Today, Explained - Congress is daddy

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

DC is baby. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained . Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today Explained, Sean Ramos firm. If I told you the United States Senate was working overtime last night, what would you think they were hashing out? Something about Ukraine? Maybe something about the debt ceiling? Maybe they were talking about train derailments? Turns out, no. The United States Senate skipped dinner to undo Washington, D.C.'s new crime bill.

The D.C. Revised Criminal Code Act is another example of how far the far left is so out of touch. The resolution represents my chance to say enough is enough. It sends the wrong message that D.C. is not serious about fighting crime. Why Congress and even the president of the United States took it upon themselves to govern the nation's capital for the first time in over 30 years. Coming up on the show. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs?

And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today,ained. Now you say, not Francis. Today Explained. Good job.

Full name is Martin Ostermuhl, and I'm a reporter with WAMU 88.5, the NPR station in D.C. Where you can hear Today Explained Monday through Thursday at 9 p.m. I digress. Martin, just tell us right off the bat, what just happened in Washington, D.C.? It's a bit of a big old mess, which is kind of Washington, D.C. in a nutshell. No, this is me in a nutshell. Help! I'm in a nutshell!

No, this is specific to law and order, criminal justice, public safety in Washington, D.C., but being that it's Washington, D.C., it quickly became a national issue. The fundamental of it is that the District of Columbia, which is a self-governing city, wanted to rewrite its criminal code, which is all the criminal laws on the books, which are very old. That's why they wanted to rewrite them. They ended up doing that. It went through the legislative process, but everything in D.C. has to go to Congress for review, gives members of Congress a chance to weigh in. Things went south when it go to Congress for review, gives members of Congress a chance to weigh in. And things went south when it got to Congress. Obviously, there's a Republican House,

an election coming up next year that's going to be very consequential. So Republicans took the opportunity to make this an issue about Democrats being quote-unquote soft on law and order, on public safety, on crime. The D.C. City Council wants to go even easier on criminals. And this kind of turned into a much bigger debate than I think a lot of local D.C. lawmakers expected. Even liberal Democrats in the nation's capital have gone too far for President Biden. The president broke with the left wing of his party. He's standing by a GOP bill to block the D.C. City Council from changes in the city's crime code.

And before we get to this actual criminal code, which is, you know, the heart of this matter, just remind people in case they don't know why a D.C. crime bill would need to go to Congress for approval? Well, the District of Columbia is just that. It's a district, it's not a state. And until about 1975, it wasn't even a place that had its own mayor or its own locally elected lawmakers. So when it got those by virtue of Congress granting home rule, they included a little provision in there which says that anything the DC council or local legislature does still has to go to Congress for review. So basically, they were saying, we're giving you the right to govern yourself, kinda. We're going to let you govern yourself, but we're going to get to govern if we feel like we need to step up and be the responsible adults in the room. Let's talk about this crime bill. You said the previous crime bill,

or I guess the current crime bill, was old. How old is it? Yeah, so the criminal code, like I said, that's all of the criminal laws on the books, date back to 1901, and it was Congress that wrote these criminal laws. It shall not be lawful for any person or persons to play the game of football or any other game with a ball in any of the streets, avenues, or alleys in the city of Washington. And they've been updated in a piecemeal fashion since then. So they've kind of tweaked certain things, you know, they've enhanced or increased penalties for certain offenses as they needed to.

But a lot of the definitions and terms and offenses that were written back in 1901 are still on the books in the district. Nor shall it be lawful for any person or persons to play the game of bandy, shindy, or any other game by which a ball, stone, or other substance is struck or propelled by any stick, cane, or other substance in any street, avenue, or alley in the city of Washington under a penalty of not more than $5 for each and every such offense. And what was the proposed overhaul? What exactly was the DC City Council proposing here? So the City Council proposed,

and it was actually wasn't even the City Council, about 15 years ago, they started this process. They created a specific commission to start to do that process. And they worked over the last six years, actually going through every line of the code, of the criminal code and rewriting terms coming up with new sentences all that sort of jazz that is the sort of thing that only a very committed

nerdy lawyer would ever want to do so they did that for six years they produced what was what ended up being about a 400 page bill with all these changes included that's what they submitted in late 2021 to the dc council the d. Council considered it, made a couple changes, and voted on that late last year. By a unanimous vote, the D.C. Council passed the district's first overhaul of the criminal code in more than 100 years, the committee chair calling it monumental. And as the product of countless meetings, hard collaboration and compromise, and thoughtful engagement by a wide range of stakeholders, all of which might disagree with a particular element of the total package, but unanimously recommended moving it forward nonetheless. Okay. And was any of it

