If there’s one thing you’d think Congress could do without controversy, it’s renaming post offices. But, no.
On Tuesday, a House committee quietly pulled Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s bill to rename a post office in Brookland after Chuck Brown, D.C.’s godfather of go-go. Some lawmakers got skittish after learning that Brown had served eight years in prison some 70 years ago for a killing he said was in self-defense. (It was in prison where Brown learned to play guitar.)
“Committee members raised concerns about advancing a postal naming bill for an individual convicted of murder," a spokesman for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in an email to The 51st. "After consulting with the ranking member’s staff, the bill was withdrawn to allow for further review and discussion.”
The decision angered Norton, who noted that Brown — who died in 2012 — is a local icon; go-go is the city’s official music, and Brown has a street and park named after him. She also made a broader point about the GOP’s sudden concern over criminal pasts.
“The hypocrisy is shocking but not surprising. Republicans on this committee cheered the pardons issued by President Trump, who himself was convicted of crimes, to the violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6,” she said.
As Norton pointed out, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Those convictions notwithstanding, one Republican congressman has introduced a bill to rename Metro the “Trump Train,” while another penned a measure that would rechristen Dulles Airport as Donald J. Trump International Airport. And just this week, Trump renamed the shuttered U.S. Institute of Peace after himself.
“I find it ironic that in this administration there are folks who are insisting that a criminal record from long, long, long ago for which Chuck Brown did his time is somehow unacceptable,” said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson.
The city may never gets its Chuck Brown post office, but thanks to Trump, we do again have a statue commemorating a Confederate general who committed war crimes and was an avowed white supremacist.
On Tuesday, a House committee continued its offensive by passing a bill that would eliminate any deference that judges could give to city agencies in interpreting local laws. The bill, from Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-South Dakota), stems from the 2024 Supreme Court decision Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that overturned a longstanding precedent declaring that federal courts should look to government agencies for guidance on how to interpret vague laws or regulations. Earlier this summer, the D.C. Council passed its own bill in response, clarifying that local courts should still adhere to the old practice of deferring to city agencies and experts whenever there’s a legal conflict over what a local law means.
For city officials, the reasoning was simple enough: It’s better to let in-house subject-matter experts interpret vague laws on everything from zoning to environmental protection than rely on judges – who aren’t experts on those topics – to do so anytime there’s a lawsuit.
House Republicans, though, disagree. Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) said D.C.’s new law puts a “thumb on the scale in favor of the mayor and D.C. agencies when they are sued over their actions” and that any such deference to city agencies is “inherently unfair” to residents. City leaders have strenuously disagreed; in a letter sent to Congress this week, Mayor Muriel Bowser, Mendelson, and Attorney General Brian Schwalb said the House bill ran the risk of “threatening decades of D.C. court precedent and the effective operation of local government.”
A tipped wage referendum is dealt a blow
We’ve been watching D.C. politics long enough to know that the fight over the tipped wage probably isn’t over, but it may be going quiet for now.
This week, a judge dealt a significant blow to a nascent effort to call a referendum on the D.C. Council’s move over the summer to water down Initiative 82, the voter-approved measure that had been slowly phasing out the tipped wage. The judge ruled that the D.C. Board of Elections made procedural mistakes in approving the language of the proposed referendum and ordered the board to redo some of the process. But because of an impending December 17 deadline for the referendum’s proponents to collect signatures from tens of thousands of D.C. voters, it’s very unlikely that the referendum will make it to the ballot.
If this all sounds confusing, we don’t blame you. The debate over the tipped wage in D.C. has been a political and procedural rollercoaster for the last seven years. D.C. voters first approved a ballot initiative to phase out the tipped wage in 2018, but the council quickly repealed it. There was then a brief attempt to call a referendum to essentially reverse the council’s repeal, but that was also sunk by a judge citing procedural errors. In 2022 the entire process started anew, and here we are again with a local judge seemingly killing off a possible referendum.
For now, the tipped wage in D.C. will remain at $10 through July 2026, and increase slowly every two years thereafter until it hits 75% of the prevailing minimum wage in 2034. Unless there’s another successful ballot initiative. And there may well be: On Tuesday, the same group that put Initiative 82 on the ballot created a campaign committee for a new initiative.
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