WASHINGTON ― When the federal government partially shut down in 1995, the local city government closed recreation centers and suspended trash collection while then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich seethed over having having to sit in the back of Air Force One. During the shutdown drama of 2013, then-mayor Vince Gray decided D.C. was not doing that anymore. The city defied the federal government by spending its own money, and Gray declared all of the city’s workers “essential to the protection of public safety, health, and property,” thereby exempting them from the federal shutdown. D.C. residents still don’t have any voting representation in Congress, even though the city is more populous than the entire state of Wyoming, which gets one representative in the House and two senators. But the fact that the city has no voting member of Congress means D.C. residents, who are often subject to mockery and erasure by the city’s out-of-town professional class, played no part in failing to fund the federal government.

Source: Huffington Post January 20, 2018 22:41 UTC