Congress: D.C. can decide on medicinal marijuana and subsidized abortions
By: MICHAEL NEIBAUER
Examiner Staff Writer
December 10, 2009
Conference committee also continues to let school vouchers fade away
The District would be free to hold a medical marijuana voter referendum, to subsidize abortions with local money and to host needle exchanges virtually anywhere, under a budget bill adopted by congressional negotiators.
The final $24.2 billion Financial Services appropriations bill, adopted by U.S. House and Senate conferees late Tuesday, also signals impending doom for the D.C. school voucher program.
The legislation includes the District's federal appropriation and riders that control how the city spends local or federal dollars. Both chambers must still approve the measure.
The final measure provides $75.4 million for school improvement -- $42.2 million for public schools, $20 million for charter schools and $13.2 million for vouchers. But as President Obama recommended, the bill going forward only allows current voucher recipients to participate in the federally funded Opportunity Scholarship Program. Congress is slowly ending the program by barring new applicants.
The future of school vouchers in D.C. "would best be decided by the elected representatives of the people of the District," conferees stated in their report. If the city wants vouchers, they said, it can decide before next school year whether to create and fund a program.
In the final bill
» $15 million for forensic lab construction
» $200,000 for the Whitman-Walker Clinic
» $375,000 for D.C. National Guard tuition assistance program
The budget bill also lifts a pair of "special restrictions" imposed on the District -- one barring D.C. from legalizing medical marijuana via a voter referendum, and the other prohibiting the use of local tax dollars to subsidize abortions.
"The D.C. abortion rider has created severe hardships for low income women in the District," D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, said in a statement. "It has singled out the District and its women for unfair and unequal treatment."
The Archdiocese of Washington, meanwhile, hopes to save the abortion rider, said archdiocese spokeswoman Susan Gibbs.
"It's hard to justify why we would need more funding for abortion considering the abortion rate in the District already exceeds 40 percent," Gibbs said.
D.C. voters are widely expected to legalize medical marijuana if given the choice. A 1998 referendum on the same question found 69 percent support, but Congress barred the decision from taking effect.
Congressional conferees also removed language prohibiting the District from distributing clean needles or syringes to drug addicts within 1,000 feet of virtually any place where children congregate.
The committee nixed $4 million for D.C. HIV/AIDS prevention programs, but included $17 million for Mayor Adrian Fenty's permanent supportive housing program and $4 million for a "reconnecting disconnected youth program."
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