The hot mess of democracy in DC

Truth be told, DC home rule has been a hot mess since Congress approved it in December 1973. Residents may have acquired the right to elect a mayor, city council and advisory neighborhood commissioners. However, the DC Home Rule Act as written has permitted federal officials, including presidents, to get deep into DC’s local affairs — making a mockery of the concept of self-governance and even democracy.

Consider that this week the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform marked up legislative proposals that would amend the home rule charter, modify or repeal local laws, or impede the ability of DC officials to manage the local government. The 13 intrusive GOP bills that were under consideration all passed on largely party-line votes; the outlier was a unanimous vote in favor of a DC-initiated bill to streamline a cumbersome, outdated process by allowing electronic transmission of legislation up for congressional review.

“This imposition of policy without the participation of those being governed should be an affront to anyone who believes in democracy,” at-large DC Councilmember Christina Henderson said in a statement that highlighted the absence of any opportunity for community input or analysis of the full impact. “Even with our lack of statehood, I will continue to raise my voice in advocating against the advancement of these bills.”

“This is an unprecedented assault on our city,” DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson said in a statement issued midway through the proceedings when the outcome was already clear.

An assault on the District and on the very principle of “consent of the governed,” yes. Unprecedented, no.

In prior years, President Joe Biden signed congressional legislation repealing the city’s reform of its criminal justice code. President Barack Obama helped reinstate Republicans’ ban on the use of DC’s local funds to finance abortions for low-income residents. President Bill Clinton, working with congressional Republicans, created the financial control board while placing the local court system even more squarely under the federal government and eliminating the federal payment.

Even while professing support for home rule as it was being debated in Congress, President Richard Nixon introduced the DC Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act of 1970. It was signed into law in 1971, including several measures like no-knock search warrants that inspired much local opposition. 

Trampling on home rule has been a nonpartisan affair.

Last month, following Nixon’s lead, including the use of deplorable, racist language to justify his actions, President Donald Trump hoisted his own anti-crime banner. He declared a federal emergency, calling in the National Guard while attempting to use the Department of Justice to take over the DC Metropolitan Police Department. 

I have long complained about flawed public policies advanced by certain members of the DC Council that have invited and embraced lawlessness in the city. That environment has helped fuel violent crime on District streets.

But public safety has never motivated Trump. He didn’t call in the guard on Jan. 6, 2021 — when the crime of the century was underway, an attempted coup d’etat where lives were taken and others were at risk, including that of his own vice president.

Trump’s crime emergency in DC, as it will be in other major cities if he takes it on the road, is nothing more than a political tactic and transparent cover-up technique: cover-up of illegal deportations and arrests of American citizens by federal agents in cover-up gear; cover-up of indisputable damage to the country’s economy, including an imposition of new taxes on working-class people through disastrous tariffs; and cover-up of his and Melania’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislane Maxwell, known child-sex traffickers. 

All of that is true. This, too, is true: Using DC as a political pawn and distraction for an already inattentive public and media are not illegal actions. They may be unethical, but they don’t violate the Home Rule Act as adopted by Congress over 50 years ago. 

The thin nature of that membrane has permitted abuses and is the reason Julius Hobson Jr. said, “My father used to call it home fool.”

As original advocates for true home rule for DC, Hobson Sr. and others were “critical because Congress had continued its oversight and pretty much had a heavy hand in what happened in the city or didn’t happen in the city.” 

Hobson Jr., an adjunct professor at George Washington University, is one of several individuals with extensive knowledge about the city’s political history and its battles for self-governance with whom I spoke over the past week. He began his narrative in the mid-1950s with the lawsuit Bolling v. Sharpe, which was eventually folded into the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Back then, the city was run by a three-member, federally appointed commission. Things changed somewhat in 1967.

“When [President Lyndon B. Johnson], with all of his successes in Congress, failed to get home rule through Congress, he, by executive order, changed the form of government to the nine-member appointed city council and the mayor-commissioner. He picked Walter Washington” for the latter post, explained Hobson, a former elected official and senior executive in the District government who handled local and federal affairs.

Congress created the city’s first elected body of the modern era — the DC Board of Education — in 1968. Hobson Sr. successfully won an at-large seat, avoiding a runoff by obtaining more than 40% of the vote. Later, he filed a lawsuit — Hobson v. Hansen — against the DC Public Schools, claiming discriminatory distribution of financial and other resources for Black children.

In 1970, Congress approved a nonvoting delegate to the House. Hobson Sr., along with Josephine Butler and Charles Cassell, co-founded the DC Statehood Party. “At the time, everybody thought it was a fallacy,” Hobson Jr. said of the group’s aspirational moniker.

That view may have been accurate. To this day, District elected officials and residents are Sisyphus’ heirs. That’s been true when Republicans or Democrats held a federal political trifecta as well as when control was split. 

“What I try to get people to understand is that white Southern conservative Democrats were never comfortable with home rule,” said Hobson. “Neither was the FOP. The Fraternal Order of Police opposed home rule.”

In the home rule charter, Congress vested the president with the power to declare an emergency and take over the DC police department. “Little known to a lot of people was also a provision that prevented the city council from amending the criminal code for five years. 

“And all of this was about the lack of trust of a majority-Black city being able to govern itself, particularly here,” said Hobson. Congress also required a 30-day legislative layover before any council-approved legislation becomes permanent law.

