D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said Monday he is withdrawing a bill overhauling the city’s criminal code ahead of a planned vote in the U.S. Senate this week to block it from taking effect. But his gambit was dismissed only hours later by senators who said the disapproval vote would proceed as planned.

Mendelson announced the withdrawal of the bill on Monday in a letter to Vice President Kamala Harris, who also serves as the president of the Senate, saying that his decision stops the congressional review period and thus precludes the Senate from voting to block the measure. This follows a vote taken last month in the House of Representatives overturning the bill.

“It’s quite clear to me that the headwinds that have prevailed in Congress are about the politics of next year’s election, not what’s in this bill,” Mendelson said during a press conference on Monday, adding that withdrawing the bill would allow lawmakers time to “talk and agree on next steps” for the sweeping 450-page measure, a years-long effort to update and modernize the city’s century-old criminal code. The bill ran into a buzzsaw of Republican opposition over claims that it was “soft on crime.”

But Mendelson’s attempt to withdraw the bill — a move he admitted had little precedent — was quickly shot down by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee), who has led the effort in the chamber to block the bill.

“This desperate, made-up maneuver not only has no basis in the D.C. Home Rule Act, but underscores the completely unserious way the D.C. Council has legislated,” he said in a statement. “No matter how hard they try, the Council cannot avoid accountability for passing this disastrous, dangerous D.C. soft-on-crime bill that will make residents and visitors less safe.”

A Senate source said the vote on the revised criminal code bill was likely expected Wednesday (the same day as a protest against congressional interference), and a potentially large number of Democrats were likely to vote with the unified Republican caucus. That number only grew after President Joe Biden said last week that he wouldn’t veto a disapproval resolution passed by Congress and sent to his desk, clearing the way for the first such congressional move to block a D.C. bill in three decades.

Speaking on Monday, Mendelson seemed both resigned and angered by the fact that the revised criminal code bill would not become law. He said the Republican opposition to it was based more on political grandstanding than the content of the bill, but also conceded that the council — which unanimously approved the overhaul — hadn’t done a good enough job explaining why the changes were being adopted.

“Crime easily lends itself to demagogic rhetoric,” he said. “I think our challenge here is the messaging got out of our control… and Republicans wanted to make a campaign message for next year. The public conversation on public safety is different than on any other issue. I don’t know any other issue that lends itself to demagogic rhetoric the way crime does.”

That rhetoric has largely been lobbed by Republicans at Democrats, but locally even some of the city’s officials raised concerns around the content of the bill and the timing of its passage and when it went to Congress. Mayor Muriel Bowser vetoed the bill earlier this year over concerns that some maximum penalties for violent offenses were being decreased, but the council voted to override her. And speaking last Friday on WAMU 88.5’s “The Politics Hour,” Bowser said the council should have pushed the bill through earlier in 2022, when Democrats controlled the House.

“We would all be foolish to just approach this work in the same way that we were approaching it with a whole different set of players and a different dynamic,” she said of the current GOP majority in the House, which has expressed interest in more aggressively interfering in D.C.

Some local officials and activists, though, have said that Bowser is partially to blame, largely because she only grudgingly said that Congress shouldn’t interfere in the city’s consideration of changes to its criminal code. Mendelson did not weigh in on whether he agreed with those sentiments, but he conceded that it remained unclear whether the council would work to make changes to the revised criminal code anytime soon. “Republican opponents will find something else [to complain about],” he said.

It also remains to be seen what changes to the revised criminal code the city’s lawmakers could agree to. While Bowser has proposed increasing some maximum penalties for specific violent offenses, earlier this year almost all councilmembers voted a similar proposal down over concerns that it would undo years of work and was caving in to “fear-mongering” over what the overhaul intends to accomplish.

Mendelson echoed that argument on Monday, citing changes to the penalty for armed carjacking.

“There is misunderstanding about that,” he said. “Carjacking was reduced from a 40-year maximum that no [judge] handed out to a 24-year maximum, which is twice what the penalty is in Arizona, Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee. That’s not an, ‘Oh no, we’re not touching that at all.’ We have our options and will look at them.”

Moving forward, Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1) said the council would likely try and better communicate the changes in the bill.

“I think we’re trying to give ourselves some more time to build out that messaging strategy, because we still need to reform our criminal code, right?” said Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1). “We cannot live with the code from 1901 because obviously it’s not working right now.”

As for whether the dust-up over the revised criminal code bill could create a chilling effect in the council around other legislative efforts, Mendelson said it could — but also that he wouldn’t let Republicans in Congress dictate what local lawmakers do.

“I don’t plan on installing a hotline to the Republican leadership… and calling them every week for permission to move forward,” he said. “I’m not going to do that.”