Over at The Corner, John J. Miller has already mentioned the controversy reported in a front-page story in today’s Washington Post: that local officials in Prince George’s County, Maryland are incensed at ABC’s “Commander in Chief” for airing an episode Thursday night that depicted the county as held fast in the grip of crime as a poor black community. The left-wing racism that President Bush famously called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” is fully on display here; on the Hollywood plantation, preponderantly black communities are always poor and crime-ridden (but it’s the fault of white conservatives). We’re supposed to know where we are, in Hollywood’s black America, from the fact that the local restaurant advertises its chitlins. ABC deserves every slap it gets for this travesty.

But my attention was caught by this element of the flap: in the episode, Geena Davis’s “President Mackenzie Allen” is so moved by what she learns about poor, violent Prince George’s County that she “sends 40 U.S. marshals into the county to quell the crime,” according to the Post story. This reminds me of the episode I’ve mentioned here before—the last one of this show I could bring myself to watch—in which Prez Geena commutes the sentence of a death-row inmate held under the authority of the state of Texas. Same problem here: the president of the United States has no authority to send U.S. marshals into a local community to take over basic law enforcement functions. Was Prince George’s County invaded by Venezuela? Was there an insurrection that prompted the governor of Maryland to call for federal help? No? Then however moved she was by the plight of people terrified by crime, our fictional president had no legal basis for asserting federal power.

Before someone writes me about this, no, it’s not at all like Eisenhower sending paratroopers to Little Rock. That was presidential enforcement of the authority of federal courts.

Why can’t Hollywood get this right? (Don’t get me started on “The Fugitive” and Tommy Lee Jones’s merry band of deputy U.S. marshals.) Our semester is about to end here. Hey, Warren Bell! I’m available for seminars on the Constitution for screenwriters . . .