Jason Chaffetz Will Be DC’s New Boss in Congress

Chaffetz.

Congressional Republicans on Tuesday picked Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah to take over the House Oversight Committee next January, succeeding term-limited Darrell Issa as the White House’s chief inquisitor and—more importantly for Washington residents—the District’s overseer on Capitol Hill.

While the House Oversight chairman’s primary role is to grill executive-branch officials in loud, boisterous, sometimes inconclusive hearings—think the IRS, Obamacare, or Benghazi, to name a few of Issa’s achievements—the committee is also charged with monitoring the the District, which can not spend its own budget without congressional authorization. And, all DC legislation is subject to 30 or 60 days of congressional review before it can take effect, a mostly uneventful inconvenience that becomes a nail-biter on certain hot-button issues, such as this year’s marijuana decriminalization law.

The 47-year-old Chaffetz, about to start his fourth term, beat out a couple of members from Ohio, including arch-conservative Jim Jordan (who last year tried to overturn all of DC’s gun laws), but Chaffetz doesn’t exactly have a spotless record of his own when it comes to the District’s affairs. He hasn’t chimed in on decriminalization or marijuana-legalizing Initiative 71, which was approved by 69 percent of DC voters, but it’s worth looking back on his record of meddling with DC:

Chaffetz tried to block the District from legalizing same-sex marriage.

Back in January 2010, Chaffetz, then a freshman trying to bring his Utah wholesomeness to the nation’s capital, introduced an amendement seeking to overturn the District’s legalization of same-sex marriages, even though he knew it would be a fruitless effort. “It’s going to be exceptionally difficult because Democrats have us outnumbered by large amounts,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. Sure enough, Chaffetz was overwhelmed, and his bill was quashed before it even got to a committee vote. Today, even Utah issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Chaffetz tried to block the District from legalizing medical marijuana.

They never rose to Andy Harris-level theatrics on the issue, but Chaffetz and Jordan teamed up in June 2010 in an attempt to block DC from finally putting into effect the medicinal cannabis law its residents approved in a 1998 ballot referendum. Like his marriage amendment, Chaffetz’s strike at medical marijuana did not pick up much energy in a majority-Democrat Congress.

Chaffetz wants DC to become part of Maryland.

Maryland is a fine state, but if Chaffetz’s wishes came true, it would also include the swath of land we currently know as the District of Columbia. When the Republicans took control of House in the 2010 elections, Chaffetz was briefly a contender to take over the House Oversight subcommittee that, at the time, oversaw DC affairs. (Issa reorganized the subcommittees to put the District directly under his purview.) In a Washington City Paper profile, Chaffetz floated his belief that not only is the statehood cause a losing one, it’s unconstitutional.

“It’s our nation’s capital and the Constitution deals with it in a unique way,” he said. “Washington, DC, is not a state. My proposal is stronger than Eleanor Holmes Norton’s proposal, because I’d like to see it retroceded back into a state.”

The last time any part of DC was retroceded to a state was 1846, when the southwest corner on the far side of the Potomac was given back to Virginia and became Arlington.

UPDATE, 12:18 PM: In a statement, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton “congratulate[s]” her new potential adversary. “The new chairman has already visited the ranking member’s district, and considering the committee’s jurisdiction over DC matters, I will shortly invite him to visit the District, which is even closer,” she says. But that might not bode well for the District, considering the ranking Democrat on House Oversight, Elijah Cummings, hails from Maryland, and we already know how Chaffetz feels about the DC-Maryland border.

Benjamin Freed

Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.