Inside one state's fight to save child care
Welcome to Field Notes, a reporter's log that gives readers an inside look into some of our most exciting reporting trips. This first appeared in the member-exclusive newsletter the Vox Explainer.
Hi, hello!
This is Rachel Cohen, a reporter at Vox, and I'm here to share a dispatch from a recent reporting trip to Boise, Idaho — where a unique and heated political fight unfolded in the world of child care policy. The piece not only looks at a growing partisan divide in child care but also a broader conservative push to deregulate the sector and redirect public funds away from the license-based centers government subsidies have historically favored.
For both time and budget reasons, I don't get to travel for most stories I work on. In this case though, thanks to a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation to support child care reporting, I was quite fortunate to spend four days meeting with lawmakers, parents, and child care advocates in Idaho. There I worked to understand a very complex, sensitive, and confusing story. In journalism, what I've realized over the years is that oftentimes the very act of traveling to a region can signal to otherwise hesitant sources that you are taking this story seriously. It shows you are investing resources into getting it right, which increases the chances that people will help you and talk with you. They see you're making a greater effort than just picking up the phone, and that really does mean something in this line of work.
Sometimes reporting trips are to collect more vivid detail and description to bring a narrative to life. I wanted to do that, certainly, but this trip was primarily for me to better understand what was really going on, to sit down with people face-to-face, and clarify a series of fast-moving and complicated ideas. I did make a lot of calls. I did review all the existing local reporting before I flew out. And I filed my own public records request with the state of Idaho. But I suspected that going there would prove valuable in being able to report this story better than just doing those things in isolation. Given all the flight delays and other travel complications, I'm very glad that turned out to be true.
You can find the story here. Here's a look inside my reporting.
Field Notes
SUNDAY, MARCH 9
10:30 am: I flew from Washington, DC, where I live, to Atlanta, and then on to Boise. After dealing with some delays with my flight layover, I finally reached my hotel a little after midnight. The long day of travel gave me a lot of time to review my notes and get ready for what I knew would be a busy week.
At the Boise Airport, I was greeted by a nice reminder that I was surrounded by some famous potatoes.
A sign that greeted me at the Boise Airport when I arrived. Rachel Cohen/Vox
MONDAY, MARCH 10
12 pm: My first meeting was at the (very beautiful) Idaho State Capitol, a short walk from my hotel. I learned I was in what is known as the 'Gem State,' a nickname first coined when Idaho was just a US territory in honor of all the precious gemstones around.
I sat down with Democratic state Rep. Megan Egbert to learn more about the H243 bill and what she was hearing from her constituents. She was actively involved in the legislative opposition.
The main entrance really was beautiful, and to my surprise — maybe just because I'm used to stricter protocol — there was no security. Anyone could walk right in. Rachel Cohen/Vox
2 pm: Later that afternoon, I went over to the Idaho Association of Commerce & Industry, which is basically their state chamber of commerce, and met with the longtime president to discuss how the lack of child care access affects the state's workforce and economy.
I turned left. We sat in a big conference room for our meeting. Rachel Cohen/Vox
7 pm: At night, I had some calls with child care providers. Idaho is two hours behind DC, and being able to talk to people in their own time zone made reporting a whole lot easier. Oftentimes people can only talk with the media after work, so coordinating evening discussions was just a whole lot easier on Mountain time.
TUESDAY, MARCH 11
10:30 am: I spent the morning meeting with sources off the record (so I can't share specifically who), but I can say I had some very clarifying coffee dates. Then I made my way over to Lakewood Montessori, a reputable child care center in Boise where I got to tour and sit down with the owner, Mary, to talk about the proposed bill. It was a beautiful day, and I knew I wanted to speak with as many child care providers as I could while I was in town.
From my tour of the Boise Montessori child care center. It was a really lovely facility, and seeing such cute kids always makes the drier parts of the reporting process worth it. Rachel Cohen/Vox
2 pm: After lunch, I headed back to the state Capitol where I met separately with both of the bill's co-sponsors, Rep. Rod Furniss and Rep. Barbara Ehardt. I learned that the bill was going to be amended the next day to restore maximum staff-child ratios, and I spoke with the lawmakers about why they believed deregulation was a good idea in the first place.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12
10 am: Today I had several more off-the-record meetings with sources and calls with child care providers around the state.
5:30 pm: I had the pleasure of having dinner with my old editor, Haley, who I interned for 12 years ago at the Washington Monthly. She now lives in Boise with her husband and two kids.
