What You Have Seen During the 112th Congress is Spontaneous Reaction from Officials and Residents of

Floor Speech

What you have seen during the 112th Congress is spontaneous reaction from officials and residents of the District of Columbia to spontaneous injustice from this House.

Importantly in what Mr. Ellison read was the notion of budget autonomy. The most immediate answer to the predicament we find ourselves in is the failure of Congress to acknowledge that our local budget has no business in this House.

I am very pleased that one Member, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Mr. Issa, had the District before him in the form of several of our public officials and listened closely to their testimony. Their testimony, and the testimony of witnesses called by the majority Republicans, went something like this: that the District of Columbia's finances and its budget are in better shape than those of virtually any jurisdiction in the United States.

Then witnesses from both sides said that the District does incur significant problems. Those problems result from the fact that the District has to do its budget twice--first for itself, and then the Congress does its budget again. As a result, the bondholders charge the residents of the District of Columbia a premium because Congress requires the District's budget to come here.

What does the Congress do with the District's budget when it comes here? Well, it certainly wouldn't tamper with a budget that has been put together by D.C. Council subcommittees, hearing endless hours of testimony, then calling committees, then with give-and-

take from members of the council. Congress doesn't feel it's competent to do that, so what Congress does is to essentially pass the budget as it is and use the fact that the budget is here for its own purposes and against the interests of the residents of the District of Columbia. It uses the local D.C. budget to affix amendments--known as riders--to keep the District from doing what the District wants to do with its own local funds. I'm not here talking about what the District wants to do with Federal funds; it's what the District wants to do with its own local funds.

And in order to make sure that the District gets the point, the District gets shut down if the Federal Government decides to shut down. The very threat of a shutdown has repercussions for the District's finances, for those who hold its bonds, for those who hold its contracts. No city can afford that, and certainly not the District of Columbia.

As a result, this situation has not only driven our own people to civil disobedience, it has driven them to follow the example of Mahatma Gandhi who, when things got bad enough, if you saw the movie ``Gandhi,'' would simply stop eating. People would beg him to eat, and he would stop eating. And people would say, You must eat; you're more valuable if you're alive, and he would not eat because he was trying to shame the British Government into bringing democracy to India. And he succeeded and has been, of course, the great icon of civil disobedience of various kinds.

But who would expect that public officials would have to engage in civil disobedience here? Who would ever think that a hunger strike would be necessary in the United States of America? Not for some radical principle, but for the first principle, the principle upon which this country was founded: If it's our money, we get to decide what to do with our money, King George--yes, and King Congress.

Ms. NORTON. There is an answer to this, and I thank Mr. Issa for proposing a budget autonomy bill himself that mirrors my own budget autonomy bill--with some differences to be sure, in deference to the Congress. But this is a chairman of a committee who listened to the District, listened to witnesses, understood the harm imposed on the District--not only the shutdown, not only, of course, the amendments, but he was particularly impressed by the harm it does to the finances of a city that has done the right thing by its own finances.

As we contemplate what will happen in the next few hours, we ought to find a way to do two things if we do nothing else: Make sure that the District budget passes as the District would have it--not as any Member of this House would have it--and that the abortion amendment is gone; and, finally, that under no circumstances, whatever happens to the Federal Government, under no circumstances should the government of a local jurisdiction, your Nation's capital, be shut down.

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