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President Joe Biden seems to be snubbing D.C. taxpayers by riding around in a motorcade that doesn’t display Washington’s ‘Taxation Without Representation’ protest slogan on its license plates.
On inauguration day, Biden rolled onto White House grounds in The Beast, the nickname for the presidential limo, which displayed new ’46’ license plates, for the 46th president, with the ‘Taxation Without Representation’ slogan displayed.
But it looks like those plates were just a temporary symbolic gesture to the 672,000 residents of Washington, D.C., who pay federal taxes but have no voting members of Congress.
During his early trips in 2021, the Biden motorcade was back to using the same slogan-less license plate, with the same number, as former President Donald Trump, who was adamently against D.C. statehood. The plates remain the same today.
Axios first reported Wednesday on plate-gate, reporting that D.C’s non-voting Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton planned to write a letter to the administration indicating that one of the best ways Biden can speak up for D.C. autonomy ‘is to put Taxation Without Representation on his license plate.’
INAUGURATION DAY 2021: President Joe Biden’s motorcade arrived at the White House with license plates that said ’46’ – as he’s the 46th president – and the D.C. protest slogan ‘Taxation Without Representation’
THIS WEEK: President Joe Biden’s motorcade has been using slogan-less plates since as easly as March 2021, suggesting the plates displayed on inauguration day were just a temporary, symbolic gesture to the taxpayers of Washington, D.C.
Biden supports D.C. statehood and a bill turning the District into a state twice passed the Democrat-led House during his term as president. The Senate, however, has never had enough Democrats to override a GOP filibuster and get the proposal across the line.
As Trump pointed out in a May 2020 interview with The New York Post, Republicans would have to be ‘very, very stupid’ to vote in favor of statehood due to the current, very liberal makeup of the capital city.
In the 2020 presidential election, Biden won the District with 92 percent of the vote, to Trump’s 5.4 percent.
In kind, Democrats have tended to use the protest license plates and then Republicans remove them.
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Democratic President Bill Clinton used them late in his term, while Republican President George W. Bush had them removed. The D.C. Council pushed Democratic President Barack Obama to bring them back and he did in 2013.
Trump got rid of them in August 2018.
The White House did not respond to Axios’ multiple requests for comment on the matter.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has traditionally had a cozy relationship with Biden – so much that she was one of the few officials to travel to Wilmington amid the COVID pandemic to celebrate his win on November 7, 2020.
A DailyMail.com picture from late September 2020 shows President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump getting into the Beast, which displayed the same number on its slogan-less license plates that President Joe Biden is using today
But she hasn’t been able to get the president to sign off on a proposal to end telework for droves of federal employees, which would force them to come back to offices in downtown D.C.
She’s found an unlikely ally in House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who says he supports it, as part of Republicans’ general detest for COVID-era protections.
Businesses in the downtown corridor – especially lunch and happy hour spots – have struggled since the start of the pandemic.
The federal government leases about a third of downtown office space.
Last month, Bowser – who was sworn-in for a third term – said that federal workers either needed to come back or the government needed to give up the space so that it could be used by the ‘local government, by nonprofits, by businesses, and by any user willing to revitalize it.’
She’s also making a push to turn some of the downtown office buildings into housing.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
