More on Lifting DC Riders
As I wrote yesterday, DC is finally free to implement laws and spend money on programs related to abortion, medical marijuana, and needle-exchange programs as Congress had stripped away the anti-democratic riders that usurped these aspects of home rule. Here’s a great statement from Delegate Norton on what the lifting these riders in the annual appropriations bill means:
“We will never make up for the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has besieged this city because needle exchange was banned for a decade, or make up for the resulting loss of lives. There is no way to make poor women, forced to carry pregnancies to term, believe that their reproductive choice was guaranteed in the decades during the longest of the bans, on using local funds for abortions for poor women. But, today we start a new chapter in democracy in the District of Columbia with the first D.C. appropriations in memory free of all un-democratic, anti-home rule riders.”
Laura Evans from Fox 5 did a good overview last night as well:
