President Biden’s reversal on a House GOP-led measure to kill the District of Columbia’s criminal justice overhaul last week exposed a White House still struggling to figure out how to operate in a Washington where Republicans have partial control over the agenda.
Mr. Biden told senators that he would sign the resolution, just weeks after the White House had told lawmakers the administration opposed it.
Mr. Biden’s allies in the District were also incensed by his stance. Some called it a betrayal. One D.C.-based group said he was embracing “the oppression, the disenfranchisement and the outright discrimination woven throughout our history.”SEE ALSO: Nancy Pelosi criticizes Joe Biden admin over handling of D.C. crime bill
Backers call it a long-overdue rewrite of a century-old code, bringing sentences more in line with what judges are doing right now. Opponents call it the wrong message to send at a time when crime is surging in the city. Legislative experts said either OMB fired off its statement without first checking with the president — a real no-no — or else someone had a change of heart.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre rebutted that suggestion.She acknowledged that OMB had said the president opposed the resolution, but she said that statement didn’t include a veto threat, which meant Congress should have known he might sign it.
“They slipped into the easy familiarity of [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi solving all their problems for them over the last two years, so legislative affairs consisted of trudging up to the Hill and hearing what the former speaker had to say and adapting their perspective to her guidance,” he said. “Now they need to act independently, and they are subsuming a lot of their policy calls into the political agenda.
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