Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)

During a hearing on the Hill in May, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) surprised just about everyone by saying that he wouldn’t object to finding a way to allow the District to spend its money as soon as it was budgeted, instead of forcing city officials to wait for Congress to give the go-ahead as happens now.

But the Post reports today that a bill he may introduce giving the District the budget autonomy it has long desired may come at the expense of, well, autonomy. While Issa’s proposal would allow the District to start spending its money as soon as it passes the D.C. Council and move the start of the fiscal year to July instead of the current October, there’s quite a little catch worked into the language:

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has included in his measure a provision that would prohibit D.C. from spending its own taxpayer funds to pay for abortions for low-income women except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, according to a draft of the bill obtained by The Washington Post.

So in exchange for the ability to spend its own money when it wants to, the District would have to stop using its own money to fund abortion for low-income District residents. (Let that irony soak in just a little.)

Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time that D.C.-funded abortions have been targeted by Republicans. Upon taking control of the House earlier this year, Republicans quickly proposed reinstating the ban on the use of local funds for abortions, a ban which had been lifted by Democrats in 2009. Though that proposal didn’t go anywhere, it was included by President Barack Obama as a concession to Republicans to avoid a shutdown of the federal government in April. It was that deal that set off the wave of arrests at D.C. voting rights rallies, including Mayor Vince Gray and members of the D.C. Council on April 11.

Looking further back, this certainly won’t be the first time that District leaders have faced a compromise solution that compromised local decision-making. Last year, a bill that would have given the District a single voting seat in the House was scrapped after Republicans stubbornly insisted that it could only move forward if city officials agreed to gut local gun laws and give up the right to legislate any new ones in the future.

While a tantalizing offer, it’s probably not going to get a very good reaction. While city officials have long argued that forcing the District to submit its budget to Congress every year is not only impractical and inefficient, Gray has stood strong on autonomy-related issues in the past. Moreover, it wouldn’t be lost on anyone that an issue affecting women remains the bargaining chip upon which the District’s other rights are negotiated. (In April, the D.C. Abortion Fund put out a strong statement decrying the on-again, off-again abortion funding prohibition.)

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton may be leaning towards Issa, though, considering her surprisingly mild statement in response to the proposal.

“We received a proposal from Chairman Issa’s staff this morning, apparently at the same time they provided it to the media. We appreciate that Chairman Issa has followed up on his statements at a May hearing that he wanted to give the District of Columbia more authority over its local budget and fiscal year and to avoid future shut downs of the District government over federal spending fights. D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown and I will be speaking today to evaluate Chairman Issa’s proposal,” she said.

All told, the ban on the use of local funds for abortions is an easy vote for congressional Republicans, and as long as they’re in charge, they’ll likely get their way with it. Faced with that reality, Issa may have dealt the District the best hand it has seen in a while. Sadly, that doesn’t say much about the quality of the hand as much as it does about how bad the context in which it was given.