In Haley's kitchen! Rachel Cohen/Vox
THURSDAY, MARCH 13
8 am: My last day in town proved valuable. After persistent badgering, several sources finally agreed to talk, including from Wonder School — a company facing public backlash for supporting the bill — and officials from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. I also connected with people I'd talk with further when I returned to DC as more legislative developments unfolded throughout March.
11 pm: I got home and spent another three-and-a-half weeks reporting and writing the article!
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Trump's immigration raids are now before the Supreme Court
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. Last month, a federal judge in Los Angeles handed down a temporary order placing some restrictions on the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in that city. The Trump administration now wants the Supreme Court to lift those restrictions. The contested provisions of Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong's order are fairly narrow. They provide that federal law enforcement may not rely 'solely' on four factors when determining to stop or detain someone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. Under Frimpong's order, the government may not stop or detain someone solely because of 1) their 'apparent race or ethnicity,' 2) the fact that they either speak Spanish or speak English with an accent, 3) their presence at a location such as an agricultural workplace or day laborer pick-up site, or 4) the type of work that they do. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Frimpong's order prohibits the government from relying exclusively on any one of these factors or on any combination of them, so it could not detain someone solely because they speak Spanish and they are a day laborer, for example. The government may still rely on these four factors to determine whom to stop or detain, however, so long as it has other reasons for targeting a particular individual. Thus, for example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could target someone because that person speaks Spanish, and they work as a day laborer, and they were witnessed getting into a truck owned by a company known for hiring undocumented immigrants, because one of the three factors that ICE considered in this hypothetical stop is not on Frimpong's list. That said, at least according to the Cato Institute's David Bier, Frimpong's order has drastically reduced the number of immigration arrests within Los Angeles. The central issue in this case, known as Noem v. Perdomo, is what courts are practically able to do in order to rein in overzealous tactics by law enforcement. Judge Frimpong's order is modest — again, it does not prevent the Trump administration from targeting anyone, just as long as part of the reason why a particular individual is targeted doesn't appear on Frimpong's list of four — but it is also unlikely to survive contact with a Republican Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous toward Donald Trump. Indeed, the Court has long cautioned lower court judges against issuing broad orders imposing across-the-board restrictions on law enforcement. One of the seminal cases that the Trump administration relied upon in its Perdomo brief was handed down in 1983, well before the Court's recent partisan turn. The Republican justices, in other words, likely will not even need to stretch the law very far if they want to rule in Trump's favor in Perdomo. What is ICE up to in Los Angeles? The Perdomo case arises out of multiple immigration raids in Los Angeles, which have often taken place at job sites and other locations where the Trump administration believes that undocumented immigrants are often present. As Frimpong found, 'car wash workers, farm and agricultural workers, street vendors, recycling center workers, tow yard workers, and packing house workers were targeted.' One early operation 'detained multiple day laborers outside of the Westlake Home Depot.' At least some of these operations appear to violate the Constitution. In some instances, law enforcement appears to have targeted people because of their race. Frimpong, for example, pointed to an incident where 'agents approached and prevented a nonwhite individual from walking away but not those who appeared to be Caucasians.' A Latino car wash worker targeted by one of the raids testified that the federal agents who arrested him ignored two of his light-skinned coworkers, one of whom is Russian and another who is Persian. In other cases, federal agents appear to have targeted individuals despite having no reasonable grounds to believe they are undocumented. Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia, for example, is an American who was born in Los Angeles. According to an appeals court that upheld nearly all of Frimpong's order, agents 'forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm' after he was unable to identify which hospital he was born in. The agents eventually released Gavidia after he produced a Real ID card, a document that is only issued to people who are legally present in the United States, but they took his ID. It is quite difficult to obtain a federal injunction against law enforcement officials It is likely, in other words, that at least some of the people targeted by these Los Angeles raids could individually challenge their arrests or detention in court. But the ability to bring such individual challenges often isn't worth very much. For starters, the Republican justices' decisions in Hernández v. Mesa (2020) and Egbert v. Boule (2022) likely make it impossible to collect money damages from an ICE agent who violates your constitutional rights. In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the Supreme Court held that federal law enforcement officers who violate someone's constitutional rights may be personally liable for that violation. But Hernández and Egbert read that decision so narrowly that such suits rarely, if ever, move forward. So, even if someone like Gavidia brings a successful lawsuit, he probably wouldn't win anything more than the right to get his ID back. Someone who is unlawfully detained could potentially obtain a court order demanding their release. But many people targeted by law enforcement lack access to legal counsel or cannot afford to hire a lawyer even if they can find one who will take their case. While indigent criminal defendants have a right to a government-paid lawyer, defendants in immigration proceedings typically do not. And even when immigration defendants do prevail, an occasional court decision declaring some long-past arrest illegal is unlikely to deter future illegal arrests. Yet, the Supreme Court has long discouraged federal judges from issuing injunctions that forbid law enforcement from acting illegally in the future. The key case is City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), which held that Adolph Lyons, a man who was allegedly choked out by police officers without provocation, could not obtain a court order forbidding LA's police from using such chokeholds in the future. 