controversial late last year? And if so, which parts of it were controversial? Again, it's a massive project, 450 pages worth of legislation, just thousands of words being changed. So there's a lot of things going on, but pretty much everybody involved, which include prosecutors, public defenders, criminal justice reform advocates, lawmakers, they said they agreed on 95% of what was in there. Again, this was stuff like you're removing references to steamboats and livestock and offenses that just make no sense anymore because no one is lighting a bonfire in an open field in the district. It just doesn't happen anymore. So why do you need to outlaw it? So there was lots of agreement on those sorts of things. The 5% where there was disagreement, there was significant disagreement. And this was stuff like this big bill would have reduced certain maximum penalties for some violent offenses. So say carjacking, which is in the news nowadays, has a 40-year max sentence under current law, but they were going to lower that to 24 years. And this kind of went on for a variety of different offenses. And the logic was, well, even though it says 40 years on paper, judges never hand out 40-year sentences. They

usually hand out much less than that. Let's match what's on paper with what's happening in practice. There was another provision that would have reinstated the right to a jury trial for folks arrested for misdemeanors. Since the mid-1990s, if you got arrested for a misdemeanor that would have gotten you less than six months in jail, you didn't have the right to a jury trial, you just got a judge. This new bill would have reinstated that. The chief judge of the Superior Court sent in a letter to the mayor. In order to provide enough jurors for a projected 210 additional jury trials, the courts will have to summon 70,750 more jurors each year. And then there was a third provision that was controversial, which would have eliminated all

mandatory minimum sentences for everything but first degree murder. So every other mandatory minimum would be tossed. Today on News 4 Midday, Police Chief Robert Conte said while he supports some aspects of the legislation, he's against decreased penalties for gun crimes. Anytime you talk about reducing penalties, the consequence that is associated with crimes that are particularly impactful to community members, I think that that is just a non-starter. And then the last thing that was controversial was a provision that would have allowed anybody who was in prison for 20 years would gain the right to ask a judge to basically reduce their sentence at that point. It was kind of like, you know, asking a judge to review every person's sentence after 20 years in prison.

So you say 95% of this new criminal code overhaul isn't controversial. Do the city council and the mayor and whomever else come to agreement on the 5% you're calling controversial? No, and that's one of the issues that kind of led to Congress getting involved. So the council approved this bill on two separate votes unanimously. But when it went to the mayor, she had raised concerns about this reduction of penalties for certain offenses and also concerns about reinstating the right to a jury trial because she said it would overwhelm the courts. What this law would suggest is that the number of trials would skyrocket.

And so we have concerns about all of that. So she specifically said, I really hate these provisions. I don't think they're workable. I think they're going to be worse for public safety in the city. You're experiencing more robberies and carjackings and people using guns. And I think the message about accountability for those crimes has to be abundantly clear. So she vetoed the bill. Now, the council came back a couple weeks later and overrode her, which is normal legislative process.

You know, the executives can veto and legislative bodies can override the vetoes. And that was it. And the measure was then sent to Congress for the congressional review period we talked about earlier. And that started off the kind of what we've seen recently in the news with both the House of Representatives and the Senate getting a chance to weigh in on this bill. Right, exactly. So tell us what happens once this bill gets to Congress. So it gets to Congress and they immediately start taking wax at it because they start calling it soft on crime.

They say that the D.C. Council is being, quote unquote, radical and minimizing these maximum sentences. Republicans are saying just sends the wrong message. There's no way they should be doing this. The radical D.C. Council has chosen to prioritize legislation that will turn this crime crisis into a catastrophe. So when Republicans are sort of coming down on D.C. for being, quote unquote, soft on crime, do House Democrats support the Republicans or do they support D.C.?

Or does it split the caucus or what? Well, it split the caucus in the House. I mean, 31 Democrats voted with Republicans. So the House bill that was going to block the district's revised criminal code passed with a significant majority. I mean, and again, bipartisanship is not a word you hear thrown around often on Capitol Hill these days. And this was one thing that was bipartisan. So I think that sent up some alarm bells amongst both local city officials and then Democrats in the Senate. Now, the whole time this is being volleyed sort of back and forth in Congress, there's this looming threat that Biden might step in and for the first time in his presidency, exercise his veto. But then to everyone's surprise last week, that's not how

this plays out. The president supports D.C. statehood. He's been clear about that, but he's not going to veto this bill from Congress, which does amount to Congress sort of meddling in D.C.'s own governance, right? So how do you square that circle? Both things can't be true. No, we believe both things can be true. Look, right now, D.C. is not a state. This is coming to the president, right? This is something that's coming to his desk and he has to take action. How does Biden's announcement that he's not going to veto Congress here go over in D.C., go over amongst Democrats? Well, amongst Democrats on the Hill, lots of them were not happy.

