Democrats in the District of Columbia have long blamed Republicans in Congress for the repeated failure of their quixotic attempts to gain full statehood and their more reasonable demand for a vote in Congress. It’s time to put this urban legend to rest. The election of the nation’s first black president, along with a Democratic majority in Congress, raised high hopes that the city would be rewarded for its 93 percent support of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential contest. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Political commentator Mark Plotkin summed up D.C’s growing frustration with the president, who won’t even display “Taxation Without Representation” license plates on his presidential limousine: “He went to Cairo to talk about democracy. He won’t go to Brentwood or Deanwood.” Meanwhile, the latest antics of Mayor Vincent Gray — who ridiculously got himself arrested in a street-theater protest on Capitol Hill — and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton — who told her congressional colleagues to “go straight to hell” for not supporting her unsuccessful efforts to amend the final compromise budget bill — did the city no favors. On the contrary, they only managed to highlight their real priorities: More abortions for low-income women and less scholarship money for low-income children.
Recommended Stories
But let’s not forget that it was during a 2009 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting that another Democrat — Sen. Dick Durbin, of Illinois — revealingly explained the high percentage of abortions in D.C. as a result of the “fact that a disproportionately large number of African Americans live in the District of Columbia.” Yet incredibly Gray disingenuously blames House Republicans– who want to reduce abortions of black babies and educate black children far more effectively than is presently being done — for D.C.’s “colonial status.”
District residents should be reminded that it was former Rep. Tom Davis — a Virginia Republican — who crafted a reasonable compromise that would have given D.C. a vote in Congress, but city officials refused to back it because it would have also repealed gun control in the nation’s capital. And it was D.C. Democrats, not congressional Republicans, who took $1 million away from AIDS patients and used it to pay for abortions before a federal ban went into effect. District Democrats’ unrelenting pursuit of a far-left agenda that puts abortion, gun control and teachers unions before the best interests of their own constituents is the real reason the city still has no vote in Congress and, despite home rule, no real autonomy over its own affairs. And why the city will continue to be a political pawn no matter who’s living in the White House.
