The efforts of some House Republicans to insert anti-District riders into the fiscal year 2024 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill has D.C. leaders fuming.
The Republicans who want to insert the riders want to repeal the city’s Death with Dignity Act and prohibit the District from passing such a bill in the future; maintain the existing abortion rider which prohibits the city from spending its own local funds on abortions for low-income women; maintain the present marijuana rider which prohibits the commercialization of the sale of weed; repeals a law prohibiting motorists making right turns on red; prohibits the District from carrying out its automated traffic enforcement law; and repeals a portion of the Anti-Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) law that presently exempts public charter schools.
The GOP lawmakers also want to require the city to report on its enforcement of the Partial Birth Abortion Act; mandate the District to report on maternity care access and stop the city from using funds to carry out the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) denounced the proposed riders.
“These riders are not just anti-Home Rule, they are actually harmful to the District,” the chairman said. “Perpetuating the marijuana rider only means the illegal market will continue to grow because the District is handcuffed in the ability to regulate sales and distribution. The District led the nation in HIV/AIDS infections in the past because of a previous rider prohibiting needle exchange programs. Now the Republicans want to resurrect that harmful rider.”
Mendelson said the riders will “throw our budget out of balance by hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“Republican House leaders have criticized the District for being poorly run, even though we have one of the most fiscally stable governments in the nation, and now they proposed to truly throw it out of whack,” he said.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton praised the appropriations bill for providing $40 million for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant; $8 million to clean up Anacostia and Potomac Rivers; $28 million for District emergency planning and security; $600,000 for the Major General David F. Wherley Jr., District of Columbia National Guard Retention and College Access Program; $4 million to combat HIV/AIDS in the city and a provision preventing the city from shuttering if a federal government shutdown occurs in fiscal year 2024.
Like Mendelson, Norton also expressed outrage over the riders.