Jena 6 and DC .5 million

[schwael]

My blood is still boiling over the "failure" of the DC vote bill in Congress.  Not that I was a huge fan of the bill since it puts the issue of the voting rep in front of the issue of home rule, which i find to be backwards.  However, it's still pretty ridiculous that they wouldn't even open the debate on the Senate floor after it passed the House

Comments

[jbailey]

For those of us new on the scene: What are you talking about? =)

[schwael]

ah. sorry! Well, there's two ways to tell the story based on what one sees as the priority issue. First here's how I tell it (and how Al Jazeera tells it if you do a search for their DC story on YouTube) - When the US constitution was written, the capital was made a "district" and exists outside of any state government. Therefore it does not have typical states' rights of self-governance. Therefore Congress controls the city government's budget and has veto power over all of the city's laws. Some argue that the city's problems such as poverty and having 6x the national AIDS rates wouldn't be any better solved if it had home rule, but that seems like a copout to me