Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. Madam Chair, I move to strike the last word.

The Acting CHAIR. The gentlewoman from the District of Columbia is recognized for 5 minutes.

Ms. NORTON. Madam Chair, the underlying bill is a special insult to the Americans who voted for the new majority on the promise of jobs. They might forgive that the mjority does not know how to produce jobs or that they haven't produced jobs yet, but they will never understand a bill that will make history on the number of jobs it affirmatively destroys.

The deficit commission warned about cuts that are at the centerpiece of the majority's bill, cuts that don't distinguish between short-term and long-term deficits, between the job-producing role of government investment during an economic turndown and the needed savings to reduce the long-term deficit, which must go on simultaneously; but the majority loses its focus entirely with its obsession on snatching local authority, over local funds from the District of Columbia.

While the majority wants to make draconian cuts in most Federal programs, putting at high risk the economy itself, it simultaneously expands Federal power into the local funds and affairs of a local jurisdiction, the District of Columbia. Three riders in this bill are anti-self-government, having nothing to do with the underlying bill or the Federal Government.

Particularly cruel, apart from the home-rule violation, is the attempt to reimpose a provision that would keep the District of Columbia from spending its own local funds on needle exchange programs. If this is reimposed, a rider I got off during the last few years, it will cost lives and spread HIV, as it did for the prior 10 years.

But they're not through there. The majority takes a hard-line approach, even when I asked for and was denied the right to testify before the Judiciary Committee on yet another rider, a rider that would keep local District of Columbia funds from being spent on abortions for poor women. What business is it of any Member of this body how the District of Columbia spends its own money, which it raises from its own residents and businesses?

Mr. Speaker, they go further. They try to reestablish a voucher program in the District, ignoring a compromise reached last Congress to allow every child now with a private school voucher to remain in the program until graduation. It disregards the fact that the District has the largest public charter school alternative in the United States. Almost half of our children attend these schools. If the majority wants to give money for alternatives to public schools, then they've got to respect our choice.

Republican support for vouchers--only in the District of Columbia--exposes them for where they really stand on vouchers and school choice. There is wholesale support in this body for public charter schools. They will not bring a voucher bill for the Nation to the floor because polls and referenda in the States show there is zero national support for private school vouchers. Instead, Republicans single out the District and only the District, ignoring the city's own extraordinary, flowering public charter school program. Our choice, not someone else's who has nothing to do with us.

You cannot try on this floor to slash Federal power while dictating local policy and how local money should be spent. Those two don't go together.

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