'Past exposure to illegal conduct,' Justice Byron White wrote for the Court in Lyons, does not permit someone to seek an injunction. Rather, 'Lyons' standing to seek the injunction requested depended on whether he was likely to suffer future injury from the use of the chokeholds by police officers.' Indeed, White's decision placed nearly impossible barriers before most plaintiffs seeking court orders requiring police to modify their behavior. To obtain such an injunction, White wrote, Lyons 'would have had not only to allege that he would have another encounter with the police, but also to make the incredible assertion either (1) that all police officers in Los Angeles always choke any citizen with whom they happen to have an encounter, whether for the purpose of arrest, issuing a citation, or for questioning, or (2) that the City ordered or authorized police officers to act in such manner.' At least some of the plaintiffs in Perdomo present an unusually strong case that they are likely to be caught up in an immigration raid again in the future. According to the appeals court which heard this case, 'at least one individual with lawful status was stopped twice by roving patrols in just 10 days.' So a court could quite reasonably conclude that this individual is 'likely to suffer' the 'future injury' that Lyons demands. But Lyons also places such a high bar in front of plaintiffs seeking an injunction against law enforcement that it would not be difficult for the Republican justices to write an opinion relying on Lyons to toss out Judge Frimpong's order, assuming that they even bother to explain their decision in the first place — something that the Court's Republican majority often refuses to do. In addition to arguing that Lyons requires the Supreme Court to block Frimpong's decision, Trump's lawyers also point to the Court's recent decision in Trump v. CASA (2025), which held that federal courts typically should not issue injunctions that extend beyond the individual parties to a lawsuit. So, even if the one plaintiff who was stopped twice may obtain an injunction, that court order might have to be so narrow that it protects him and him alone against future illegal stops. Trump's CASA argument is hardly airtight. Though CASA did hold that broad injunctions are generally discouraged, it did permit them when necessary to give a victorious plaintiff 'complete relief.' Frimpong argued that a broad injunction is warranted in Perdomo, because law enforcement officers cannot reasonably be expected to know which suspects are protected by a court order. 'It would be a fantasy to expect that law enforcement could and would inquire whether a given individual was among the [plaintiffs] before proceeding with a seizure,' she wrote. The only way to stop ICE from targeting the Perdomo plaintiffs is to issue a court order that protects everyone in Los Angeles. Will that argument persuade a majority of the justices? The honest answer is, 'Who knows?' CASA is a brand new decision, handed down less than two months ago, and the Court has yet to apply its new rule to the facts of any specific case — including the CASA case itself. And the fact remains that it is exceedingly difficult to obtain any injunction against law enforcement, much less the broadly applicable one handed down by Judge Frimpong. The Supreme Court has generally preferred for judges to adjudicate alleged legal violations by law enforcement one at a time, rather than issuing wholesale injunctions halting an illegal practice — even though individual decisions often do little to stop these practices. At least some parts of Frimpong's order are probably overly broad In fairness, there are some good reasons to prefer individual lawsuits over wholesale court orders. Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases typically turn on the very specific facts of a particular case. Police might reasonably suspect, for example, that a person spotted with a large wad of cash in a neighborhood where illegal drugs are often sold is engaged in illegal activity. By contrast, police may not have reasonable grounds to suspect a similar person spotted walking near a business where people often make down payments on their new homes. As a general rule, the Fourth Amendment permits police to briefly stop and search someone if they reasonably suspect that person is engaged in illegal activity — or, in an immigration case, of being illegally present in the United States. To be sure, there are some things that law enforcement may almost never consider when determining whether to stop a particular individual. In Kansas v. Glover (2020), for example, the Court said that police may not target someone based on 'nothing more than a demographic profile' or stop and question someone about their immigration status because of their 'Mexican ancestry.' Frimpong's conclusion that ICE may not target someone solely because of their 'apparent race or ethnicity' is consistent with Glover. But Frimpong's conclusion that law enforcement may never reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented solely based on their presence in a particular location is probably a bit of a stretch. As a federal appeals court explained in a 2014 case, day laborer jobs are 'one of the limited options for workers without documents.' These jobs are often grueling, unreliable, and underpaid. They are unattractive to virtually anyone who is authorized to work in the United States and, thus, have less-demanding and better-paying job options available to them. There are at least some cases, in other words, where a law enforcement officer could reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented if they are consistently seen at a location where undocumented workers seek jobs as day laborers — what Frimpong described as a 'day laborer pick up site.' It is difficult to come up with categorical rules governing which factors law enforcement may consider when deciding whom to stop. Even race may be an acceptable factor in very limited circumstances; if multiple witnesses to a robbery tell police that they saw an East Asian man commit the crime, for example, then police could reasonably limit their search to people who appear to be East Asian. This is one reason why cases like Lyons exist: to prevent judges from handing down categorical rules that prevent police from conducting lawful investigations.
