Chapter Eight: 1995
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 18, 1995
In a way not seen since before home rule, Congress made plans to inject itself into the everyday governance of Washington.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) put together a task force to reform schools, housing and social welfare programs. His lieutenants spoke of a plan to whisk new laws through the House, with little opportunity for the District's congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), to have any say about them.
Amid the echoes of pre-home rule meddling, congressional and city leaders confronted each other for the first time last month at a House hearing. The subject was public schools. Up on the dais sat the Republicans, all of them white, all of them elected by voters who live someplace else. Down below sat the witnesses, all of them black, all of them living in the city, all of them prepared to be indignant. The day before the hearing, a D.C. school board member used the word "apartheid" to sum up GOP intentions.
Norton sat in the back of the hearing room with a scowl on her face. Venting a complaint that goes back to the birth of Washington, she fumed that Gingrich's task force left her city with no power: "Whenever I go to meetings, people get up and say, `What in the world is going on?' They say, `Uh-oh, first you get this [control] board and tell me this saves home rule, and then here come these [Republican] people.' "
Before any voices could be raised in anger, however, Gingrich's team sued for peace.
Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.), the speaker's point man on D.C. schools, smiled a warm Midwestern smile and insisted that he wanted nothing more than to work with the local folks: "We're going to struggle with the issue of how we can be helpful without interfering or going too far."
Later, Gunderson wrote a "marketing" memo, saying Republicans must be careful to consult D.C. residents "so that no one can accuse us of a preordained agenda." Norton has been invited to sit with the Republicans during hearings on schools. Last week, Gingrich himself said he will slow the pace of reform, hold "town meetings" and give city residents "a chance to tell Congress what they think."
The broad retreat suggests that, as much as they might talk about schemes for better schools and housing in Washington, white Republicans in Congress will find it exceedingly difficult to ram unwelcome reforms down the throat of a black-majority city.
And yet the levers of power in the District—which Democrats in Congress largely left alone for 20 years—have shifted dramatically in less than six months under the Republican majority.
Marion Barry, who must now answer to the financial control board, can no longer expand the payroll or dispense abundant patronage. He must contend not only with Congress but also with the D.C. Council, which is emerging as a partner with the GOP in advocating conservative reform.
For the moment, Congress, the council and Barry are trying to work together, however warily. Barry and the council have vowed to preserve their influence over District affairs. Congress is groping for a way to showcase new ways of governing cities without giving the mayor ammunition to revive his accusation that the District is "half slave, half free."
"Consider the alternative: intransigence, intractability, finger-pointing," said Rep. James T. Walsh (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees D.C. spending. "This is marvelous progress."
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