[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 70 (Friday, May 17, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H2752-H2754]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REDEFINING THE NATION'S CAPITAL AS A FREE-STANDING FEDERAL AGENCY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2013, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms.
Norton) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
Ms. NORTON. I thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I come to the floor to discuss a bill addressed only to my district,
the District of Columbia, which will come to a hearing next Thursday in
the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, chaired by Chairman
Trent Franks.
In point of fact, over the last month, there have been two such bills
introduced in this House, bills that can only fairly be characterized
as abuse of power. They are both directed against only one
jurisdiction--my own district.
H.R. 7 would appear to be a Federal matter. That bill would make
permanent the Hyde amendment, which annually passes this House every
year, barring the use of Federal funds for abortion. Wherever you stand
on abortion, at the very least, that is a Federal matter. In the very
same bill however is an outrageous abuse. The bill seeks to do the same
for the District of Columbia, barring permanently the use of local
funds--funds raised by local taxpayers--for abortions for low-income
women. Local funds are similarly used for abortions for low income
districts in districts across the United States because, after all,
they are local funds. But H.R. 7 redefines the Nation's Capital which
was given home rule in 1973, as a free-standing jurisdiction--instead
of a Federal agency for purposes of abortion.
Imagine having your district defined as a Federal agency so that the
Congress can make ideological points by overturning local legislation
at will. Yep, this is still America. That bill is H.R. 946. As to the
District of Columbia, it's simply an expanded way to interfere with the
business of a local jurisdiction.
I must say that I think that H.R. 7 and H.R. 1797 I will discuss
shortly do point to the bankruptcy of the Republican agenda in the
113th Congress essentially does what is done anyway every year with
respect to abortion. It hasn't come to the floor yet.
{time} 1350
It hasn't come to the floor yet, and indeed very few bills have come
to the
[[Page H2753]]
floor. Sometimes the House has a rule one day and the bill the next day
when there was plenty of time on both days because the Republican House
doesn't have any agenda and it has to stretch out what few bills it has
to make it look like there's something that the House is doing. That's
how the House is doing its business.
Now the House is into my business, however, when it deals with the
district I represent, a district of 600,000 American citizens who you
can bet your life are going to demand and always demand to be treated
as full American citizens because that is exactly who we are. We will
never accept overriding our rights--our local rights and our
constitutional rights--in order to satisfy the agenda of this Member of
Congress or that Member of Congress who is making a point for special
interest groups or for others.
The bill that I want to primarily discuss, H.R. 1797, goes beyond the
usual way in which the Congress--or at least the Republican Congress--
seeks to interfere with the rights of the people of the District of
Columbia. What they do generally is to take advantage of the fact that
the district's own local taxpayer-raised funds have to come here
essentially to be checked off and signed off, and Congress don't ever
look at the budget. How could they? They don't know anything about a
local jurisdiction's budget. But they do use the local budget to attach
their own ideological stripes, and the usual one has to do with
abortion.
H.R. 1797 uses the District of Columbia in yet a new way with a new
abuse because it goes beyond the low-income women for whom the district
cannot spend its own local funds. Instead, H.R. 1797 goes after every
woman in the District of Columbia because that bill essentially would
make all abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks illegal.
Don't talk about the obvious constitutional issue. I'll get to that
in a minute.
H.R. 1797 seeks to regulate pregnancy and abortion--a local matter--
with respect to only one jurisdiction, and it's a matter that usually
involves a matter of principle. People who are ``pro-life,'' as they
call themselves, have my respect, but this circumstance is the only
example where I have seen them try to apply the principle only to one
jurisdiction, leaving everybody else in the United States exempt from
the so-called ``principle.'' If abortion should be denied after 20
weeks, as a matter of principle, then surely that principle should
apply throughout the United States. There's a reason why it doesn't,
and I will get to that.
First, I want to thank Chairman Trent Franks for permitting me the
courtesy of testifying next Thursday at the hearing of H.R. 1797 that
affects only my district. He had two bills last year. This bill is a
redux of the same bill that came to the floor and was defeated last
year, and he also had another to permanently disallow local funds to be
used to fund abortions for poor women in the District. On both of those
bills, I was denied the right and the courtesy of testifying, although
traditionally granted to Members, even though bills don't usually
involve only one jurisdiction.
This bill is of great concern not only to me, but there's going to be
a press conference next week indicating that the bill is viewed by
women all over the United States as, of course, a vehicle to eliminate
the reproductive rights of women across the country. The bill is
fatally flawed in several obvious ways.
