Chances are that D.C. home rule has been on your mind lately. It certainly has been in the news. Members of Congress—one representing Utah (2,000 miles from D.C.) and one representing Tennessee (700 miles from D.C.)—recently introduced a bill to repeal D.C. home rule. And President Trump has said he wants to “take over” D.C.
Such news has left people in D.C. and around the country with a lot of questions. Can President Trump take over D.C.? What is D.C. home rule? How does it work? And why does it matter?
Here are some answers to these pressing questions.
What is D.C. home rule?
D.C. home rule is shorthand for the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, which allowed D.C. residents to elect the mayor, D.C. Councilmembers, and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners who run day-to-day affairs in the District.
Before Congress passed and President Nixon signed the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 into law, members of Congress—never elected by D.C. residents—had the responsibility of running the District. Their offices fielded calls about D.C.’s potholes, trash pickup, schools, and crime, in addition to all the calls they were getting from their constituents in their home states.
History from before the home rule era suggests that Congress struggled to manage D.C. and that members of Congress were regularly reminded of their responsibility by D.C. residents who demanded improvements. By 1973, after nearly 100 years of trying to manage local affairs, many members of Congress were quite eager to give up the responsibility—even those who had wanted to maintain power over the majority-Black District.
For example, Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia had once opposed D.C. home rule, but changed his mind in 1971, telling the Washington Post that under such a law, “Congress can no longer be made the whipping boy” and “There would be no more passing of the buck to Congress.” In the same Washington Post article, Representative Thomas Abernathy of Mississippi said that managing the District made him “sick and tired of people saying Congress won’t give us this and Congress won’t give us that.”
The D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 ultimately passed as a compromise between D.C. residents who wanted full democratic rights and members of Congress who wanted to maintain power over D.C. and its majority Black population. The law allowed D.C. residents to elect a local government that would oversee the day-to-day functioning of the District, while Congress maintained power over local laws, the local budget, and other matters.
This compromise bill passed, in part, because members of Congress wanted to stop having to manage the District’s day-to-day affairs. The D.C. Home Rule Act itself explains that the “intent of Congress is to delegate certain legislative powers to the government of the District of Columbia” to “relieve Congress of the burden of legislating upon essentially local District matters.”
The D.C. Home Rule Act also passed because of relative bipartisan respect for local government. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, many federal leaders accepted the general principle that D.C. should have some form of local control and democracy, even as they debated the extent of local democracy. When President Nixon signed the D.C. Home Rule Act into law, he called himself “a longtime supporter of self-government for the District of Columbia.”
The law also passed in large part thanks to the civil rights movement and the growing political power of Black Americans. In 1957, D.C. became the first majority-Black major city, and the broader civil rights movement supported D.C. democracy. For example, immediately after attending the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. attended a march for D.C. home rule. And local civil rights leader and D.C. Delegate to Congress Michael Fauntroy directly helped register voters in Congressional districts where Black voters could swing elections. Thanks to Fauntroy, D.C. democracy became a central issue for Black voters around the country. This organizing strategy eventually ousted segregationist Representative John McMillan of South Carolina, who had long blocked D.C. democracy on the House District Committee. With McMillan gone, Representative Charles Diggs, a civil rights advocate and Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, became chairman of this committee in 1973. That year, the D.C. Home Rule Act passed.
How does D.C. home rule work?
Under home rule, District residents elect a mayor, D.C. Councilmembers, and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners. D.C.’s local government has the power to pass and enforce local laws and to pass the District’s budget. However, because D.C. is considered a “federal district,” not a state, Congress—where District residents have no voting representatives—and the President have the legal ability to micromanage local laws and local tax dollars.
For example, all local D.C. bills have to go through a Congressional review period before they become law. The review period is 30 working days for civil bills and 60 working days for criminal bills. Here’s how the process works.
- Step 1: Elected D.C. Councilmembers vote to pass a bill.