Some Democrats in the House said, listen, we voted the way we voted supporting the district because we assumed that Joe Biden was the backstop. He was the guy who was going to come and he was going to veto any bill and he was going to put an end to this nonsense. You know, Biden says he's not going to do that, leaves these Democrats exposed. And also Biden's decision opened more Democrats up in the Senate. It gave them the opportunity to come out against the district and make their own statements about being strong on crime and they don't want to be seen as soft on crime. Now, locally in the district, this was huge because again, one thing that district officials, they could disagree on lots of things. The one thing they generally agree on is that they should be allowed to decide their own affairs. They should be able to govern for themselves. So members of the DC council, the mayor, they disagree on

lots of policy issues, but when it comes on the basic issue of who should make those decisions, they agree. It should be us as DC's elected officials. Unfortunately, we live with the indignity of limited home rule in the district of Columbia. We're taxpaying Americans. We're in the shadow of the Capitol. But we don't have two senators. We don't have a vote. When President Biden made his announcement, there was a lot of angry Democrats, local folks in D.C. I am totally against our Congress blocking anything that our elected officials are doing.

And then there was other folks on the other side who said, listen, this was fundamentally a strategic error by the DC council to pass a bill and then send it up to Capitol Hill as Republicans were taking over the house. This isn't technically an election year, but election cycles never end in our new age of politics. And so 2024 is coming up. And so members of the Senate who are up for reelection have to think about these things. President Biden himself has to think about these things. So there was a lot of dissension internally. And the fact that Mayor Bowser and the D.C. Council had disagreed on provisions also created friction. So disagreements all over the place here. A pretty tumultuous few weeks for the District of Columbia. Yeah, I mean, this is the sort of drama we haven't seen in a long time. Like I said,

there hasn't been a disapproval resolution that's cleared Congress in three decades. You know, there's usually a lot of noise from Republicans on the Hill when they dislike things that D.C. is doing, which is often because D.C. is a Democratic city. But for it to get this far and for Democrats and Republicans to be united on this issue against the district is virtually unheard of. Congress is daddy. D.. Congress is daddy. D.C. is baby. More with Martin in a minute on Today Explained. I'm your daddy.

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free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario D.C. sleeps alone tonight. Today Explained, we are back. Martin, for all of those who listen to our show and don't live in D.C. like you and I do, can you just remind people how D.C.'s government works in concert with the federal government? Yeah, it's one of those very confusing things in the sense that nowhere else in the country is like DC. First of all, DC, like most people know, is not a state. And DC only got its own mayor and elected city council back in the mid-1970s. As a senator, President Richard Nixon boasted that he supported DC home rule. When he was elected president some decades later, he took action and signed

the D.C. Home Rule Act into law. It's pretty limited home rule. It's not like, here, govern yourselves and we'll just step out of the way sort of thing. It's everything that D.C. does can be checked by Congress. Essentially, Congress is the ultimate check and balance on the district local affairs. So any bill that clears the D.C. Council goes to Congress. Congress gets a chance to weigh in. Congress has the power to basically tell the district it can't do certain things by putting provisions in the federal budget that say DC cannot spend money on needle exchange programs. It can't spend money to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana. It can't spend money subsidizing abortion for low-income women. And those are all things that Congress has done to D.C. and is currently doing to D.C. So again, it's a very kind of fraught relationship because D.C. did get the chance to govern itself with adult supervision. I think the marijuana example you quickly alluded to there is one of maybe the most illustrative of all of them, because I think a lot of people across this country now have now had the experience of having marijuana legalized for

either recreational or medicinal use at the state level while it's illegal at the federal level. But in D.C., it's a much murkier situation. Could you explain it to people who aren't familiar? So back in 2014, D.C. voters approved a ballot initiative that legalized the possession, home cultivation, personal use, and gifting of small amounts of marijuana. So everything but sales. Which is to say that if you go into a marijuana dispensary in D.C., you don't buy marijuana. You give them like $20 for a painting or a bracelet, and they give you some marijuana along with said painting or bracelet as a gift.

Yeah, it's a very confusing, convoluted, and completely congressionally made reality because after DC voters approved this ballot initiative, Congress came back, congressional Republicans came back and said, well, listen, that's great and good, but you're not doing anything when it comes to recreational sales.

So they put what's called the budget rider, so essentially a prohibition on the city saying you can't legalize recreational sales. And that was in 2015, and it still exists today. And so we have this market where literally dozens of stores across the city, you can go in, like you said, you can pay 50, 60 bucks for a sticker or a cookie, and you get your quote unquote gift of marijuana. But let's be honest, we all kind of understand what's happening. You're buying marijuana. But all the while, city officials have said we want to legalize recreational sales because then we can tax it.