First, there is discriminatory treatment of the District of Columbia
to its residents by banning abortions after 20 weeks only in the
District of Columbia, as I've indicated. If barring abortion is a
principle, it's a principle that as a matter of principle, would apply
nationwide. But it's not applied nationwide in H.R. 1797 because the
District is the one jurisdiction over which Congress has a modicum of
control. Until the District becomes a State, the Congress can step in.
But, of course, the Home Rule Act contemplates that in our democracy
Congress would never step in, unless there was an abuse of Federal
authority by the District of Columbia. This would be, on the contrary,
an abuse of Federal power by the Congress of the United States were
this bill to pass.
The bill discriminates against the District by picking out the
District among all the districts in the United States for unequal
treatment. H.R. 1797 violates unabashedly Roe v. Wade, which allows
abortion until viability as determined by a physician. Roe and all of
its cases, all of the precedents that follow it, make it clear that
viability cannot be determined by statute.
Roe v. Wade, 40 years ago, guaranteed the right of an abortion as a
constitutional right. So you can expect that this is a matter that
would be ultimately challenged. But the reason that the District is the
vehicle used here is that the special interests obviously want a
Federal imprimatur and don't have the guts to go get it by bringing a
bill to the House floor that would apply to everybody. So they choose
the bullying way, the easy way. You have a Federal imprimatur, if you
can get the Congress to vote with respect to one jurisdiction because
the Congress is Federal. Of course, the bill violates the Home Rule Act
itself because while the Home Rule Act acknowledges the ultimate
jurisdiction of the Congress, it clearly, in its terms, contemplates
that the legislative power will go to the Council of the District of
Columbia. There is no principled reason here to violate the local
jurisdiction's local authority.
Here we have gone from the usual attack on low-income women by
denying the city its authority to spend its own taxpayer-raised funds
as it sees fit, to an attack on every woman of childbearing age, every
such family in the District of Columbia.
The bill goes further. It criminalizes abortion by making a physician
subject to imprisonment for up to 2 years for abiding by Roe v. Wade
and engaging in an abortion.
Then the bill has a truly bizarre section which gives new meaning to
the word ``extreme.'' It allows any current or former health provider,
who has ever treated a woman--and it doesn't say when that provider
might have treated a woman, perhaps as a child, because it has no
limit--but allows any former health provider to obtain an injunction
against the abortion. The right to privacy, among others is absent.
{time} 1400
This is a new low in extreme provisions that we have seen in the
Congress from my Republican colleagues. The very idea of even
introducing a bill that would deny the constitutional rights of only
one jurisdiction is an outrage in and of itself. Sure, bills are
introduced on this floor all the time that are, on their face,
unconstitutional, but it is bullying to pick out one jurisdiction
because you don't have the courage to come forward with a national law,
a national bill. By no means, however, do we believe a national bill is
appropriate.
This bill has also been introduced on the other side by Senator Mike
Lee of Utah. Apparently someone asked him if there is a 20-week
abortion bill in Utah or if Congress might introduce one for Utah. He
was quick to say, no, they don't have such a bill in Utah, and he would
oppose it if the Congress tried to enact one that applied to Utah. He
would be for only if Utah itself enacted the bill. So here we have a
Tea Party Republican in the Senate who applies his Tea Party principles
against federal intervention except when it comes to the District of
Columbia.
Anybody who thinks that we're going to stand here and let that happen
without, in fact, protesting it and rallying Americans who believe in
fairness do not know us very well. We refuse to be a vehicle for the
extreme views or pet projects of some Republicans. They have their own
outlets. They have the right to come to this floor and offer bills.
They have the right to speak on this floor in any way they choose. We
will not be a prop for those views.
The Republicans are the supposedly small government Tea Party party
who are now using the big foot Federal Government against a single
jurisdiction that doesn't have a vote on this floor, that could not
vote for or against H.R. 1797 if it came to this floor. What kind of
courage is that? It's a bully's path to making ideological points. If
you have an ideological point, make it; don't use my district to do so.
The extreme right-wing of the Republican Party doesn't even want the
Federal Government in what the Federal Government has always done, but
now they've got the Federal Government in
[[Page H2754]]
something that even they say the Federal Government should never be
doing--interfering with the local rights of people to govern themselves
locally.
This is a country in which there are wide differences on many
subjects, perhaps none more so than the right to reproductive choice,
but it is also a country that respects one another in the various
States and localities where we live and do not try to reach over and
somehow compel people in one jurisdiction to do as people in another
jurisdiction do. That's the difference between this country, a Federal
republic, and other countries, and it is a principle we mean to hold
this Congress to.
