D.C.’s emphatic embrace of woke policies has even Democrats on Hill rethinking support

A lurch to the left in recent months by the District of Columbia’s local leaders — on everything from crime and policing to voting rights and reparations proposals — has even some Democrats on Capitol Hill wondering if the city has gone too far.

District politicians are scrambling to shore up support among their Democratic Party allies on the Hill ahead of a likely vote next week in the Senate on an overhaul approved by the city council of the local criminal code — an overhaul that has been criticized by Republicans as “soft on crime.”

A GOP-authored bill would block the criminal code changes, which include reduced penalties for some violent crimes, from taking effect. At least one Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin III, has said he plans to join Republicans in voting against the District. 

The White House could bail out the District with a veto of the GOP’s disapproval measure, but the criminal code overhaul on the table is controversial enough that a last-minute save from a reelection-minded President Biden is no guarantee, either.

Another Democrat facing red state voters in 2024, Montana’s Jon Tester, hasn’t said how he will vote when the bill comes up, but he was noncommittal when asked about the District’s massive code rewrite.

“I hate to be a cop-out for you guys all the time, but I do have to look at it. I just don’t know what it does yet,” Mr. Tester told CNN on Tuesday. “There is the issue of, you know, D.C. does what D.C. wants to do and let D.C. do what they do, but we do have some oversight.”

Three other Democrats — Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gary Peters of Michigan and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — all told CNN that they haven’t made up their minds. Mr. Brown is also on the ballot next year.

With the ongoing absence of Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is on medical leave, the defection of Mr. Manchin could be enough to scuttle the District’s overhaul. 

“I don’t support it. I mean, I want to put people away, I don’t want to let them out,” the West Virginia Democrat told CNN on Monday. “I haven’t been briefed on it, but what I know about it, I would vote to rescind it.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser demurred Wednesday when asked whether she would support the idea of Mr. Biden vetoing the GOP’s disapproval measure.

“I expect all national Democrats are looking at this closely and are making a calculus on what’s best for the party,” she said before adding that she has continued to be in contact with the White House on the issue.

The Constitution gives Congress final say over the District’s laws during a review period. The only formal action Congress can take during the review period — which lasts 30 days for most laws and 60 days for laws involving crime and public safety — is voting to disapprove of the District’s new law. 

The disapproval resolution has to be supported by the House and Senate and signed off on by the president to take effect. That can result in a law being overturned, which has only happened three times in the city’s history, and never on something as significant as the criminal code rewrite.

Bipartisan support for the disapproval resolution took on added weight when one representative got firsthand experience with the crime in the District. 

Andie Craig, a Minnesota Democrat, was assaulted by a man inside an elevator at her D.C. condo building last month. She was one of the 31 Democrats who voted with Republicans in disapproving the rewritten code just hours after the attack.  

“It turns out the congresswoman’s attacker had been arrested and convicted no fewer than 12 times before — most recently for assaulting a Metropolitan Police officer,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader from Kentucky, said in a recent floor speech. “But there he was, this career criminal, just roaming the streets.”

The broader issue of D.C. statehood looms over the criminal code saga.

Republicans see the debate over crime and policing as a way of introducing voters nationwide to some of the progressive policies championed by the District, such as voting rights for noncitizens and reintroducing the effort to pay reparations to local Black residents. 

For the GOP, granting statehood to a left-wing city that is supposed to represent the whole of the American people undermines the District’s argument for total self-governance.

Democrats, on the other hand, see a clear political benefit in making the District the 51st state. Over 75% of all registered voters in the federal city identify as Democrats.

The District’s new rule allowing noncitizens to vote was even less popular with House Democrats as 42 voted to disapprove of the measure during the same day that a vote was taken on the criminal code.

After earlier reports that the law had taken effect following the end of the congressional review period, a spokeswoman for Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting member of Congress, clarified that the review period for the Senate is still active until March 14.

The law originally set out to allow green-card holders and those with temporary protected status to vote in mayoral, council and attorney general elections. But Eric Goulet, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education (and a Democrat, as virtually all elected officials in the District are), told The Washington Times that the law’s contentious inclusion of illegal immigrants was added by Ward 6 representative Charles Allen during committee hearings over the summer.

“To imperil the chances of congressional Democrats in swing states [by] potentially forcing them to pick between voting to support the District or voting to support their own electoral chances on this, I think it’s just a really unfair position that we’ve put them in,” Mr. Goulet told The Times. “Even the president has to decide whether he’s willing to take a political hit to support D.C. on this effort or whether or not he’s going to just let it go.”

Calls to change strategies haven’t caused District leaders to rethink their position in the legislative food chain as of yet.

Ward 5 Council member Kenyan McDuffie reintroduced a bill Monday that would establish a reparations fund for the city’s Black residents who were directly affected by slavery, Jim Crow and institutional racism, according to DCist.

The bill was first introduced in 2020 but never made it to a vote during the legislative session. It calls for a nine-member task force to be created to study the reparations effort by no later than June 2024 and deliver a report a year after that.

Money for the fund would come from the District’s annual sales tax and from the tickets and fines doled out by the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Reparations proposals have become all the rage in some of the country’s most progressive circles. A San Francisco committee on reparations has suggested the city pay as much as $5 million to Black residents impacted by slavery.

Boston, St. Paul and Asheville, North Carolina, have also established committees to assess the feasibility of paying reparations,

District leaders have reframed the congressional oversight fight over the criminal code as an attack on the city’s self-governance.

Letters sent last week by Mayor Bowser, the entire D.C. council and Attorney General Brian Schwalb all called on the Senate to reject the disapproval resolution on the grounds that it was silencing the voice of the District’s residents.      

“If any of the 50 states enacts a law that does not please Congress, that state is not stripped of its autonomy,” Vincent Gray, the Ward 7 representative on the D.C. Council, told The Washington Times in a statement. “Our pursuit of statehood should not be linked to a local law that is out of fashion with Congressional leadership.”

Mr. Gray, a former District mayor, and Ms. Bowser have tried to splash cold water on some of the anti-policing sentiment that fueled the criminal code overhaul and consequential reductions to the city’s police force.

Mr. Gray introduced legislation last week that called for over 800 police officers to be added to the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, a move that was applauded by the mayor’s office.

Ms. Bowser proposed an amended code with harsher penalties last month, weeks after the D.C. Council overrode her veto (which included Mr. Gray) of the original rewrite in January that invited congressional objections.  

Other figures in local politics said the District’s headaches with Congress were easy to predict.

“We should have seen this coming,” Michael D. Brown, one of the District’s two elected shadow senators who act as unpaid, non-voting representatives for D.C. in Congress, told The Times. “We know that the way Congress deals with District Columbia is wrong … but we have to take it into account when we do things. It’s just our reality.”

Mr. Brown added that it’s the first time the statehood movement hasn’t had the wind at its back in years.