MIKE DAVIS: Trump takes over DC police, but here's what must happen next

Fox News

a day ago

Washington, D.C., is a crime-infested cesspool and, sadly, has been for some time. Murders, armed robberies, carjackings and many other vicious crimes terrorize innocent residents, many of whom are poor racial minorities. For the past four years, the Biden administration, under the leadership of Biden D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, wasted precious resources that should have gone toward D.C. crime investigation and prosecution in pursuit of leftists' obsession with January 6.
President Trump has taken bold action to put a stop to this insanity by federalizing the D.C. Metropolitan Police. Attorney General Pam Bondi has designated Drug Enforcement Administration Director Terrance Cole to work with Mayor Muriel Bowser to help run the police department. That should further confuse Police Chief Pamela Smith, the department's former "chief equity officer," who raised eyebrows this week when she appeared not to know what the term "chain of command" even means.
President Trump and his team's task in taking charge of law enforcement in the nation's capital is daunting, in part because of a little-discussed law that also needs to go.
In the early 1970s, the Democrat-led Congress passed two laws that resulted in D.C. becoming ungovernable. The first restricted the president's power to appoint judges to the local D.C. courts. The president has the same appointment power with respect to federal courts in D.C. that he does in other districts, but local courts, the D.C. Superior Court and D.C. Court of Appeals, hear most criminal matters that involve local crimes. For these judgeships, the president must choose from candidates selected by a seven-member, Democrat-controlled nominating commission. The president only appoints one member. Various others, including the mayor and the D.C. Bar, appoint members.
The D.C. Bar is a farce. For instance, it is outrageously persecuting and attempting to disbar Jeff Clark, a Trump 45 Justice Department and Trump 47 White House Office of Management and Budget senior official, for a memorandum that he drafted and which was never even made public. The scheme for appointing local D.C. judges violates the U.S. Constitution's Appointments Clause. Only the president and Senate should have a role in such appointments, not a city's mayor or a local bar association.
These local D.C. judges are, for the most part, rabid leftists. For example, President Ronald Reagan got stuck appointing radical leftist and future Obama-era Democrat Attorney General Eric Holder as a D.C. Superior Court judge. Even when thugs who terrorize innocent civilians are arrested, leftist D.C. judges, enabled by the radical D.C. City Council, hand down pathetically lenient sentences that allow these punks—as new D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro calls them—back out on the streets to cause more devastation.
Juveniles often do not even go to Superior Court for their crimes. Most wind up in Family Court, which is focused on "rehabilitation." These juveniles do not need arts and crafts, as Pirro has said. They need iron bars. Unless Congress changes this appointment scheme, or unless the Supreme Court strikes it down, President Trump cannot rectify the situation even if vacancies arise. He will have to choose from a slate of atrocious candidates put forth by the leftists on this unconstitutional commission. The situation is reminiscent of the crisis in Israel, where the anti-Netanyahu Supreme Court appoints the majority of the judicial selection committee that then selects new justices when vacancies occur.
Another massive problem involves the unconstitutional Home Rule Act of 1973, which gave the ultra-blue DC its own radical local government to oversee day-to-day affairs in our nation's capital. For decades, local criminals and their enablers in the city government and on the courts have held hostage our nation's capital with crime, homeless camps, chaos, and filth. By coddling real criminals and persecuting his political enemies, former President Biden took D.C. back to levels we have not experienced in decades. President Trump recently invoked Section 740 of this statute to federalize the D.C. police department. President Trump also controls the D.C. National Guard and is deploying hundreds into the city to restore order. This D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 is a half-century-long national disaster. Congress must make its repeal a high priority, returning control of Washington to the American people, where it belongs under our constitution.
This scenario is untenable. Washington voted so overwhelmingly against President Trump, all three times, that it would make despots like Kim Jong Un and the president of Iran blush about faking the inverse of these types of electoral numbers, but that is of no consequence. As President Trump has said, our capital is the image of our nation that other leaders see when they visit the White House. Many parts of the capital city look like third-world slums. Homeless encampments littered with drug needles, tattered cloth, and the rancid stench of fermenting feces defile the sidewalks and burn the human senses. Last year, the Supreme Court held in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities can put a stop to these filthy encampments, and President Trump will take full advantage of that authority. Article II of the Constitution empowers the president to manage federal enclaves like D.C.; yet Congress has unconstitutionally delegated the President's Article II power to a woefully inept mayor and city council.
For decades, incompetent fools littered the city council and mayorship, most notably former Mayor Marion Barry. After being convicted following his arrest in a narcotics sting operation in which he smoked crack, on video, with a prostitute, in a hotel room, D.C.'s overwhelmingly Democrat voters re-elected Barry. One member of the City Council who was recently federally indicted for corruption just won re-election. That's why President Trump shouldn't bow to these buffoons and has every right to declare a national emergency.
D.C. is a mass of suffering, no matter what the leftist reporters and other limousine liberals who live in Georgetown, the Palisades, or in Chevy Chase in wards 3 and 4 tell us. They are safe and secure in their small part of the city, or outside of it wholly. The rest of D.C.'s residents are not so lucky. These innocent people suffer the daily consequences of the half-century-old Home Rule Act of 1973 and the law providing for the entrenchment of leftist judges who have transformed the criminal justice system into a revolving door for criminals.
Democrats have no desire to change the status quo. They want to abolish the filibuster and make D.C. a state, knowing it would reliably elect two Democrats to the U.S. Senate and have sovereign protections from federal encroachment. Prominent Democratic strategist James Carville reiterated this goal just last week.
Senate Republicans must wake up to the reality that the filibuster will survive only until the next Democrat trifecta. A preemptive strike now would lead to the passage of much quality legislation, including the repeal of laws that have turned our capital into a crime-infested, third-world Marxist hellhole.