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We’ll take our good news about the toxic frenemy-esque relationship between Congress and the District wherever we can get it, considering how few and far between it is. So here’s a victory: the local portion of D.C.’s budget has been officially enacted without the past rigamarole of submitting the budget first to the president and then to Congress.

“The city has succeeded in declaring its fiscal independence from the federal budget process through the budget passed pursuant to budget autonomy, which remains the law of the land,” said D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton in a statement.

The budget became law on Friday, when the 30-day Congressional review lapsed. So even if the federal government shuts down again this year, D.C. will still be able to spend its locally raised money come October 1, when the budget kicks in.

So how did we get here and will it last?

Voters approved the Budget Autonomy Act by a wide margin in 2013, which grants the city the right to spend locally raised funds without Congressional approval. This spring, after years of judicial limbo, a D.C. Superior Court judge granted that the Home Rule Act allowed for the Budget Autonomy Act.

Though former Mayor Vincent Gray fought the law (believing it violated federal law) Mayor Muriel Bowser sided with the D.C. Council. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, who was representing the city’s chief financial officer, chose not to appeal the court’s ruling. “We stand with the Mayor, the Chairman and the Council in the District’s ongoing fight for autonomy and statehood,” Racine said in a statement yesterday.

Cue the “Happily Ever After” graphics, right? Not so fast, said Congressional Republicans. Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) introduced a bill shortly thereafter to repeal the Local Budget Autonomy Act. It passed the House largely on party lines, though it earned a veto threat from President Barack Obama in the process.

“The Administration strongly supports home rule for the District and the President has long called for authority allowing the District to spend its own local taxes and other non-Federal funds without congressional approval,” reads a statement of administration policy about the law. “Subjecting the District to the lengthy and uncertain congressional appropriations process for its use of local tax collections imposes both operational and financial hardships on the District, burdens not borne by any other local government in the country.”

Even if the president vetoes Meadows’ legislation, though, an identical measure in the House’s 2017 Financial Services Bill also repeals the Budget Autonomy Act, despite efforts to remove the rider or add an opposite one that would enshrine budget autonomy in federal law. The spending bill now goes to the Senate, where Norton vows she “will be waging another vigorous fight this year.”

Why are GOPers so hellbent on getting rid of budget autonomy? House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) had only one reason: “The D.C. government wants to use revenues to fund abortions in the District. House Republicans will not stand for that.”

The Republican National Platform calls D.C. “a special responsibility of the federal government” (how cute!) and compares the attempt “to seize from the Congress its appropriating
power over all funding for the District” to the “unacceptable spike in violent crime and murders currently afflicting the city.”

Given that the Republicans control both the House and Senate, it’ll be an uphill fight for Norton and her allies on Capitol Hill. But she promises in a statement that, even with budget autonomy, Republicans will still be able to kick around their favorite play toy.

“For years now, Congress has not held hearings on the D.C. budget and has shown no interest in D.C.’s budget, except to impose anti-home-rule riders, which Congress can continue to do despite budget autonomy and D.C.’s local budget becoming law,” she said in a statement.

Very comforting.