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The capital vs the Capitol When the House of Representatives voted to overturn a pair of laws recently passed by the Council of the District of Columbia this week, Eleanor Norton Holmes, the District’s non-voting delegate, delivered an uncompromising and partisan denunciation. “I can only conclude that that the Republican leadership believes DC residents, the majority of whom are black and brown, are unworthy or incapable of governing themselves,” she said. But Holmes’s black-and-white account of the House vote to block two controversial pieces of legislation — one a revamped (and relaxed) criminal code, the other allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections — omitted some inconvenient details.

Earlier in the week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy gave an evening address about the urgency of raising the debt ceiling and cutting federal spending. Technically, the government has already taken on the amount of debt it’s allowed to carry. The Treasury Department is employing “extraordinary measures” to shuffle money around to service the national debt and make government payrolls. But these measures can’t keep the government afloat forever. Hence the need to raise the debt ceiling or risk catastrophic default some time in the summer. The timing of the speech — one day before President Biden's third State of the Union address — was conspicuous.

We might have finally discovered something that politicians are worse at than budgeting: regulating emotions. What is in the water in Washington, DC that is causing these adults to constantly melt down in public? First there was President Biden’s now-former chief of staff Ron Klain. The man who has been accused of being the brains behind the Biden operation is moving on from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue… well, maybe. Klain delivered a mawkish farewell address in the White House East Room, with his 80-year-old boss proudly looking on a few feet behind him. To say Ron got choked up would be an understatement. He gushed over the Biden family and the administration’s accomplishments. He even heaped praise on Joe Biden’s parenting skills.

George Santos is frustrated. In an hour-long interview with The Spectator, Santos tried to make it clear he came to Washington with the hope to get things done. But he’s been “slapped in the face” with the reality that there is so much red tape. “Washington, DC is performance art,” he says. “This is a master course on performing arts... everybody here is acting.” Santos of course knows a thing or two about acting; his exploits have been well publicized since his election. Perhaps the most well-known of his roles took the form of his popular drag performances in Brazil. A fan of drag for many years, it’s surprising to learn that Santos only began watching RuPaul’s Drag Race only once the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Last week, British Columbia became the first province in Canada and the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs for personal use. Those drugs include heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and even fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more than 50 times more powerful than heroin. British Columbia follows Oregon, which decriminalized all drugs in 2020, taking a more proactive — if controversial — approach to address the alarming number of overdose deaths across the region. Under the state's new guidelines, adults 18 years and older caught with less than 2.5 grams of an illicit substance will not be arrested or charged with a criminal offense.