Former President Donald Trump has lately taken to claiming that he will shut down home rule in Washington, D.C., dictating how the city will be run from on high to clean up crime and other perceived problems.
The Washington Post editorial board tore into the former president over this, blasting his plan as "rankly undemocratic" and, while not necessarily illegal owing to the Constitution's unique grant of power to Congress over the status of the district, an enormous step back for political representation.
All of this comes after years of increasingly bitter debate over the status of D.C. altogether, with a growing movement advocating the district become a full state, both to gain proper congressional representation and to stop having their every political decision subject to congressional veto.
"For a taste of what Republicans might have in mind for a Trump-led takeover of D.C., consult the nearly 50 bills to change laws in the District — on subjects as diverse as sports team logos and local election laws — that GOP lawmakers have proposed in recent years," wrote the board. "One would ban abortion in the city; another would repeal home rule entirely."
Much of this is being done in the name of fighting crime — which, the board noted, spiked after the pandemic and remained high even after most other cities got their public safety issues under control.
Read also: Opinion: Crime is not on the rise — so why do so many Americans think it is?
"In the end, though, democracy worked, as it has in the past," wrote the board. "Voter concerns about rising rates of carjackings and homicides pushed the council to shift gears, enacting anti-crime legislation [Mayor Muriel] Bowser, a Democrat, also supported. Courts increased the use of pretrial detention for potentially violent defendants, police cracked down on open-air drug markets, and the city hired more officers."
Trump and his Republican allies, by contrast, would force D.C. to be accountable only to the whims of a (presumably Republican) congressional majority, with its residents getting no say, wrote the board.
"Even if the District had not rebounded, its people, like all other Americans, have an inherent right to rule themselves, even if it means their leaders sometimes make mistakes. This principle, enshrined in the nation’s founding documents, needs no further justification. But if Republicans need one, it is that democratic systems, for all their messiness, tend to self-correct in ways that top-down systems do not," the board said.
Ironically, the board noted, in the pro-Trump Project 2025 document that calls for increasing executive power and reshaping every federal program into a right-wing bent, the Heritage Foundation proclaimed that “the principles of federalism should be upheld; these indicate that states better understand their unique needs.”
This should apply to D.C. as well, the board concluded, with "no special exception."
