On Thursday, President Biden reversed course and announced that he would sign a bill rolling back the District of Columbia Council’s sweeping rewrite of its criminal code — a measure so ill considered that it was opposed by Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser and the liberal Washington Post editorial board.
The Post warned in January, as the council prepared to override the mayor’s veto, that the bill would make D.C. “a more dangerous city” by decreasing “punishments for violent crimes such as carjackings, home invasion burglaries, robberies and even homicides” and by tying “the hands of police and prosecutors while overwhelming courts.”
That warning was initially not enough to get the White House and the overwhelming majority of House Democrats to abandon their obsession with D.C. “home rule.” On February 6, the White House issued a veto threat decrying the “denial of self-governance” in the federal district as “an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded.” A few days later, House Republicans, joined by 31 House Democrats, passed a resolution disapproving of the new D.C. criminal code.
The House Democrats who voted against the House GOP’s resolution are now furious with the Biden administration for indicating the bill would be vetoed. “The White House f***ed this up royally,” one House Democrat told the Hill. “We are being hung out to dry.”
The obvious winners of Biden’s flip-flop are the law-abiding citizens of the District of Columbia, congressional Republicans, and the congressional Democrats who sided with them. The obvious losers are D.C.’s would-be criminals, the 173 House Democrats who opposed the rollback, and advocates of statehood for the District of Columbia.
Biden’s capitulation is proof that he and many other Democrats don’t really believe their rhetoric about statehood for D.C. “I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” Biden tweeted on Thursday. “If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did – I’ll sign it.”
In other words, Biden supports D.C. home rule — except on the most basic question of criminal law. He supports D.C. statehood — which would allow local “defund the police” Democrats to run amok in the federal district without federal oversight.
While Democratic support of statehood in the District of Columbia has always been mostly about power politics — two extra Democratic votes in the Senate and an extra Democratic vote in the House — there are principled reasons why the Constitution gave Congress the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” in the federal district. First and foremost among these is that the physical security of the federal government and its leadership is a national, not just local, concern. Much of the impetus for creating a federal capital district followed a 1783 riot that drove Congress out of Philadelphia after the local government failed to protect it. Recent events — including the January 6 riot, the arrest of an armed assassin outside the Maryland home of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the attack in San Francisco on the husband of then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi — underline the continuing importance of the Founders’ worries.
“The indispensable necessity of complete authority at the seat of government carries its own evidence with it,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43. “Without it, not only the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity, but a dependence of the members of the general government, on the State comprehending the seat of the government for protection in the exercise of their duty might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members of the Confederacy.”
Ensuring the safety of the seat of government is the most basic reason why Congress has constitutional authority over the federal district. The dangerous law enacted by D.C.’s council is proof that Congress should not attempt to relinquish this authority.