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House lawmakers voted Tuesday to repeal a pair of D.C. laws that have been friction points for years between the deep-blue city and Republicans in Congress: a law allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections and another that prohibits the D.C. police union from bargaining on officer discipline. The two efforts would still have to pass in the Senate.
Dozens of Democrats joined Republicans in voting to revoke the laws in a striking show of bipartisan interest in intervening in local policy. The dual action underscored the city's vulnerability at a time when it is repeatedly playing defense on Capitol Hill and in the shadow of a president who has casually floated taking it over. The votes are among three scheduled this week, with another Wednesday seeking to repeal D.C.'s "sanctuary city" law limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
"The right to vote is a defining privilege of American citizenship," Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said on the House floor. "Diluting that right by extending it to noncitizens - whether here legally or illegally - undermines the voice of D.C. residents."
The vote to repeal the city's noncitizen voting law marked the third time the House has sought to block the law in as many years, showing the GOP's relentless mission to stop the policy ever since it passed the D.C. Council in 2022. The repeal effort has repeatedly garnered broad bipartisan support, with 56 Democrats joining Republicans in the 266-148-1 vote this time, a slight uptick from previous years.
Republicans have also long eyed repealing provisions in a large police reform package that had rankled the D.C. police union, namely excluding the union from negotiations over officer discipline and giving more power to the police chief in those decisions.
"When we undermine law enforcement, we embolden the criminals," said Rep. Andrew R. Garbarino (R-New York), who sponsored the repeal and described it as an effort to reverse the department's challenges retaining officers. "If Washington, D.C., won't fix this problem, it's our job to."
Thirty Democrats joined Republicans to vote for the repeal, which passed by a vote of 235-178-1.
Other House Democrats were quick to point out that, for three months, House GOP leadership did not make time to schedule a vote on a bill to restore D.C.'s 2025 budget - after Congress slashed it by $1 billion as part of a stopgap funding bill in March - yet is making time to vote on three bills overturning D.C. policies.
"I could think of a million things Congress should be focused on right now, but instead we're micromanaging D.C.'s affairs without providing D.C. the funding to which it is entitled," said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pennsylvania), who put forth an amendment in the Rules Committee seeking to put the D.C. Local Funds Act, restoring D.C.'s funding, up for a stand-alone vote as well. Scanlon's amendment failed on a party-line vote.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) stressed that the noncitizens voting law only impacts local, not federal, elections, but said "most troublesome to me is the interference with the police accountability bill."
"There's no question in my mind the police discipline bill is playing to the [police union]," Mendelson said. "It's not about a genuine interest in helping public safety."
The law passed by the D.C. Council removed the police union's ability to negotiate police discipline because for years those negotiations resulted in rules that often forced the department to rehire officers accused of serious misconduct.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) wrote a letter to top lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee last month urging them not to repeal the police discipline law. Rather than protecting hardworking officers, she wrote, Garbarino's bill would "reverse common-sense disciplinary reforms adopted by the District to the sole benefit of [police] officers who engage in egregious, sometimes criminal misconduct and seek to evade accountability."
Bowser did not join a letter with the D.C. Council or D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D) urging Congress not to repeal the noncitizens voting law, which mirrors her silence on that bill in previous years. She did not sign the bill when the D.C. Council passed it in 2022, which Republicans were quick to point out in urging Democrats to join them in the repeal.
A spokeswoman for the mayor said in a text message that "Mayor Bowser continues to oppose all congressional interference in the lives of Washingtonians. DC will continue to fight to protect our home rule and self-determination. If Congress wants to be helpful, they should pass the District of Columbia Local Funds Act to fix their damage to DC's FY25 budget."
D.C. has spent more than two years in the hot seat in Congress - especially on issues of policing and immigration, two policy areas where Democrats, particularly those in vulnerable swing states, have shown more of a willingness to join Republicans in rebuking liberal D.C. policies. Congress oversees D.C. under a provision in the Constitution.
Notably, several newly elected Democrats in the D.C. region joined Republicans in voting to repeal one or both of the laws. They included Rep. Eugene Vindman (Virginia), who backed both, and Reps. Suhas Subramanyam (Virginia) and April McClain Delaney (Maryland), who voted to repeal the noncitizens voting law.
Both previous efforts to block or repeal D.C.'s noncitizens voting law died in the then-Democratic-controlled Senate. But with the support of Democrats, the Senate voted in 2023 to block D.C.'s larger police reform legislation that was passed after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. That included the provisions regarding officer discipline. President Joe Biden vetoed the effort to block it.
Ankit Jain (D), D.C.'s shadow senator, said the fact that the Senate is now under Republican control may increase the likelihood of the bills' succeeding in the Senate, which does not always prioritize D.C. legislation, and said he is actively working to persuade enough Democrats to oppose the repeal efforts. The legislation would be subject to the filibuster, requiring support from seven Democrats.
Jain said he was particularly worried about the impacts of the repeal of the noncitizens voting law. It could unseat three local neighborhood commissioners who are noncitizens and would cease to be registered voters, he said, and it would also have an unclear impact on D.C.'s July 15 special council election in Ward 8, in which ballots are already being mailed to voters.
"You talk about election interference - this is directly interfering in our election," Jain said.
Sarah Graham, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Board of Elections, confirmed that any noncitizens would be ineligible to hold office if the repeal succeeded and any noncitizens would not be able to vote in the special election. Fewer than 1,000 noncitizens are registered to vote citywide, and only 24 are registered in Ward 8, according to the D.C. Board of Elections.
On the House floor Tuesday, Republicans especially objected to undocumented immigrants or foreign nationals being allowed to vote in local elections.
"Washington, D.C., should be at the forefront of ensuring safe and secure elections, not encouraging illegal aliens and others to vote for polices that we don't want," said Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who sponsored the repeal bill.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), D.C.'s nonvoting House delegate, defended the law, saying on the floor that "D.C. allows noncitizens to vote in local elections because it believes that all adult residents deserve a say in their local government."
And of the D.C. police discipline law repeal, Norton said that while Republicans regularly seek to repeal local legislation, "what is different about this bill is it also overrides the long-standing wishes of the D.C. police department." For years before the reforms, police chiefs said they lacked enough power to permanently fire officers accused of crimes or violating department rules. A 2017 Washington Post investigation and 2022 D.C. Auditor's office report both found that the department was routinely forced to rehire officers it sought to terminate, in some cases for alleged misconduct as serious as physical and sexual violence.
In many cases, officers were rehired after police chiefs were forced to defer to decisions of third-party arbitrators who sided with the officers, a system the D.C. Council's police reform bill scrapped. In other cases, the department was forced to rehire officers because it missed a key 90-day deadline for bringing disciplinary action; the council's bill relaxed that deadline to make it easier for the department to meet.
In addition to allowing the union to again bargain with the department over discipline, the House also voted to restore tighter deadlines for the police disciplinary process and repeal a requirement that police notify the public before disciplinary proceedings.
D.C. police union chairman Greggory Pemberton did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Speaking on a panel of police union representatives at the White House last week, Pemberton criticized the D.C. Council for passing "layers and layers of legislation" that curtailed officers' ability to police and denied them the right to fight false allegations of misconduct.
The union has fought the discipline reforms since the council first passed them on an emergency basis in 2020, suing the District in federal court over the changes and arguing they strip officers of their rights as D.C. government employees. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, and judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld that decision.
The union also separately sued the D.C. Auditor over the 2022 report.
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