appropriations Bill

December 10, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) issued the following statement on the D.C. Appropriations bill that just passed the House.

"Today the House took historic steps to ensure greater democracy in the nation's capital by finally allowing the District to spend its own funds to save the lives of its residents by removing the bans on using local funds for needle exchange programs, and for abortions for low-income women, and by allowing the city to decide whether to implement a referendum to permit the use of medicinal marijuana. We will never make up for the HIV/AIDS epidemic that besieged this city because needle exchange was banned for a decade or make up for the loss of lives. There is no way to make poor women, forced to carry pregnancies to term, believe that their reproductive choice was guaranteed in the decades when there was a ban on using local funds for abortion for poor women. But today, we start a new chapter in democracy in the District of Columbia with the first appropriations free of all un-democratic, anti-home rule riders."

Norton expects Senate approval. Full analysis of the bill will follow shortly.