On March 24, 17 organizers from the organizing coalition Hands Off DC were arrested outside of the Capitol while protesting Congressional involvement in the D.C. Council’s legislative affairs. Sixteen movement leaders were arrested for blocking traffic and one was arrested for vandalism, according to reports.
Shadow Representative Oye Owolewa was among the leaders arrested. “It’s a shame that we have to get arrested for folks on Capitol Hill to pay attention,” he told Washingtonian at the time. The arrested leaders were reflective of the broader coalition of more than 50 organizations behind Hands Off DC that share one common goal: organizing and working on behalf of D.C.
Hands Off DC, the coalition of statehood activists and local elected officials who first came together to demand Congress respect D.C.’s right to self-governance after the Senate voted to overturn local criminal code reform, is now gearing up for a new fight. The March vote in Congress to overturn D.C.’s revised criminal code sparked this new organizing movement to curtail congressional interference in the District’s affairs and press for statehood and local autonomy. More recently, in June, Republican Members of Congress introduced a series of budget riders that attempt to strip away D.C. residents’ rights to basic health care, workplace privacy, harm reduction services, and more.
“None of it is a serious attempt to improve life for people in D.C. It’s all just political theater that will get them on Fox News, but it has the potential to really harm D.C. communities,” Alex Dodds, an organizer with Hands Off DC, tells Washington City Paper.
This June move by Congress is the latest in a long string of attempts to interfere in D.C.’s local political process this year.
In the past six months, Congress has intervened to block local legislation three times. In February, the House of Representatives blocked D.C. legislation that would expand voting rights to noncitizens, but it failed to advance out of committee in the Senate. The aforementioned efforts to overturn the D.C. Council’s Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022 culminated with President Biden’s veto in March.
By May, both chambers of Congress had authorized a joint resolution against the D.C. Council’s Comprehensive Policing And Justice Reform Amendment Act, critical legislation that has already been in effect for two years on an emergency basis and once passed would update and reform policing practices in the District. President Biden vetoed the joint resolution on May 25.
Following Biden’s veto, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton tweeted, “As the first time a president has ever vetoed a disapproval resolution since passage of the Home Rule Act seeking to nullify local D.C. legislation, today’s veto is a historic victory for D.C. residents, home rule, and the cause of local control over local affairs.”
These actions were the first disapprovals of D.C. legislation since 2015.
According to Norton’s office, only three disapproval resolutions have ever been invoked against D.C. bills before: in 1979, 1981 and 1991.
This Congressional maneuvering has set off a high-stakes fight that has drawn into the fray Republican lawmakers, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the president. A lot of this Congressional involvement occurs because Congress has authority over D.C. affairs and reviews and approves its legislation before it can become law under the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act. The congressional approval process is unique to D.C. Once a piece of legislation is approved by D.C. Council, the Act must be sent to the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate for a review period of 30 days before becoming law (this extends to 60 days for certain criminal legislation).
During this review period, Congress may pass a joint resolution disapproving the Council’s act. If, during the review period, the President of the United States approves the joint resolution, the Council’s act is prevented from becoming law. If, however, upon the expiration of the congressional review period, no joint resolution disapproving the Council’s act has been approved by the President or the President has vetoed the joint resolution, the bill finally becomes an active law. Usually this is a straightforward approval process, but the recent spirited legislative session has proven otherwise.
In response to these political attacks on D.C. autonomy, Hands Off DC formed and brought together organizations working at the intersection of police abolition, public safety, representative democracy, and the multiracial fight for justice. The groups include but are not limited to Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, DC Vote, D.C. Justice Lab, and Don’t Mute D.C. Harriet’s Wildest Dreams is a Black-led abolitionist community defense hub focused on protecting community members from state-sanctioned violence in the District. DC Vote has been fighting for full and equal representation for D.C. residents through D.C. Statehood for years. D.C. Justice Lab advocates for large-scale criminal legal system reform for D.C. residents. And Don’t Mute D.C. is an organization dedicated to battling Black displacement and cultural erasure in the city. D.C. statehood is the underlying bond between these four groups’ unique missions.
