A generation ago, D.C.’s two top local Democrats shared a Northeast Washington stage with the country’s most powerful Republican, a White southerner who had just become House speaker and who tried to win over a crowd of predominantly Black Washingtonians.
Seated on the stage a few feet away, Marion Barry, the city’s mayor at the time, and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who had introduced Gingrich, applauded along with the crowd.
That such a conciliatory moment seems improbable in contemporary Washington is a testament to the hostility now ingrained in American politics, when bipartisan cooperation — especially around the management of the nation’s capital — is rare, if not nonexistent.
Since winning a House majority in November, Republicans have made a show of focusing on violence in D.C., seeking to block local legislation and calling the city’s leaders before the House Oversight Committee, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who is slated to testify on Tuesday.
Republicans have long made a sport of deriding Washington, portraying it as a dysfunctional, crime-infested “swamp” defined by insider deals and government bloat. President George H.W. Bush, during a 1989 televised speech, held up a baggie of crack cocaine that he said federal agents had “seized” across from the White House in Lafayette Park (it was later revealed that federal agents, at the direction of Bush aides, had lured a drug dealer to the park and paid about $2,400 for the crack). In 1997, in the midst of Barry’s scandal-tarred reign, conservative columnist George Will called the city a “national embarrassment.” Only last year, Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) described D.C. as a “disgrace to our country” and floated the idea of repealing Home Rule.
Yet even during the most combative of periods, D.C. officials and Republican leaders have met privately or otherwise maintained lines of communication, a level of cooperation that appears to have eroded during President Donald Trump’s tenure. The tensions between House Republicans and D.C. leaders flared in recent weeks when GOP members persuaded enough Democrats, including President Biden, to block a historic D.C. Council-approved revision of the city’s criminal code.
“There’s simply no communication,” said Norton, D.C.’s House representative since 1991. In the past, she said, Republicans, when they were in the majority, were “not as polarized against the District” and “we were in regular communication.”
“It’s easy to talk with people, it should be easy today but it’s not easy,” Norton said. “I don’t have those kinds of relationships anymore because the Republicans don’t want them.”
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which has jurisdiction over the District, “wants to work with city leaders and hopes they want to work with the committee,” said Austin Hacker, his spokesman.
At a March 29 hearing on crime and city management in D.C., at which Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) testified, Comer said that D.C. was in a crisis over violence and that “city leaders have failed in their responsibility to keep safe its citizens and visitors and provide economic and educational opportunities for them.”
Beverly Perry, a senior adviser to Bowser, said in a recent interview that the mayor has met on occasion with House Republicans since taking office in 2015, and described her relations with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as friendly. Perry said that Bowser was open to continuing to meet with Republican lawmakers, though she added: “The thing I would not encourage the mayor to do is meet with people just to be insulted.”
Bowser and Comer met at the congressman’s office on May 9 for about a half-hour, Hacker said, adding that they discussed “local initiatives,” as well as the upcoming committee hearing that Bowser is scheduled to attend. Norton was not present. Susana Castillo, a spokeswoman for the mayor, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
The city’s complex relationship with the House is rooted in a constitutional provision that gives Congress authority to review the city’s budget and overturn legislation before it becomes law, a power that federal lawmakers have exercised four times since Home Rule was enacted in 1973.
Although it hasn’t happened recently, there have been periods when Republican leaders have promoted the city’s quest for independence. In the 1950s, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed to allow for Washingtonians to vote in presidential elections, and to have voting representatives in Congress and Home Rule.
President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 approved a bill granting D.C. a nonvoting delegate in the House. Three years later, he signed a bill granting D.C. Home Rule. In 1978, a group of Republicans, which included conservatives such as Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), pushed for D.C. to get representation in both the House and Senate, a proposed constitutional amendment that died when only 16 of the required 38 state legislatures approved it.
George Derek Musgrove, a University of Maryland at Baltimore historian who has written about D.C. history, described 1978 as a turning point when moderate Republicans who wanted to grant the city rights were overtaken by social conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly. “They did not want any expansion of D.C. self-determination, specifically voting representation in Congress,” Musgrove said. “It would empower liberals and threaten the Republic.”
By the mid-1990s, when Republicans took over the House for the first time in decades and Gingrich became speaker, D.C. was on the verge of bankruptcy, a crisis that eventually led Congress to create a Financial Control Board to oversee the city’s finances.
Jack Kemp, a moderate Republican who had served as Bush’s secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, saw D.C.’s financial travails as an opportunity for the GOP to demonstrate that it had an interest in helping cities. At Kemp’s urging, Gingrich met with Barry, and the two men, at least for a time, formed an unlikely partnership that captured national attention.
“Are we smoking something or is that Marion Barry with Newt Gingrich?” was the headline of a syndicated column at the time by Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune.
