President Joe Biden appears to be snubbing DC taxpayers by riding in a motorcade that does not display Washington’s protest slogan “Taxes Without Representation” on its license plates.
On inauguration day, Biden entered the White House grounds in The Beast, the nickname for the presidential limousine, which featured new ’46’ license plates, for the 46th president, with the The slogan “Taxes Without Representation” is shown.
But it appears those plates were just a temporary and symbolic gesture for the 672,000 residents of Washington, DC, who pay federal taxes but have no voting members of Congress.
During its first trips in 2021, the Biden motorcade again used the same plate without a slogan, with the same number, like former President Donald Trump, who was staunchly against DC statehood. The plates remain the same today.
Axios first reported Wednesday in Plate-Gate, reporting that DC non-voting delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton planned to write a letter to the administration stating that one of the best ways Biden can speak for the DC Autonomy ‘is to put Taxation Without Representation on your nameplate.’
INAUGURATION DAY 2021: President Joe Biden’s motorcade arrived at the White House with license plates reading ’46’, as he is the 46th president, and the DC protest slogan ‘Taxes without representation’
THIS WEEK: President Joe Biden’s motorcade has been wearing license plates without a slogan since March 2021, suggesting that the license plates displayed on Inauguration Day were just a temporary token gesture for Washington, D.C., taxpayers
When asked about it at Wednesday’s news conference, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she didn’t know why Biden’s Beast was missing its plates.
‘Look, I have to find out, even the Beast and why it might not have those plates. But what I can tell you, and the president has been very consistent since the campaign, is that we strongly support statehood for DC and that hasn’t changed,” Jean-Pierre said.
Biden hasn’t had a chance to sign a DC statehood bill because it passed the Democrats’ House twice during his tenure, failed to gain traction in the Senate because it would never survive a Party-led filibuster Republican, and the vote would probably be a party line.
As Trump noted in a May 2020 interview with The New York Post, Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to vote for statehood because of the current very liberal makeup of the capital.
The former president argued that it would virtually guarantee two new Democrats in the US Senate, as well as more Democrats in the House.
In the 2020 presidential election, Biden carried the District with 92 percent of the vote, to Trump’s 5.4 percent.
In the same way, Democrats have tended to wear protest plates and then Republicans remove them.
Democratic President Bill Clinton used them at the end of his term, while Republican President George W. Bush removed them. The DC Council lobbied Democratic President Barack Obama to bring them back, and he did so in 2013.
Trump got rid of them in August 2018.
A DailyMail.com image from late September 2020 shows President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump boarding the Beast, which featured the same number on its tagless license plates that President Joe Biden wears today.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has traditionally had a cozy relationship with Biden, so much so that she was one of the few female officials to travel to Wilmington amid the COVID pandemic to celebrate his victory on November 7, 2020.
But he has been unable to get the president to approve a proposal to end telecommuting for many federal employees, which would force them to return to offices in downtown DC.
He has found an unlikely ally in House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who he says supports him, as part of Republicans’ general disregard for COVID-era protections.
Businesses in the downtown corridor, especially lunch spots and happy hour, have struggled since the start of the pandemic.
The federal government leases about a third of the downtown office space.
Last month, Bowser, who was sworn in for a third term, said federal workers had to return or the government had to give up the space so it could be used by “local government, nonprofits, businesses.” , and by any user willing to revitalize it.’
It is also pushing to convert some of the downtown office buildings into housing.
