Republicans' latest excuse for opposing D.C. statehood represents a new low

You might have thought congressional Republicans couldn’t get more contemptuous, or contemptible, in their disregard for the rights of people who make their home in the nation’s capital. But their latest gambit — using the scandal surrounding D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) as a reason the District shouldn’t become a state — represents a breathtaking new low in gall and hypocrisy.

During the Sept. 19 hearing on a bill that would make D.C. the 51st state, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform exercised a rarely used authority to call additional witnesses at a separate day of hearings. They wanted Mr. Evans and officials of Metro, where Mr. Evans served as chairman until revelations about his misconduct forced his resignation, to testify. Mr. Evans and Metro officials refused to show up for the second hearing, and ranking Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) argued the committee cannot proceed with the statehood bill until it “fully understands and assesses the nature and extent of D.C. Council member Evans’s misconduct.”

If this is to be the standard for statehood, the committee’s Republicans would do well to spend the holidays reviewing the report given to Congress by the Justice Department detailing the work of the department’s public integrity unit. Since 2008, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted public corruption in each state represented by the Republicans on the committee. In Mr. Jordan’s home state, between 2008 and 2017, prosecutors secured at least 309 public-corruption convictions. In a case that shares some similarities to that of Mr. Evans, the speaker of the Ohio House resigned suddenly last year and remains under investigation after the FBI raided his home. We don’t see Mr. Jordan offering to turn in Ohio’s statehood card.

It’s pretty rich that Republicans who think it’s fine for convicted Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) to decide when to stop collecting his federal paycheck, and who excuse any egregious conduct by the president, expect us to think they actually care about integrity in government. Here, they could learn something from the D.C. Council, which did undertake a serious investigation of Mr. Evans and is moving to expel him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-latest-excuse-for-opposing-dc-statehood-represents-a-new-low/2019/12/21/b0f26dd0-2369-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html