A group of four protestors associated with the Occupy D.C. movement took their five-day-old hunger strike to congressional leadership offices today in hopes of getting a prohibition on the use of local funds for abortions removed from a federal budget bill currently being debated by Congress.
The hunger strikers, joined by about a dozen members of the Occupy camp, first visited the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who recently proposed a budget autonomy measure for the District that included the abortion-funding prohibition. They met with three staffers to air their grievances.
“I thought we were on the same page about budget autonomy,” Sam Jeweler, one of the hunger strikers, said.
At the moment, though, Issa is grilling Interior Secretary Ken Salazar over the damage to McPherson Square, which was rehabilitated with about $400,000 in funds from the 2009 stimulus bill. In a letter sent yesterday, Issa asked Salazar to explain the National Park Service’s policy toward the ongoing encampment, inquiring if the Park Service “plans to force the protestors to stop camping,” and asking for internal government communications related to the encampment.
After their brief meeting with Issa’s staff, the group moved to the Longworth House Office Building and settled outside House Speaker John A. Boehner’s constituent office. Boehner was not there, and the doors remained closed during the hunger strikers’ stay.
Shortly after noon, Boehner press secretary Brittany Bramell arrived, by which time the four fasters had formed a barricade in front of the office door. Bramell told the group she would pass along their concerns, but the protestors were dissatisfied with this response and asked to speak to someone higher on the totem pole.
Joe Gray, who joined the starvation 19 hours in, and Jeweler are still ambulatory; Kelly Mears and Adrian Parsons are getting around in wheelchairs. Parsons, sitting under a blanket and holding a copy of Issa’s autonomy bill, is normally very thin and reed-like. But after nearly five days of consuming nothing save electrolyte-enhanced water and multivitamins, he is looking especially pallid. I asked how he was feeling.
“It sucks,” he said, later asking if I had ever fasted.
Gray, meanwhile, is the lone hunger striker who actually has full representation. A resident of Gaithersburg, Gray said he had been at Occupy D.C. since it first planted itself in McPherson Square on Oct. 6. He was thinking about dropping by the office of his House member, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD).
A few minutes after they arrived, the fasting protestors slapped “Taxation Without Representation” bumper stickers over their mouths, peeling them off only to offer muffled quotes to the half-dozen reporters. One of the stickers also wound up pasted to Boehner’s door, much to the consternation of one of the Capitol Police officers presiding over the scene, though the interaction between the police and the protestors was minimal.
Though the hunger strikers started at McPherson Square, they have moved on from the Occupy movement, which famously does not have any specific demands. (They have also been spending nights at St. Stephen’s Church in Columbia Heights since the temperature dropped last weekend.) The hunger strike does not have the official sanction of the Occupy D.C. assembly, but their “support” does have a mic-checked blessing. It’s a somewhat nebulous mixture of a larger group with general complaints about economics and politics and a tiny offshoot employing self-deprivation to focus on a specific issue on which Congress has been historically loath to move forward.
Representatives of DC Vote, including executive director Ilir Zherka, said he spoke with Parsons, Mears and Jeweler before they began their fast and warned them of the inherent dangers of a hunger strike, but made no recommendation one way or the other.
“They’re making decisions and we’re supporting them,” Zherka said.
Jeweler announced what he saw as a promising development about 12:45 p.m., when he received an email from a staffer in D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office saying the strikers’ concerns would be requested to be made “official business” on Boehner’s schedule.
According to people who remained at the scene, the hunger strikers left Boehner’s office late this afternoon.
This article has been updated.