We can regulate it. We can, you know, take in potentially large sums of revenue from it. But Congress has still said no. And of course, there's a very active movement in the District of Columbia to change this status quo. It ebbs and flows. There's times where people say, listen, the ultimate fight is statehood, and that's what we have to go for. And then there's moments where they say statehood is never going to happen. Let's go for something else. Let's try for, let's say, like a full voting representative in the House of Representatives, because right now it's just

a non-voting delegate. Nothing has moved particularly far. And it was only about eight years ago that the fight for statehood became the kind of the main goal, the driving goal for city officials. And it actually got relatively far. I mean, the House of Representatives, when it was controlled by Democrats, voted twice on a bill that would have made D the 51st state. Today, by passing H.R. 51 to omit the state of Washington-Douglas Commonwealth to the union, the House will finally address this unjust, unequal, and undemocratic situation. Now, the Senate has never done the same because of the filibuster, basically.

And so the city has been stuck without statehood still, but it has made progress in kind of like making the issue more of a national issue and tying it to voting rights and saying, listen, if you believe in expanding voting access, expanding voting rights, you should also believe in statehood. And when Biden came out last week and said he wasn't going to support this crime bill, he wasn't going to use his veto. His statement was, and I'm reading here, I support D.C. statehood and home rule, but I don't support some of the changes D.C. City Council put forward over the mayor's objections, such as lowering penalties for carjacking, which a bookstore in D.C. retweeted saying, look, folks, I fully support the rebel alliance, but construction of

the Death Star must proceed on schedule. How complicated is Biden's support of D.C.'s statehood made by his actions in the past week? It's gotten a lot of people confused because obviously they appreciate that President Biden supports statehood, has said he supports statehood. And last year he made, you know, he tied the issue of statehood to his broader fight for voting rights, for access to the ballot and that sort of stuff. But now he was effectively trying to please no one apparently by saying, I support statehood and I support the district's right to govern itself, except in this one case where I really don't support the district's right to govern itself. And this is why I'm going to,

I'm not going to step into this fight that Congress is having with DC. So yeah, at best, it's confusing. At worst, it's gotten a lot of people pretty pissed. What are the biggest barriers to DC achieving its sort of perpetual goal of being a state? I mean, it depends who you ask. I mean, there's folks that just say, well, listen, it's a city full of Democrats, which means it's going to gain two senators that are going to be Democrats, which means it's going to benefit Democrats in the Senate. So there's a very partisan angle to it. There's also folks who raise lesser concerns, stuff like DC is just geographically not big enough. And yes, it would be the smallest state by geography, though it would have more people than Vermont or Wyoming.

Some Republican senators have raised concerns, including that there's not enough miners and loggers in DC. Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. But what vital industries would the new state of Washington represent? Lobbying? Bureaucracy? bureaucracy? You know, there are some constitutional concerns where they say the founders wanted a place for the federal government that was insulated from the states, where Marylanders and Virginians couldn't storm the Capitol. Ironically, when January 6th happened, it was D.C.'s police officers that helped clear the Capitol. But that notwithstanding, this idea that D.C. has to exist in this kind of neutral territory, and so thus D.C. could never be a state because then it's no longer neutral. And then the federal government is at the risk of being at the whims of just the district. But meanwhile, you've got Biden saying he supports statehood. I think he had Trump at

CPAC this weekend saying the federal government should take over control and management of Washington, D.C. And you got 700,000 people caught in the middle without much of a right to self-govern. I don't know that anybody could have foreseen this exact series of events happening the way it did. There was always an assumption that, okay, fine, this criminal code bill will go to the hill. Republicans will vote to disapprove it. But we've got the Senate. That's run by Democrats. And then that fell.

Well, fine, we've got Biden. He's the ultimate backstop. There's no way that President Biden, a supporter of statehood, wouldn't veto this. And then President Biden says, no, I'm not going to veto this. There is some collective anger about the situation the district has always found itself in and continues to find itself in, but there's also some finger pointing internally of, was this a strategic mistake by us? Was this just the wrong time to debate criminal justice reform and reforming criminal laws? Shouldn't we just wait till Democrats at least have maybe retaken the House so we can at least have that as a backstop?

So there's a lot of layers to this. It's complicated. And in the meantime, we have a joke on our license plate. End taxation without representation. I mean, at least you've got that. You've got the license plate. To be fair, I liked it more when it just said taxation without representation. It felt sort of self-deprecating. Now it feels just like this hopeless slogan that's never going to do anything. That being said, the district is rolling out a new license plate this year.

It's going to come out soon. It's going to say We Demand Statehood. Wow. I know, there's that. The joke is over. I mean, you don't get a new criminal code, but you get a license plate that says we demand statehood. So there you go. Martin Ostermuhl, reporter and editor at WAMU 88.5 in Washington, D.C. Our program today was produced by Today Explains Philadelphia Bureau Chief Miles Bryan.

It was edited by Washington's own Amina Alsadi. Fact-checked by North Carolina's Laura Bullard. And mixed by the King of New York, Paul Robert Mounsey. Yeah.