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The real reason Trump's DC takeover is scary
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Depending on who you listen to, President Donald Trump's decision to seize control over law enforcement in Washington, DC, is either an authoritarian menace or a farce. The authoritarian menace case is straightforward: Trump is (again) asserting the power to deploy the National Guard to a major US city, while adding the new wrinkle of federalizing the local police force based on a wholly made-up emergency. He is, political scientist Barbara Walter warns, 'building the machinery of repression before it's needed,' getting the tools to violently shut down big protests 'in place before the next election.' The farce case focuses less on these broad fears and more on the actual way it has played out. Instead of nabbing DC residents who oppose the president, federal agents appear to be aimlessly strolling the streets in safe touristy areas like Georgetown or the National Mall. During a pointless Sunday night deployment to the U Street corridor, a popular nightlife area, they faced down the terrifying threat of a drunk man throwing a sandwich. 'This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness,' The Atlantic's Quinta Jurecic writes. 'It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.' So who's right? In a sense, both of them. Trump's show of force in DC is both cartoonish and ominous, farcical and dangerous. It serves to normalize abuses of power that could very well be expanded — in fact, that Trump himself is openly promising to try it out in other cities. However, both the DC deployment and Trump's prior National Guard misadventure in Los Angeles show that it's actually quite hard to create effective tools of domestic repression. Executing on his threats requires a level of legal and tactical acumen that it's not obvious the Trump administration possesses. Or, put differently: The power they're claiming is scary in the abstract, but the way they're currently wielding it is too incompetent to do meaningful damage to democracy. The key question going forward — not just for DC, but the nation — is whether they get better with practice. The DC crackdown has been impotent so far Carl Schmitt, a reactionary German legal theorist who would later become a Nazi jurist, famously claimed that emergency powers create an insuperable problem for the liberal-democratic ideal of the rule of law. In theory, the law can limit how and when a person in government can wield emergency powers. But in practice, it all comes down to who has the power to give those words meaning. Who says what an emergency is, and when it ends? That person, and not the legal text or its underlying intent, is what determines what the law means — and thus has the real power. Schmitt expressed this idea in a famous dictum: 'Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' And while Trump has surely never heard of Schmitt, let alone read him, this is basically the way his administration has operated. On issues ranging from trade to federalizing DC law enforcement, Trump has decided that ordinary problems — job losses from trade, crime — are emergencies that justify him invoking powers designed for times of war, natural disaster, or rebellion. And so far, he's mostly gotten away with it. His federalization of DC will test the limits of Trump's Schmittian approach. By law, Trump's emergency power only allows him to federalize control over city police — the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD — for 30 days. And federal agents, be they National Guard or the DEA or Homeland Security, have circumscribed legal responsibilities and personnel limitations that prevent them from fully replacing MPD as ultimate authority in the capital city. This is the first thing to watch in DC: Will Trump go full Schmitt, and simply declare that these constraints on his power are moot? And if so, who — if anyone — will try and stop him? It's important to emphasize that we don't know the answers to these questions. While Trump has claimed the power to maintain federal control over MPD beyond the 30-day limit, Trump is constantly claiming all sorts of things that aren't true. It is entirely possible that, next month, MPD reverts to local control with basically no long-term ill effects. But even if Trump does defy a court order to release the MPD back to DC, or otherwise maintain some kind of long-term federal presence on the streets of DC, there's a question of what