Department of Defense and Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman for his efforts.

I'm here to say to my good friends on the other side, it's one thing to beat up on the District of Columbia; it's another thing to drop a bomb on the city. And that's what this CR does.

It takes the route of authoritarian governments and dictatorships by dictating to a local government how it may spend its local funds. And it may force the District of Columbia government to shut down, even though the District government had a balanced budget, passed it last spring and had it approved by the committees in this House and Senate since last summer.

But because the Congress can't figure out how to pass its own budget, it now threatens to close down the District of Columbia government, which doesn't have a dime in this federal budget, only local funds. My amendment could have avoided all this by allowing local funds to continue to be spent by the District of Columbia.

The other side has been engaged in many attacks on the city's right to self-government, from stripping our vote in the Committee of the Whole, approved by two Federal courts, to three riders in their H.R. 1. But the ultimate attack on a local self-government is Federal usurpation, a virtual taking of our local funds by not allowing the city to use its own money to keep its own local government running.

Worse, there is an attempt to use the District of Columbia as a bargaining chip in these negotiations. There have been no riders in prior continuing resolutions. Shamefully, here the District of Columbia is paired with a rider that no prisoners can be brought into the United States with another that says D.C.'s local funds shall be captured by keeping the city from spending its own local funds on abortion.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.

Mr. DICKS. I yield the gentlewoman an additional 30 seconds.

Ms. NORTON. How much more contempt can you show for the citizens who live in the Nation's Capital? If the Republicans are going to require Members to cite the Constitution in introducing legislation, I ask them to stop tearing up the Constitution and throwing it in the faces of the American citizens who live in the Nation's Capital.

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