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Lawmakers Who Won't Be Missed
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It was a Taylor taunt hurled at our public school system and at students' math and reading test scores.
This was the same barbed-tongued Charles Taylor who:
--Directed the city to immediately close the University of the District of Columbia's law school and send the students to other schools. (He didn't succeed.)
--Used to tell us how many cops should patrol the streets and how pay raises should be awarded.
--Had his meat-ax approach to the District's budget, which then-financial control board chairman Andrew Brimmer said tore at the "very fundamental operations of government," overruled by his own House Republican leadership.
A few years ago, Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.) introduced legislation to overturn a D.C. Human Rights Office ruling that ordered the Boy Scouts of America to pay two gay Eagle Scout troop leaders $50,000 in damages for discrimination. Mr. Hostettler won't do that sort of thing anymore. His constituents told him to take a hike on Tuesday.
The Democratic takeover of Congress offers the prospect of relief from amendments, or riders, that House Republicans loved to attach to the D.C. budget.
Under Republican rule, Congress banned the District from spending locally raised tax dollars on free needle-exchange programs to curb the spread of HIV -- even though local jurisdictions in half the states provide such services. A Republican Congress also extended a federal restriction on abortion funding to all federal and local money spent in the District. And it adopted a rider that prevented the city from using its own money to lobby for voting representation in Congress. One Republican-led appropriations subcommittee even added a provision to the city budget imposing federal penalties on D.C. children caught smoking.
Under House GOP rule, efforts were made to repeal the District's law prohibiting residents from possessing firearms. Another Republican measure would have allowed residents, except for convicted felons, to own handguns and keep them in their homes. The city was spared that fate only because the House ended up scrapping the national gun bill to which those amendments would have been attached.
Tuesday night's election hardly catapulted the District to the Promised Land. But the regaining of Congress by Democrats may have brought the city some relief from odious Republican budget riders and a welcome respite from the District-bashing in vogue in certain quarters on Capitol Hill for the past 12 years.
