“Be careful what you ask for” is an adage that Mayor Muriel Bowser, DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson and other elected officials ought to have pondered in recent days while pushing for the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on the “District of Columbia Local Funds Act, 2025.” That bill was referred to the House after being unanimously approved weeks ago by the U.S. Senate.
The legislation would ostensibly counter the congressionally approved continuing resolution (CR) that treated DC as a federal agency and mandated that the District operate under its fiscal year 2024 budget; to be in compliance with the CR, $1 billion in spending cuts are needed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has yet to schedule a vote on the Local Funds Act. Johnson also has not initiated the alternative of referring the bill to the Appropriations Committee for its consideration, which would at least give the impression he wants to move forward. He essentially has not responded to the Senate’s bill, despite President Donald Trump, no fan of DC, publicly urging immediate action — and now the House is in recess for the next two weeks.
DC is in fiscal purgatory.
“Delay is never in the best interest for something like this,” Mendelson told me during an interview earlier this week that began cordially but quickly became contentious when I raised a series of questions about council plans and strategies, including whether the legislature would support a spending freeze and furloughs to address the $1 billion mandate.
Bowser and Mendelson have options: They could keep waiting for Johnson to act. They could choose to completely defy the CR, engaging in an act of civil disobedience by violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, asserting that the $1 billion is money that belongs to DC residents. I imagine that a young Mayor Marion Barry straight off his tenure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) probably would have pushed that button.
These are different times. Barry has been dead for many years. There is a madman in the White House, who has anointed himself God and has mesmerized once-responsible Republicans into neglecting their duty to the Constitution and country.
Trashing DC’s political independence means nothing to today’s GOP.
Consider Trump’s recently issued “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” executive order. From beginning to end, it telegraphs a fevered disrespect of the city.
