What Is Home Rule and Why Is It Not Enough

What home rule is
In 1973, Congress passed the Home Rule Act, giving DC residents the authority to elect their own local government for the first time in the district’s history. Before that, DC residents had little to no say in who led them or what laws governed them. Under the Act, DC residents elect a Mayor, a 13-member Council, and, since 2014, an Attorney General, who handles primarily civil matters. DC’s courts and the office of the local prosecutor remain under federal control.

What home rule does not give DC
Home rule lets DC pass its own laws, but those laws are not final until they survive a congressional review period, 30 days for most legislation and 60 days for anything crime-related. DC’s local budget, funded mostly by local tax dollars that DC residents themselves paid, must still go through the congressional appropriations process before it can be spent. DC’s ability to raise revenue is restricted too: it cannot tax income earned in the district by commuters who live in neighboring states, cannot impose tolls on those commuters, and operates under a congressionally mandated building height limit. No other local government in the country answers to this level of outside control over its own laws and budget.

How this plays out in practice
The review period causes real delays, often months, before laws passed by DC’s elected officials can take effect. DC’s local government has leaned on emergency legislation to work around this, a practice no state uses for its own capital because no other capital needs to.

Beyond the delay itself, members of Congress have repeatedly used the appropriations process to block DC’s locally passed laws outright, not just slow them down. Congress has used riders to prevent DC from spending local funds on a needle exchange program and on setting up a regulated cannabis market that DC voters approved. In 2022, Congress successfully blocked the local government’s effort to revise DC’s outdated criminal code, a law DC’s elected Council had already passed. Anti-home rule bills have been introduced in Congress at a growing rate, more in the last Congress than in any before it.

Why this isn’t enough
Home rule gives DC residents a local government. It does not give them protection from having that government’s decisions overridden, and it does not give them a vote in the Congress that holds that power. Statehood is different in kind, not just degree: it converts DC’s local authority from something Congress can override at will into something no other state’s residents have to worry about losing.