The House on Wednesday ignored President Biden’s veto threat and voted to rescind a D.C. police overhaul that city leaders pushed in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
The disapproval resolution passed 229-189. The largely party-line vote marked the second time the chamber has rebuked the city government in the nation’s capital this year.
“Progressive policies from the D.C. Council continue to hamstring District officers and needlessly place them in unsafe situations,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican. “This police reform package, which D.C. has presented to Congress for approval, does far more harm than good and must be rejected.”
Many Democrats and Mr. Biden backed an effort to kibosh a previous bill that revised the D.C. criminal code, fearing it was soft on crime. But the attempt to kill the city’s new policing laws was a bridge too far for most Democrats, who said the overhaul was designed to weed out bad cops.
With Mr. Biden sending a clear veto threat this time, the resolution targeting the D.C. police bill will likely face a harder time getting through the Democrat-controlled Senate. Only 14 House Democrats backed the disapproval resolution on Wednesday.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, Georgia Republican, sponsored both resolutions as part of a GOP attempt to flex Congress’ constitutional powers to block local bills. The House majority is targeting local measures that are viewed by some as detrimental to public safety in the nation’s capital.
Congress gets a mandatory review period for D.C. legislation.
“As millions of people visit D.C. every year, it’s imperative that our nation’s capital is safe for all residents and visitors, yet unfortunately this simply is not the case,” Mr. Clyde said. “As the heart of our republic, Washington, D.C., should be the safest city in this great nation.”
Mr. Biden enraged House Democrats by saying he opposed the previous Clyde effort to rescind an overhaul of the District’s criminal code, only to later declare he wouldn’t veto the disapproval resolution. The president later signed the bill.
The D.C. police overhaul, meanwhile, began after a police officer killed Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The reform was transmitted to Congress in a final bill in January.
The White House said Mr. Biden doesn’t agree with every part of the city’s legislation but he approves of key provisions, including a ban on chokeholds, limits on the use of force and deadly force, improved access to body-worn camera recordings and stronger training requirements around deescalation tactics and the use of force.
“Congress should respect the District of Columbia’s right to pass measures that improve public safety and public trust,” said the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The city’s police union opposed the local overhaul, saying it has hurt recruitment and led to an exodus of officers.
Mr. Comer said transparency measures in the city bill will simply make it easier for activists to delve into the personal lives of officers and harass them. He said other measures would make it difficult for officers to get approval for the use of riot gear.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Maryland Democrat, said the city wanted to set reasonable checks on police behavior. He said a key plank of the overhaul would have fixed a situation in which the city was forced by labor arbitrators to rehire officers who’d been fired for engaging in criminal misconduct, including assault and child abuse.
“In their eagerness to kick around the more than 700,000 taxpaying American citizens who live in Washington, D.C., but have no voting representation in the House of Representatives or in the U.S. Senate, our colleagues are embracing a claim that puts them in favor of an extreme police-union position on discipline that jurisdictions across America are debating and many of them are rejecting,” Mr. Raskin said.
He also cited a letter from Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson that said, “This kind of piecemeal interference hurts our ability to confront crime and improve public safety in the District of Columbia.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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