exactly he is accomplishing. Here, we have to separate damage to democracy from other concrete harms. Trump's crackdown may already be producing unjust arrests of many unhoused people in DC. That is bad and worthy of condemnation. Such arrests do not, however, help Trump consolidate the kind of controls a would-be dictator wants from law enforcement: the ability to suppress critical speech and opposition political activity through force of arms. The mere fact that federal troops are on the street, or that MPD is technically under federal control, does not mean that they're arresting Democrats or raiding the Washington Post or opening fire on protesters. Of course, the fact that something isn't yet happening doesn't mean it won't. But the current deployments, for all their fascist aesthetics, are quite far from that — in fact, they appear to be doing a lot of impotent, haphazard traffic stops. In the U Street area, home to mixed populations of longtime residents and more recent gentrifiers, locals have confronted the cops and jeered at them — with no reports of serious retaliatory injury. Trump is doing something that has an authoritarian intent and appearance that galvanizes resistance, without any kind of plan for turning it into an effective repressive tool. One could tell a similar story about the National Guard deployment to LA. Back then, Trump sent in the troops with a big show, claiming they were necessary to get (overhyped) riots under control. In reality, they showed up and went on a few drug and immigration raids, and then almost all of them quietly slinked off without scaring the LA population into political submission. Courts are currently hearing arguments on the deployment's legality. Ad hoc authoritarianism None of this is to say that Trump's deployments are harmless. As Walter points out, he is creating legal and political precedents that could — at least in theory — be used toward repressive ends if they so desire. If Trump does something to mess with the fairness of the midterm elections, and large cities erupt with protest, he's already somewhat normalized a militarized response. From a health-of-democracy standpoint, then, what's worrying about recent events in DC is not the developments on the ground. It's the precedent they set — the powers that Trump is claiming that could be all too easily abused. The question is whether such abuse will occur. So far, there is very little evidence that the Trump administration has anything like a systematic plan for suborning American democracy. He isn't doing what someone like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did in 2010 — come in with a blueprint for destroying the political opposition and executing on it as efficiently as possible. Rather, he's simply asserting powers whenever it's convenient to do what he wants to do at the moment. Can't get Congress to raise tariffs? Use emergency powers to impose them. Want to impose an unconstitutional export tax on Nvidia? Just make an extortionate 'deal' with its CEO. Want to stop seeing images of protesters with Mexican flags in LA? Send in the National Guard. To be clear: This ad hoc authoritarianism is still dangerous. It's just comparatively less effective than its deliberate cousin. Trump hasn't silenced the Democratic opposition or the American press or shuttered civil rights groups. He's taken steps in all of those directions, but they fit the ad hoc pattern: each troubling, but not (yet!) systematic or successful enough to fundamentally compromise the fairness of elections or Americans' rights to dissent and free speech. Where we're at, in short, is a place where the building blocks for constructing an authoritarian state are all in a row. The question is whether Trump has the will and the vision to put them together in a way that could durably compromise the viability of American democracy. This context helps us understand why the DC deployment is both absurd and dangerous. It is absurd in the sense that it does nothing, on its own, to advance an authoritarian agenda — and, if anything, compromises it by creating images of uniformed thugs on American streets that galvanize his opponents. It is dangerous in that it could normalize abuses of power that, down the line, could be wielded as part of an actually serious campaign of repression. And at this point, I don't know which scenario is more likely: that Trump's ad hoc efforts to seize control founder and ultimately amount to little, or that he follows his Schmittian logic to its dictatorial terminus.
