NEWT GINGRICH TOOK THE STAGE at Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., this sum- mer to face one of the toughest audiences of his political life: a thousand or so District residents upset about Republican plans to cut the city’s budget. The Speaker was there to convince the assembled that the new Congress had no intention of meddling in the affairs of local government.
It was, needless to say, a hard sell, but Gingrich sold it. “The citizens of the city have to deal with the reality of everyday life,” he intoned, “and those of us who visit do not have the knowledge and do not have the fight to micromanage the daily lives of the people of this city.”
Most of those present had never expected to hear such sentiments from a Republican. And they were impressed, local politicians especially. “Our Speaker cares about Washington,” concluded Mayor Marion Barry. “Our Speaker cares about our children.” (Our Speaker?) “I am optimistic,” Barry went on, ” that members of the House… are going to work with us to bring in added resources, new ideas, not in a patronizing way, not in a slap-you-on-the-head kind of way, in a partnership kind of way.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting congressional delegate, was no less enthusiastic about Gingrich’s speech: “You would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to have heard and understood the commitment. It has been a model of home-rule consultation.” Gingrich returned the compliment. “In D.C. ,” said the Speaker, referring to his para-colleague, “she’s the senior partner and I’m the junior partner.” As for Barry, Gingrich said he and the flamboyant mayor are now “more in agreement than disagreement.”
Two months later, Gingrich’s words seem less like hollow flattery and more like a statement of fact. Thanks to the Speaker, Marion Barry and Eleanor Holmes Norton have indeed become senior partners in the Republican effort to reform city government in Washington. And to such an extent that Gingrich’s own party members are taking a seriously junior role.
In late September, Rep. James Walsh of New York, who heads the subcommittee responsible for the District’s annual appropriation, came up with a new city budget. Walsh’s recommendations included ending rent control, cutting salaries for school board members (now the highest in the nation), and paring the District’s bloated municipal workforce. For a city at least $ 700 million in the red and unable to pay its bills (in the first three weeks of last month alone, 66 city vehicles were repossessed for nonpayment), these were not unreasonable suggestions.
City offcials, however, threw a very public fit at the news. Marion Barry promised to “fight to the death” against the Walsh plan. Then he called Newt Gingrich. And Gingrich responded, stopping Walsh’s bill in its tracks. The reason? To give local officials, as well as the city’s newly-appointed financial review board, a voice in the appropriations process. Or, as the Speaker put it, the District’s budget must be created “within the framework of… home rule.” A day after Gingrich put the bill on hold, the Senate’s budget for the District, in some ways more radical than the House version, passed with hardly a debate.
House Republicans, many of whom had spent years waiting for the chance to do something about the mess in city government, were horrified. In addition to a chastened Walsh, Bob Livingston, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was said to be utterly nonplused. “He was livid,” says one staffer. “He flipped out.”
What happened? Why would Gingrich publicly overrule — even humiliate — political allies to appease ideological enemies? And why would he solicit suggestions on the District’s future from the very people who have run the city into the ground?
The offxcial answer is that the Speaker has too much respect for the concept of home rule to shove improvements down the city’s throat. Sounds sensible enough, until you try to define what “home rule” actually means. No city in America enjoys complete home rule, at least as defined by Barry and Norton. State legislatures pass laws all the time that trump those enacted by municipal governments, telling cities which taxes they can collect, what sorts of companies they can do business with, how much to pay their mayors. Home rule is nothing if not a flexible concept.
In the case of the District, which was chartered by Congress and is neither a county nor a state, the term seems particularly empty. The federal government still appropriates every dollar of the city’s budget — not just federal dollars, all dollars, including those raised by local property taxes. And, 20 years after the “home rule act” of 1975 was passed, every piece of legislation the District’s city council passes still must be sent to Congress for approval before it becomes law.
In other words, appealing to the sanctity of home rule doesn’t quite cut it. A more plausible explanation for the Speaker’s actions: the politics of race. It is never politically pretty when a white Congress tells a black city what to do. Gingrich, whose interest in the District is longstanding, is particularly aware of the symbolism involved. He has been made even more aware by two of his key advisors on District matters — Steve Gunderson, one of the House’s most liberal Republicans, and Jane Fortson, a senior fellow at the Speaker’s own Progress and Freedom Foundation and a liberal Democrat. Gingrich, explains one observer, “doesn’t want Congress to come off looking like a bunch of white Republicans who just want to beat the hell out of the District.”
While it may make for good public relations, the Speaker’s strategy leaves at least one question unanswered: How does Gingrich intend to make Washington into the model capital city he envisions without allowing House Republicans to chart a radically new course for the District — without stepping on a few local toes and braving the usual Barry-inspired hysterics about congressional racism and the return of plantation overseers?
It will be quite a trick. As other Congresses and other Speakers have found in years past, the two goals — fixing the city and retaining the good will of its elected leaders — are almost always mutually exclusive.
Or perhaps nothing will happen. Reforming the District may get lost in the shuffle, a casualty of more pressing concerns, like Medicare reform and reelection. After all, as a congressional staffer close to the issue put it, the matters at stake are “relatively minor stuff: rent control, something about the salaries of the school boards. There’s not a lot at stake here, not exactly the great issues of the day.” Not unless you’re poor, black, and live in Washington.