These disparately focused groups have coalesced because they collectively recognized the urgency of the fight for statehood. If D.C. has the rights associated with statehood, none of this political circus would be happening, initiating a new surge of statehood organizing. The recent Congressional interference has shown that the Home Rule Act doesn’t grant the political autonomy that D.C. residents are seeking.
“Since March, thousands of people have joined us to tell Congress that D.C. should have the right to make our own laws about our own communities. And honestly, this is an instance where we see just how much our fights are connected,” Hands Off DC’s core organizing team tells City Paper. “D.C. statehood, abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, justice in policing, electoral justice — all of them are connected here, and the leaders of these movements in D.C. are now united and invested in fighting this interference together.”
D.C. elected officials, organizers, and residents have been fighting for statehood for decades to prevent political moments like this current one in the District’s history.
As DC Vote’s website states, “the District of Columbia was created in the late 1700s to help protect the original Congress from unruly mobs. At the time, the area was sparsely populated farmland and swamp. There is no way our Founding Fathers could have envisioned that their action would lead to the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of American citizens in the thriving D.C. of today.”
“Members of Congress come and go, but we live here,” Dodds notes.
“What do we do when our communities are under attack? We stand up, fight back,” echoed Makia Green, an organizer with Hands Off DC and previously Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, invoking the classic movement chant.
Their cause is getting support from some key Democrats in Congress, including Norton, 18 representatives who defended D.C.’s right to decide its own local laws, and 14 senators who sided with Hands Off DC in the March 8 vote on the revised criminal code.
“Almost 700,000 people live in the nation’s capital, and they are worthy and capable of governing their own local affairs,” Norton said at a May 16 Hands Off DC-organized press conference in response to Congressional involvement in both the RCCA and Comprehensive Policing Act. “House Republicans disagree, believing instead that D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and Brown, are incapable and unworthy of the same respect afforded to residents of their own districts.”
Organizers in the District are now focused on Congress’ latest move to interfere in D.C.’s legislative agenda. The steadily growing—almost always shifting—coalition is navigating organizing without traditional statehood rules while also balancing national attention ahead of an election cycle slated to drastically change the makeup of Congress.
Hands Off DC was able to convene so quickly because its organizers had already been organizing together for years, specifically since the 2020 racial justice uprising.
“Three years after 2020, none of us are unfamiliar with this type of struggle with Democratic leadership,” Green says. The trust building, base building, and movement infrastructure was already in place to mobilize in response to this political attack on D.C. autonomy and home rule.
Hands Off DC is hoping to continue building D.C. resident-led momentum and lead what Dodds describes as the “growing and strengthening effort in D.C. for community-led safety.”
“Community-led safety is the fight of our generation because it’s one that we keep coming back to,” said Green. “We will continue to be the first line of defense … The police have had 100 years to bring us to this point. It’s time to invest a fraction of that time and money into our communities.”
This continued fight over community safety, political autonomy, and budgetary decisions is fueling Hands Off DC’s next momentum of organizing against budget riders.
“If the most recent attacks all succeed, D.C. could lose important progress we’ve made to lower HIV rates, workers here could start being fired for using contraception, companies could legally discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples, we would have fewer ways to reduce traffic violence, and we would lose hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for traffic safety and social services,” Hands Off DC’s core team argues. “The recent bill threatens D.C. teachers’ ability to even discuss race in the classroom, and it continues to restrict D.C.’s ability to spend our own local funds on abortion services (even though D.C. is now experiencing an influx of individuals from other states). All of this is happening through proposals included in the next federal budget.”
“D.C. communities never asked for any of this,” they say. “Conservatives in Congress are using all of this to win a spot on Fox News and a talking point with voters in their home state, but none of it is actually about making D.C. communities any safer.”