Vox
a day ago
- Vox
Why Trump thinks DC can't govern itself
is a correspondent at Vox, where he covers the impacts of social and economic policies. He is the author of 'Within Our Means,' a biweekly newsletter on ending poverty in America. DC statehood has always been an uphill battle because of the paternalistic roots of the federal government's relationship with the nation's a few years ago, the movement for Washington, DC, statehood was gaining steam. In 2020 and 2021, Democrats in the House passed bills to make DC the 51st state, re-energizing the fight to grant residents of the nation's capital representation in Congress. This didn't necessarily come as a surprise. For some time, Trump has fantasized about taking over DC altogether, saying that the federal government would do a much better job running the city than its current mayor, Muriel Bowser. So, how did DC go from building a growing movement for statehood to a hostile federal takeover in just a few short years? The simple answer is that Republicans are now in power, and they'd like to make an example out of DC. But even without Republican control of the White House or Congress, statehood and full self-governance have always been an uphill battle, because there's also a deeper history of the federal government's paternalistic relationship with the nation's capital. DC's self-governance has always been controversial Washington, DC, was specifically established to serve as the nation's capital. The US Constitution gave Congress the power to create a small federal district that doesn't exceed 10 square miles to serve as the seat of the federal government. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which paved the way to build a new capital along the Potomac River. And so, DC was established by carving out land from Maryland and Virginia (which later took its portion back) and was under Congress's jurisdiction. That meant there would be no democratically elected mayor or local government. But DC grew into a full city, with residents living there on a permanent basis — not just to serve the federal government. And, for most of the city's history, those residents were entirely disenfranchised — unable to get representation in Congress or even vote for president. That changed during the civil rights era, when DC's voting rights (or lack thereof) garnered more attention, in no small part because of the city's large Black population, which, by 1960, had become the majority. As a result, the constitution was officially amended in 1961 to grant DC residents the right to vote for president, but the amendment stopped short of granting them representation in Congress. Even then, DC didn't have a democratically elected local government. So, in 1974, Congress passed the DC Home Rule Act, which allowed residents to elect their own mayor and council. That finally gave the nation's capital some form of self-governance, but Congress ultimately retained its power to overrule local laws and budgets if it so pleased. The federal government's resistance to giving DC autonomy is ultimately rooted in racism. Known as Chocolate City, DC was the epicenter of Black arts, culture, and politics. And since it gained the right to vote for local officials, DC has only ever elected Black mayors. As a result, opposition to DC statehood has often leaned on the paternalistic and racist notion that Black people can't be trusted to govern themselves — that the city's residents simply don't know what's best for them. That's why conservative lawmakers have pointed to issues like crime or corruption as evidence that DC can't be trusted to be a state. In 2021, for example, Steve Scalise, the Republican House majority leader, wrote, 'Why should the District of Columbia be granted statehood when it can't even perform basic governmental duties like protecting its residents from criminals?' Scalise also said that the city was simply too corrupt to be a state. These kinds of arguments have been repeated by people on the right for decades, despite the fact that states, including Scalise's own Louisiana, are well-known for their corruption and crime. So even if those issues were a legitimate concern (they shouldn't be), then why should the residents of DC be treated any differently than other Americans? Part of the reason in recent years has less to do with explicit racism and more to do with partisan politics. If DC were to get full representation in Congress, it would undoubtedly benefit Democrats, since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. (Trump, for example, only got 6.5 percent of the vote in DC in 2024.) That explains why Democrats are on board with DC statehood while Republicans are fiercely opposed. But this is the natural extension of the overt racism that has long defined opposition for DC self-governance. Before the Home Rule Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson reorganized how the district was governed and appointed Walter Washington to serve as the mayor-commissioner of DC. When Washington, who was Black, submitted his first budget to Congress, the response was astonishingly racist; John McMillan, a Democrat from South Carolina who chaired the House Committee on the District of Columbia, sent Washington a truckload of watermelons. Now, Republicans might not play the same tactics, but the degree to which they ignore Black Washingtonians and their rights is unmistakable. 'Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing,' Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, said in 2021 in a speech opposing DC statehood. 'In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.' But, as I noted then, roughly 140,000 people in DC's labor force were considered working class in 2016, according to the Center for American Progress, while about 220,000 workers in Wyoming were considered working class. The most notable difference in those two populations is that the vast majority of DC's working class was made up of people of color, while 84 percent of Wyoming's working class was white. The consequences of federal control Federal intervention in DC's affairs has often poorly served residents, and not just because they have, through the years, been denied voting rights, self-governance, and representation in Congress. Congress's meddling in local laws has ultimately served the interests of lawmakers from other states and not the interests of the people living in the city. One of the most notable examples of this was during the AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, DC spent money on needle exchange programs, which research has shown is critical in preventing the spread of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS. But, Congress banned the city from using its own funds on needle exchange programs — a ban that lasted nine years. During that time, the city saw a surge in infections and had the highest rate of HIV per capita in the country, even exceeding rates in developing countries. And, because DC was a majority Black city, the policy disproportionately affected Black people. Trump's plan to federalize the local police force follows those exact footsteps — placing his own interests above those of DC residents and their elected officials. The move is a blatantly political one. Trump is using DC as a warning to other cities: If you pass progressive criminal justice laws, then he will try his best to intervene. It's a paternalistic instinct, one that is anti-democratic at its core, taking local control away from the hands of voters. And what's unfortunate for DC is that Trump's move is not entirely unprecedented. It falls in line with how the federal government has long viewed DC's self-governance: at best an inconvenience, and at worst, a threat.