- Step 2: The bill goes to the mayor, and if the mayor doesn’t veto it, the bill passes. If the mayor does veto it, the D.C. Council can vote to override the veto and pass the bill with a two-thirds majority vote. This is normally when a bill would become law in a state. But D.C. bills go through several more steps.
- Step 3: At this point, the local bill has to go to Congress for review. This means that members of Congress—none of whom D.C. residents ever elected—can either let the review period pass without interference, or disapprove of the bill.
- Step 4: If Congress lets the review period pass, the bill becomes law. But if Congress disapproves of the bill by passing a joint disapproval resolution in both the House and the Senate, the bill moves on to the next step.
- Step 5: The disapproval then heads to the President, who can veto the disapproval or sign it and thus overturn the local law.
There are two other ways that Congress can interfere in our local democracy. Congress can attach rules to the federal budget (called appropriations bills), and they can pass stand-alone laws for D.C., bypassing our entire elected local government. For example, as part of the House of Representative’s 2025 D.C. Appropriations Bill (H.R. 8773), some Representatives tried to prohibit D.C. from using local funds to enforce a no-turn-on red law. That measure, rightfully, failed.
Of course, no members of Congress were elected by their constituents to micromanage the day-to-day affairs of the District. And history has shown that it is deeply inefficient for Congress to spend its time on dog ownership rules in D.C., or on how the trash gets picked up in our neighborhoods. Micromanaging D.C. is not anything that voters elected members of Congress to accomplish.
The President can also interfere in local matters in ways beyond signing Congressional disapprovals. For example, the president has limited power to temporarily take over the D.C. police department “for federal purposes” under “special conditions of an emergency.” And without D.C. Statehood, the president has control over the D.C. National Guard, which can have disastrous results. For example, in 2020, the Trump administration called in the National Guard on non-violent protesters marching for racial justice. Military helicopters followed protesters into D.C.’s Gallery Place area, where people normally shop, eat out, visit galleries, and watch sports. The helicopters then descended just above protesters’ heads a few blocks over. Demonstrators crouched and protected their heads as gale-force winds hurled dirt and broken glass at them, tore signs from buildings, and ripped branches off trees—terrifying intimidation on downtown streets. ACLU-D.C. sued on behalf of one of the demonstrators and obtained a favorable settlement, but presidential power over the D.C. National Guard remains.
Why does D.C. home rule matter?
Of course, home rule deeply affects the everyday lives of D.C. residents. The people who live in D.C. are just like people who live in any other state. We are veterans, nurses, grocery store clerks, teachers, restaurant workers, volunteers, family members, and neighbors. We deserve to govern ourselves—not to have politicians who we never elected dictate what happens in our neighborhoods. Denying democracy to the 700,000 residents of D.C., the majority of whom are Black and brown, is an egregious example of voter suppression happening in our country today. And, practically speaking, history suggests that Congress struggled to provide decent services to the people of D.C.
D.C. home rule is also important for all voters across the country who elected their members of Congress to represent them on matters of national importance. Members of Congress were not elected to waste their time and taxpayer money micromanaging the day-to-day affairs of the District, which has its own locally elected government. No voter had “can people turn right on red in D.C.?” as an important reason to vote for their representative or senator.
What can you do to protect D.C. home rule?
Good news! You have already started by reading this blog post. Knowing the facts about D.C. home rule and why it matters is critical to protecting the limited democracy we have and ultimately fighting to make D.C. a state. For more on D.C. Statehood, head to dcstatehoodnow.org.
Now that you know the facts, share them with your friends and family in states around the country. We are going to need their support to protect home rule. For example, we may need them to contact their members of Congress, and it’s important that they hear from you about D.C. democracy well ahead of when we need them to take action.
You can also sign up for our email list so that you are the first to know when we all need to take action together to protect D.C. home rule.
Together, we can defend our democracy and build a more just and free D.C.
