Three months ago, President Trump urged House Republicans to “immediately” fix a $1.1 billion budget hole they forced on Washington, D.C. This week, the lawmakers have instead advanced bills to impose their policy agenda on the city’s Democrat-led government — without addressing the funding shortfall.
The House passed two bills on Tuesday to undo local legislation passed by the district’s government: one to repeal a law letting noncitizens vote in local elections and another removing provisions that make it easier to discipline police officers for misconduct.
A third bill, slated for a vote later this week, would bar the district from passing sanctuary laws and force local officials to cooperate with federal immigration policies.
Even as they moved to shape the district’s laws, House Republicans have taken no steps to address the budget hole they created when they passed a stopgap spending bill in March. Several lawmakers suggested on Tuesday that a resolution remained distant and potentially even off the table, despite Mr. Trump’s stated support.
“Nobody’s talking about it anymore,” said Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. “Nobody’s talking about it at all.”
Speaker Mike Johnson has blamed the delay on the need to address other Republican priorities. “We’ve got a lot on our plate,” he said on Tuesday.
All three district-related bills would still need to be approved by the Senate, where seven Democrats would have to join all Republicans to allow the measures to be considered for a vote.
Since Republicans assumed control of the House two years ago, they have been increasingly eager to exercise Congress’s powers to block legislation passed by district officials. The House last year passed a similar prohibition on noncitizen voting, but it stalled in the Democrat-led Senate.
Under the 1973 law that gave the district’s residents power to elect a mayor and council, Congress kept the authority to review the district’s legislation. The roughly 700,000 residents of the district do not have a vote in Congress but are represented by a nonvoting House delegate, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can serve on House committees but cannot vote on bills.
On the House floor, Ms. Norton, a Democrat, condemned the House’s legislation as “anti-democratic,” saying the bills subverted the rights of local residents to govern themselves.
“It is always wrong and never the right time for Congress to legislate on local D.C. matters,” Ms. Norton said. But the bills were even more egregious, she added, given the failure to address the budget shortfall, which she called “fiscal sabotage” by Republicans.
When Republicans passed a bill in March to keep the federal government funded, they did not include routine language that exempts the district’s budget from spending limits. Without it, the district was forced to revert to last year’s funding levels, even though the money it spends comes from local taxes that it has already collected.
The Senate overwhelmingly approved separate legislation to rectify the issue. Mr. Trump — who has sounded practically mayoral in his stated ambitions to clean up the district’s streets and “beautify” its parks — threw his endorsement behind the measure. But the House never took up the fix.
When nothing had happened by April, Mayor Muriel Bowser alerted Congress that under a 2009 federal law, she had the authority to increase local appropriations by 6 percent, reducing the billion-dollar shortfall to $410 million. That still amounts to a substantial cut from what the district had budgeted.
Ms. Bowser’s office said in a statement that she “continues to oppose all congressional interference in the lives and affairs of Washingtonians” and urged the House to pass the funding and “fix their damage” to the district’s budget.
Some Republicans agree that the district must have autonomy over the revenue it collects.
“I support D.C. spending its own money,” Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the Oversight Committee, which oversees the district’s laws and budget, said during a hearing on the bills on Monday. “That has nothing to do with the legislation we’re presenting today.”
But other Republicans have maintained that their support for the spending fix was contingent on their imposing their views on voting, abortion and other issues.
Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, suggested that issues still needed to be tackled before the budget measure could be passed.
“We’re working on it right now,” he said on Tuesday. “But obviously there are other problems we’re trying to resolve along the way.”
