Contrarians Push Back!

Publisher's Roundup and a Note from Jen

As Trump usually does, his regime overreached in its lawless assault on Washington, D.C. home rule. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s missive Thursday night attempting to take over the Metropolitan Police Department and dictate its policies triggered a lawsuit from D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (who previously had tried to accommodate the federal invasion—always a mistake when dealing with authoritarian bullies). The lawsuit explained, “In every respect, the Bondi Order and Defendants’ assertions of authority over MPD exceed the narrow delegation that Congress granted the President [under Home Rule].” The suit cites the absence of a legitimate “emergency” and the limited exceptions to home rule. (The statute merely says that in case of an emergency D.C. will merely “provide services” of MPD for “federal purposes.”

Trump and Bondi’s effort for a total takeover are “unlawful assertions of authority,” the suit says, that “will create immediate, devastating, and irreparable harms for the District. Most critically, the order threatens to upend the command structure of MPD and wreak operational havoc within the department, endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike. There is no greater risk to public safety in a large, professional law enforcement organization like MPD than to not know who is in command.”

An impressive list of conservatives and independents openly denounced the D.C. takeover.

By Friday afternoon, the city and Justice Department were before U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in D.C. for a hearing on a TRO enjoining portions of Bondi’s letter. Reyes from the bench said flat out that the order to put the police department under the auspices of a federal official. If the Justice Department did not amend the order, she would enjoin that aspect of the executive degree. Before the deadline, DOJ caved, withdrawing the “takeover” portion of the Bondi letter. The remainder of the order (negating D.C. law preventing cooperation with ICE) and the “emergency” rationale for the order will be litigated next week.

As event have unfolded, we have learned that the National Guard forces are standing around un-armed at federal monuments. The real shift in D.C. is massive deployment of ICE agents and instigation of random checkpoint, which are legally dubious.

Meanwhile, D.C. residents are organizing protests. As in Texas where Democrats are fighting an unconstitutional re-redistricting to deny Hispanics and Blacks representation, D.C. is now front and center in the battle for democracy.

Trump’s order may be largely performative but allowing power grabs to stand would be a grave error. What happens in D.C. will not stay in D.C.

—Jen Rubin