Will D.C. Always Be Fighting With Republicans In Congress?

Nelson Rimensnyder ran for delegate to Congress against D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton last year. He lost.

“I will not be running again,” he says. “Unless the Koch brothers finance my campaign. It’s very hard for Republicans to raise any money in this town.”

Rimensnyder is a Republican, and he’s lived in Democratic Washington, D.C. for about 30 years.

When I met him, the first thing we did was go to his garage. It looks like a room in the National Archives, except we’re both wearing coats because there’s no heating. It's also loud — you can hear the garbage truck backing up in the alley. The shelves are bending under the weight of congressional reports and voting records. Much of it about home rule.

Rimensnyder is a historian, and worked at the Library of Congress. He does a lot of research about D.C. home rule, including when Congress passed the act granting a form of self-government in 1973.

“The Republicans on the committee in the House were very interested in it. The local Republican Party has always supported having a governor and legislative assembly and so testified at the time,” He says.

As a resident and Republican, Rimensnyder wants D.C. to have more power. Rimensnyder shares these characteristics with a famous Republican — Richard Nixon.

“It was a pet project," says Don Santarelli, who worked under President Richard Nixon while putting together the justice system that D.C. would eventually have under home rule.

President Nixon pushed for D.C. home rule from the beginning of his presidency.

“He was excited about doing something that was good, that was good government,” says Santarelli. “This is true of him in the way he looked at the federal government, too.”

In the first months of his presidency, Nixon charged Congress with “establishing a meaningful self-government in the District." There had been a number of votes on the issue in Congress — almost all of them died in the House committee overseeing the District of Columbia after passing the Senate.

The roadblock was the committee chairman Rep. John McMillan, a Democrat from South Carolina.

After McMillan was voted out in 1972, Rep. Charles Diggs took his place on the committee — he was an African American Democrat from Michigan.

The Home Rule Act passed shortly thereafter with bipartisan support. And some Republicans still support more rights for D.C., like former Representative Tom Davis of Virginia.

“I was a chief advocate for giving the city a vote in Congress,” he says. “It just never made sense to me that the capital of the free world shouldn’t have a vote in the U.S. Congress.”

Davis introduced a bill that would give D.C. a vote in the House. He had 23 Republicans supporting the effort.

“And that’s where the Republicans came up short of the stick,” says Davis. “Because it’s a Democratic city and understandably, the way politics was played, you don’t want to just give the other side a vote.”

Of course, that’s about voting representation, not social issues. If you want to talk about Washington’s recent marijuana legalization effort, which Republicans in Congress blocked.

“Voting on it in the House floor, how do you go back to a conservative constituents and say, ‘Oh, I allowed marijuana to be used?’ I get it. I get the politics of it,” says Davis.

And marijuana legalization is the most recent in a series of fights between the city and Congress.

“Well, unfortunately. The Republicans do, you know, come out with a lot of riders,” says Rimensndyer. “Abortion and some other subjects. They’re always trying to meddle in our gun laws.”

Rimensnyder doesn’t care for that type of meddling. He points to the D.C. GOP’s platform which supports more D.C. autonomy. But he also believes the District has to be realistic in its efforts.

The future of D.C. representation isn’t in statehood, he says. Other alternatives should be tried. He wants a constitutional amendment to give D.C. votes in the House and Senate. Until that amendment passes, he wants to end federal tax collection in D.C., something he believes has support from both sides of Congress.

“All the rights we’ve gotten have been incremental, and they’ve been bipartisan. We don’t get anything without bipartisan support,” says Rimensnyder.

Of course, he wants a Republican delegate in the house to prove that the city can be bipartisan. He’s waiting for the political tides to turn in that direction. In the meantime, he’ll be weatherizing his garage full of archives.

[Music: "Tired of Fighting" by Menahan Street Band ]