DC Mayor Arrested Protesting Budget Cuts

Several DC leaders, including Mayor Vincent Gray, were arrested during a budget cut protest outside the Capitol on Monday. Dressed in business attire, Gray and his Council members sat down in the street outside a Senate office building. The police soon arrived, cuffed their hands with plastic loops, and loaded them into police wagons to cheers from the crowd, according to the AP [1]. Gray and six Council members were among forty-one people arrested in total.

The group was released from jail seven hours later. “We needed to make a statement,” Gray said. He is the second DC mayor to go to jail while advocating for statehood. The district is not considered an autonomous state, and is instead directly overseen by the federal government. Many in DC view this system of governance as taxation without representation, since citizens are expected to pay taxes even though they don’t have representation in the Senate or House. Yet, despite this reality, DC was used as a bargaining chip during the budget negotiations, says Gray.

The city will likely be unable to spend its own tax dollars on abortions for low-income women. It may also be banned from spending city money on needle exchange programs believed vital to curbing the spread of HIV in the district, where the disease is considered an epidemic. Also back: a school voucher program favored by Republicans.…

“If this isn’t taxation without representation, I don’t know what is,” said the mayor before he was arrested.…

"It would be nothing short of disastrous," said Cyndee Clay, executive director of HIPS, an organization that works with sex workers and drug users and is currently exchanging about 8,000 needles a month. "I don't understand why they're doing this to us."

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http://www.thenation.com/article/159874/washington-dc-where- conservative-congressmen-dump-bad-ideas

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