For months, Democrats in Congress have held firm: there’s no way they’d clear the way for a new football stadium on the federally owned RFK Stadium site without seeing Dan Snyder’s team change its name.
But it’s not a sure thing that lawmakers will leap into action even with the team’s pledge to retire its racially insensitive moniker. Key congressional leaders say they still have too many concerns about the team’s management to open up access to the RFK land, long coveted by Snyder as the prime location for a new NFL stadium within the city’s borders.
“I think we have miles yet to go before we sleep on this one,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat and the District’s nonvoting representative in Congress, said in an interview.
Norton is backing legislation that would allow D.C. to buy the 190-acre stadium site, currently owned by the National Park Service. Technically speaking, the bill doesn’t have anything to do with the NFL team, but the franchise’s name emerged as a sticking point for the legislation as soon as Norton introduced it in March 2019.
