D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said Tuesday that residents should work through religious groups and neighborhood and civic associations to push back against consequences for Washington in the federal budget Congress is expected to pass later this week.
D.C. has its own city government, but Congress ultimately oversees the city’s affairs including its budget and laws. As a result, Gray and other city leaders said that Washington became a pawn in last week’s budget negotiations. It appears that a deal members of Congress reached Friday to avert a federal government shutdown included provisions that ban the district from spending its own, city-collected tax money to pay for abortions for poor women. The deal would also re-establish a school voucher program that has divided city leaders.
Gray said he hoped that his arrest Monday with 40 others, including six members of the District of Columbia Council, would energize other residents. On Monday, the mayor and others sat down and blocked traffic on Washington’s busy Constitution Avenue near the Capitol before being arrested and held until the early hours of Tuesday.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that we got people’s attention,” Gray said in an interview in his office later Tuesday, still wearing a tag from police on his wrist. “But the reality is, too, that a single event is not going to make a lasting difference. I think the greatest value of this was to be able to be a catalyst or to be a spark for further involvement.”
Gray said he didn’t have any guarantees that activism by citizens would work, but he added that change comes about when people get frustrated enough to take action, making analogies to the civil rights movement, the movement to give women the right to vote and recent events in Egypt and Libya.
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