Biden to sign push to block DC laws
GOP-led resolution halts bid to rework criminal sentences
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said Thursday that he would sign a Republican-sponsored resolution blocking new District of Columbia laws that overhaul how the nation’s capital prosecutes and punishes crime.
City officials have spent nearly two decades trying to redo Washington’s criminal laws, including redefining crimes, changing criminal justice policies and reworking how sentences should be handed down after convictions. The overhaul passed the D.C. Council late last year.
But the Republican-controlled House has decided to wade into city matters, claiming the district’s changes will contribute to already rising crime in Washington — the number of murders in 2021 was the highest in nearly 20 years — and make it easier for some criminals to get out of prison or evade punishment all together.
The resolution passed the House with some Democratic support and appears poised to clear the Senate on a bipartisan basis as well, perhaps as early as next week.
Biden said in a tweet that he supported statehood for D.C. “But I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the mayor’s objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” he said. “If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did — I’ll
sign it.”
In doing so, the president will allow Congress to nullify the city’s laws for the first time in more than three decades. Democrats will be abandoning a commitment to oppose the unusual rules governing the district that allow Congress to step in and the acquiescence comes despite their longtime push to grant statehood to the nation’s capital.
The GOP effort is part of a growing political backlash against Democratic-led criminal justice changes that picked up pace after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Earlier Thursday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell cited crimes in his home state of Kentucky
as he tried to blame Biden and Democrats for rising crime, including an incident two days ago when masked thieves stormed an auto showroom and drove off with a half dozen cars.
“Getting murderers off our streets and foreign poison out of our neighborhoods are among the most basic governing responsibilities you can possibly think of,” McConnell added, a reference to the country’s fentanyl crisis. “Evidently the Biden administration does not agree or just cannot deliver.”
Washington’s criminal code hasn’t been updated substantially since it was first drafted in 1901.
Criminal justice experts have said it is outdated,
confusing and not in touch with how crimes are punished today.
In the nation’s capital, like most places in the country, Black people are disproportionately affected by the criminal laws.
The revisions passed the D.C. Council late last year would do away with mandatory minimum sentences for many crimes and expand jury trials for lower-level charges. The changes also would reduce the maximum penalties for burglary, carjacking and robbery.
But the district is not a state, and because of that, it lacks the same rights that the 50 states have to make and amend laws.
Also, district residents do not have voting members in
Congress.
While Congress has allowed the city’s residents some powers of “home rule,” it has retained veto powers over district government actions.
House Republicans voted 250-173 to overturn the rewrite of the criminal code.
They have also acted to overturn a new D.C. law that would allow noncitizens the right to vote. Biden was expected to let that pass, too, though it did not come up during the discussion Thursday, two of the officials said. It was not clear whether Biden would sign the voting resolution, which passed 260-173, or let it take effect without his veto or signature.
The crime legislation, which would take effect in 2025, created some friction within the district government.
In January, Mayor Muriel Bowser vetoed it, writing in a letter that she had “very significant concerns” about some of the bill’s proposals. She later proposed changes after the council overrode her veto.
In 2022, there were 203 homicides in the district, about a 10% drop after years of steady increases. Homicides in the city had risen for four years in a row, and the 2021 murder count of 227 was the highest since 2003. The city’s police union said in a statement that changes would “lead to violent crime rates exploding even more than they already have.”
But Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s nonvoting delegate in the House, said the criminal law overhaul was “extraordinarily important” and the result of years of work by lawmakers, criminal justice experts and nonprofits that deal with offenders.
“I really can’t understand why they are so controversial because the code, the new code, raises penalties on some crimes, but it lowers penalties on others. That’s based on experience,” Norton said.
But the issue is broader than simply about crime: D.C. officials say it’s a local matter and the federal government should keep out.
“The insult of limited home rule is that the 700,000 D.C. residents and taxpaying Americans, and their duly elected officials, must endure the review and oversight of our laws by officials not elected to represent our interests or values,” Bowser wrote in a letter to Congress on Feb. 23.