The Washington Post goes after Senator Ensign today over his admission that he had an affair, but the part of their editorial criticizing him for the gun-rights amendment that he successfully attached to the D.C.-voting bill is bizarre (or “noxious” to use their own words) in its reasoning. The Post claims that Ensign would “never, in a million years, strip Nevada officials of their right to write local laws or in any other way visit upon them so extreme a sovereignty-stripping measure.” But the Post’s editorial writers ignore the district’s special status under the Constitution in the exact same way as the supporters of the bill to give D.C. a voting member of Congress.

The whole reason the D.C.-voting bill is plainly and obviously unconstitutional is because the District of Columbia is not a state like Nevada. It is a federal district over which Congress “exercise[s] exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever.” Congress is not exercising “extreme” sovereignty-stripping power when it prevents the District over which it has complete and sole governmental authority from enacting “laws or regulations that discourage or eliminate the private ownership or use of firearms.” It is simply preventing the district government that has been granted limited home rule from stripping citizens of their Second Amendment rights, a true example of extremism. To paraphrase its own words, what works for the Washington Post “at any given moment is the only thing that seems to matter.”