There is the claim that, well, the District doesn't do enough
restricting of abortion, so that's why we simply have to step in here.
On the contrary, there are nine States that do not restrict abortions
any more than the District does, and the District abides by Roe v.
Wade. Yet this bill is directed against only one jurisdiction. Of
course I take exception to the bill itself, but I take particular
exception against being bullied by people outside my jurisdiction in
order to satisfy their own personal philosophical concerns.
I can tell you this much: the notion that you can use the District
and abuse its women on reproductive choice and nobody else will care
should have been put to rest last year. The kickoff of the Republican
attack on reproductive rights was, in fact, this bill which went to the
floor and failed, but Republicans didn't stop there. Going back to
abortion was not enough. They went all the way back to contraception
and, amazingly, made contraception a campaign issue in the last
election. Well, I hope they have learned their lesson, because women
put all of this together and showed what they thought about it in the
Presidential election.
I am very grateful to women all over the country for how they
responded specifically to this very bill, this 20-week abortion bill
that applied only to the District of Columbia. They were not fooled for
a moment. Women across the United States wrote thousands of emails and
letters indicating that they understood this bill, the very same bill
that was defeated last year, to be a vehicle for inroads into the
reproductive rights of women across the United States. Far from
ignoring it because, after all, it was only 600,000 D.C. residents. The
women may live in California or Wyoming--we saw them writing from their
States in large numbers, making it clear that they saw it for what it
was, that special interest groups were going from State to State to
pass anti-choice bills. They begin at personhood where there is
absolutely no right to abortion or contraception because, in their
view, life begins at conception. And then some have 6-week bills and
there are other 20-week bills. They are all over the map. And by the
way, they are quite divided because they are all over the map.
They have settled on 20-week abortion, however, for H.R. 1797, and we
mean to do for this bill what we did last year--to turn it back, to
make women all over the country understand it for what it is, just as
they did last year, to see that the only way to resist these attacks is
to be as persistent as our opponents are in coming back to attack women
using the women of the District of Columbia.
The women of my district are the chosen vehicle, but the targets are
a national campaign against the reproductive rights of women in the
Nation. They can't come to the floor, or they won't, with a broadside
attack on the reproductive rights of women. So they do the cowardly
thing and come against the District of Columbia because of the
technical jurisdiction that, of course I can see the Congress has, but
no principled Congress would ever use its federal power against a local
jurisdiction.
{time} 1410
Therefore I come to the floor this afternoon to put all on notice
that you can come as many times as you want and as many ways as you
want, but I represent 600,000 taxpaying Americans, and they insist that
they are equal to Americans everywhere else.
For 100 years they did not have any rights. They didn't have the
right to vote for President. They didn't have the right for a local
government. For 100 years they were ruled by three commissioners
appointed by the President.
During the civil rights era, the Congress became ashamed of having a
local jurisdiction that was its Nation's Capital, that did not have the
same rights as other people in the United States, not even a local
government, a mayor or a city council who could enact legislation
affecting the local population, although this population had been
paying Federal income taxes ever since our country has been collecting
income taxes. And our residents have fought and died in every war our
country has ever fought, including the war that created the United
States of America.
American citizens in a jurisdiction as old and historic as the
Nation's Capital is, will not have our citizenship rights taken away
lightly, and we will not be used and abused by Members of this
Congress, whatever their party.
Our Union is not perfect, but it strives to be. It can become perfect
only when it hears about its imperfections. There is no imperfection
greater than having Members of Congress focus on one jurisdiction that
does not have the same ability to defend itself as every other
jurisdiction.
It is hard enough to see Members of Congress come down and vote on
the District's local appropriation, which they had nothing to do with
collecting, but which is still a part of what is allowed in the
Congress. But it is disgraceful to see one issue picked out and one
jurisdiction alone targeted.
If you feel strongly about your issue, step up and air your issue in
the way this House allows. And I ask that whatever the Congress does,
that it ask itself when it deals with the District of Columbia, is the
action consistent with the principles that you profess on this floor
time and again?
I ask reconsideration of any such attempts in the future. There is no
possible way that any self-respecting jurisdiction would accept
discriminatory treatment.
And so, Mr. Speaker, I put the Congress on notice, we will never--we
do not accept the discriminatory treatment in the Franks bill, H.R.
1797 or in the bill that I discussed previously, H.R. 7, to bar
abortions in Federal legislation permanently, which somehow tucks the
District into a bill on federal funds.
We do not accept and never will accept second-class treatment by the
Congress of the United States. We will always protest it, and we will
always find a way to find the solid ground that American citizens must
stand on to protect their rights.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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