At the town hall meeting at Eastern High School in 1995, a C-SPAN recording of the event shows, Barry told the crowd that he and Gingrich “found a common bond” and that “I’m convinced that our speaker cares about our children.” Norton told the audience that she had “cordial relations” with Gingrich, though she added that she opposed his “national agenda” and joked, “He knows that as a Democrat I seek his early retirement as speaker.”
However, Norton also added, “I am willing to put the District above partisanship.”
When it was his turn, Gingrich was deferential to the mayor and the congresswoman, saying that in their work together Norton is the “senior partner and I am the junior partner.”
“Our goal, our vision should be to have the best capital city in the world and to make that real,” he said.
Bernard Demczuk, who served as Barry’s liaison to Congress at the time, said Barry and Gingrich spoke regularly, both in person at the speaker’s U.S. Capitol office and on the phone. Demczuk said Gingrich and Barry, who was born in Mississippi and had deep roots in the civil rights movement, had a shared interest in Southern history.
“I remember being in Marion’s office and him saying, ‘I gotta speak to Newt’ and then pressing a button on his phone that went straight to the speaker’s office,” Demczuk said. “That’s how good the dialogue was. There was a warm, Southern, cultural relationship.”
Gingrich, in an interview, said Barry and other Democrats were willing to work with him because there was a “general consensus that the city needed to be fixed.”
“We took the position that we had a real obligation to do everything we could to make the city work because it’s the American capital,” Gingrich said. Of course, his interest in helping the city had its limits. Gingrich opposed granting the District full voting rights in Congress. “Why would you give them two senators who would be dedicated to raising taxes and hiring more bureaucrats?” he asked.
Thomas M. Davis III, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who served on the Oversight Committee in the mid-1990s and later chaired it, said there was a sense at the time that “we are in this together.”
“Eleanor went out of her way not to bash me when we disagreed — we didn’t see it as advantageous to attack each other,” he said, referring to Norton. “There were no surprises. We worked with the mayor in those days. We communicated.”
These days, Davis said, that kind of cooperation is difficult because “there’s a huge cultural divide between Republicans from rural areas and urban Democrats. It’s a microcosm of what has gone on in the country.”
“If you don’t talk, the lines always harden,” Davis said.
Jason Chaffetz, the former House Republican from Utah who chaired the Oversight Committee from 2015 to 2017, antagonized D.C. statehood activists when he suggested that Maryland should annex part of the city. He also opposed an assisted suicide law passed by the D.C. Council, as well as the city’s quest to legalize marijuana.
Chaffetz’s criticism of D.C. prompted a local artist to design stickers that began appearing on lampposts around the city showing the congressman’s face over a word used to refer to one’s posterior. A D.C. group formed a political action committee to raise money to defeat Chaffetz if he ran for reelection in Utah.
At the same time, Chaffetz said in an interview, he maintained “cordial” relations with city leaders, including Bowser, Norton and then-Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier. He said his opposition to D.C. legislation was based on policy differences, and he dismissed the idea that Republicans intervene in the city’s affairs to score points with constituents back home, even as the National Republican Congressional Committee aired digital ads in March attacking Democrats who opposed blocking the city’s criminal code revision.
“There’s no one on that dais — certainly on the Republican side — who is going to win or lose based on how you treat Washington, D.C.,” said Chaffetz, referring to Oversight Committee Republicans. “It’s not on the list of top 50 issues that constituents care about.”
Still, Chaffetz also said that the political climate “has become more toxic” and that neither Democrats nor Republicans “get any points for reaching out to the other side.”
During the most recent round of acrimony, Republicans, and even Democrats, say that the D.C. Council effectively invited the GOP to meddle in the city’s affairs by enacting a revision of the criminal code that was portrayed as weakening penalties for certain crimes at a time when urban violence is a national concern.
The politics surrounding the revision was further complicated by Bowser’s veto and criticism of the council legislation, a factor that was cited by House Republicans, as well as Democrats, when explaining their support for the disapproval resolution that Biden signed.
Mendelson said Bowser’s public posturing “emboldened the Republicans” and “was very bad for the District’s relations with Congress.” For her part, the mayor has said congressional Republicans have meddled in D.C.’s affairs whether she agreed with the council or not.
GOP attacks on the city, said Mendelson, who was elected to the council in 1998, feel “a little meaner” than in the past because “there’s less interest in the facts.”
“It’s like we’re a pawn,” he said. “This was about scoring points in a national debate, and the District is the collateral damage.”
After he testified at the Oversight Committee, Mendelson said he approached Comer at the dais and told the congressman that he hoped they could meet in the future.
“He was friendly, he said, ‘Sure,’” Mendelson said.
Hacker said Comer “is happy to meet with the chairman. We will reach out to his team.”
As of Thursday, no meeting had been set.