“Congress also never gave up appropriations for DC government. [It can] reappropriate local money as well as the federal payment,” explained Hobson. 

“What’s happening now isn’t new. It’s gone farther than it has been in the past. But it is something that we’ve had to deal with,” Hobson added.

Along the way, however, white conservative Democrats became white Republicans. Crime and policing remained perennial issues. Every DC mayor has had to contend with flagrant intervention into the city’s fiscal management, criminal justice system, and education programs — namely the creation of education vouchers and charter schools.

Mayor Muriel Bowser is the latest. She recently released her own executive order ahead of the deadline for the expiration of Trump’s federal emergency in DC. She acknowledged that the District had benefited from the surge of federal law enforcement — but not from enhanced immigration enforcement, nor from the use of National Guard troops who were not trained for urban policing. In fact, Trump repurposed many of them as federal landscapers, despite the millions of dollars the public has paid for their military training.

The mayor said her administration will continue to work with federal law enforcement, although she has asked that they publicly display their identifications. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should remove their masks, her order says.

Bowser has been roundly criticized by some councilmembers and residents for her decision to work with Trump. The past month’s data suggests, however, that arrests for gun possession and drugs have increased. There have been similar results in the past  — with much less controversy — when MPD has teamed with its federal law enforcement partners for special initiatives and investigations.

DC police have been operating at a disadvantage since 2021, after the council reduced MPD’s proposed budget in concert with a national defund the police movement triggered by the murder of George Floyd. Some District officers resigned; others retired. When crime reached its highest level in 2023, there were insufficient numbers of local police.

The majority of councilmembers initially failed to accept the need for more aggressive approaches to reverse the trend. Many residents complained that the DC attorney general was not prosecuting juveniles who seemed to be the prime perpetrators. 

Few DC lawmakers will admit that the city has been aided by the federal surge. It’s hard to thank your enemy. 

However, at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds acknowledged to me this week that the council “may have gone further than we thought we were going as it relates to some of the laws and systems that we put in place. And that’s something that we have to deal with. As we make a law, we can also change a law. …

I think everyone who has been in the city for any period of time recognizes that there will be crime and that there has been crime. The real issue for us today is, ‘How do you address it?” continued Bonds, a native Washingtonian who is the former head of the DC Democratic State Committee. 

She said recruitment of new officers hasn’t occurred fast enough, although “we have one of the most generous programs in America. You can come in at say 25 and get your retirement at 45 or 50. And the retirement is very generous.

“The police union has been very aggressive,” continued Bonds. “They have always had the ear of Congress. You must remember, again, that many of our officers [at the start of home rule] came from other parts of the country, and where they have friends on the Hill.”

Interestingly, Bowser and Mendelson recently held a rare joint press conference to announce the city’s new contract with the police union, which includes a 13% pay hike to account for the rising cost of living.

“No one likes crime in the community. No one wants it. But having the military here causes people to feel that their civil liberties are at stake,” added Bonds.

In fairness, Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto as chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety has helped the legislature to take a different public safety direction, adopting a commonsense and tougher approach. Equally important, MPD has implemented new strategies resulting in a substantial drop in crime even before Trump’s arrival. Violent crime dropped significantly in 2024 and has continued to do so this year.

Undoubtedly hoping for relief from Republican threats to home rule, some councilmembers met last week with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. But Bonds isn’t sure how much that will stave off any interventions.

“I think that the congressional body is concerned, but only to the extent that it helps them. As you know, many of them have some auxiliary living arrangements in and around the District. I suspect that many are comfortable with the District of Columbia being just that, a district. We’re doing everything to be a state.

“We’re part of that illustrious group called a donor state: Monies we raise in this community go towards helping, let’s say, some of the less fortunate states like Kentucky or Arkansas. But we don’t seem to get credit for it.

“So, it’s very difficult on us to accept the fact that we’re not a state when we’ve got everything going for us. Our budget process stands out across the nation. We feel that we are more solvent than even our federal government.

“This thing called statehood continues to evade us. … It’s painful. It’s hurtful,” added Bonds.

None of that means much in this climate. Trump and his congressional Republicans seem to hold the winning hand — although Bowser may have provided the opportunity for home rule to live another day. Last week, Republicans announced they were not planning to schedule a vote on legislation to extend the crime emergency beyond the initial 30 days permitted in the home rule charter.

Responding to those who have accused her of betraying District residents, Bowser told The Washington Post: “What I care about is protecting this city, our home rule and preserving our autonomy at every step."

Bowser may have set an impossible goal for herself. 

“I would compare where she is now to where Walter Washington was when he first came in as Mayor-Commissioner,” said Hobson. He offered that he has been inspired, however, by the engagement of DC residents in recent weeks; he cited last weekend’s march that brought out thousands of people and the daily “pop-up demonstrations all over town.”

At certain hours citizens gather in some communities and bang pots and pans. That tactic is comparable to one used during the pandemic. Then, residents were fighting isolation. This time they are fighting the deadly effects of creeping authoritarianism.

But, said Hobson, interrupting his own optimism, “When the 30 days [are] up, what’s going to happen?” 

This week’s actions by the House oversight committee certainly don’t bode well for a trouble-free future.

Could Trump wait a few months and then order another federal emergency? Who would stop him? There’s no clear barrier in the Home Rule Act: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

This article first appeared on DCLine.org