D.C.’s Home Rule Is a Luxury, Not a Right

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 14, 2025

 

Cut it how you like, but the fact will remain: the people of Washington, D.C., have no greater capacity to avoid direct federal rule than did the erstwhile denizens of the Northwest Territory. Per the plain terms of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has plenary power over “the Seat of Government of the United States,” which is not a city, or a state, or even a reservation, but a special district like no other in the land. If the national legislature wishes to, it can delegate some of its power to a council or a mayor or an emissary in a pointy hat. But it is not obliged to do so, and if, according to its judgment, any existing deputation has become intolerable, it can abolish or limit it at will. In D.C., home rule is a luxury, a privilege, an indulgence. It is not a right. To pretend otherwise is to replace fact with desire — which, in cases where the law is straightforward, is never a salutary idea.

 

I relate these facts not out of malice but frustration at the poor quality of the arguments that have been advanced against President Trump’s decision to hand some of D.C.’s crime-fighting efforts over to the feds. Among the briefs that have been lodged are that the move is intrinsically “authoritarian,” that there is more lawlessness “in other places,” and that, because he behaved disgracefully on January 6, 2021, Trump has no right to complain about other people’s transgressions. None of these cases makes any sense. To the charge that his call is “authoritarian,” one must respond that Trump is acting within the bounds of the Constitution, that he is following the text of the appropriate statutes to the letter, and that his announcement was quietly welcomed by the mayor whose authority he has partially superseded. To the charge that crime is worse elsewhere, one must observe that, irrespective of whether that is true or false, it is irrelevant, for it is over Washington, D.C., and not elsewhere, that the president has been accorded direct power. As for January 6? I remain one of Donald Trump’s most tenacious critics on this point, but, frankly, I do not understand the logic undergirding its invocation in this realm. January 6 was bad, because lawbreaking is bad. The aim here is to reduce lawbreaking. That the person in charge of that effort is a hypocrite is indisputably true, but that does not affect the virtue of his intervention either way.

 

The practical arguments against federal involvement in the federal district are not much better. Perhaps it is correct to say that crime is “lower” today than it was last year, but that does not imply that crime is at an acceptable level now or that those who have been tasked with addressing it are doing a good job. A man who regularly drives through a school zone at 100 mph could be said to have “slowed down” if, after a few months, he reduced his speed to 80, but this would tell us nothing useful about whether the children on the sidewalk were in peril. By all accounts, many neighborhoods in Washington are unpleasant. There are nice areas, naturally, and one can easily find examples of unmolested people having a lovely time, but there is not an honest person alive who thinks that the place is a shining example of good government and civic order. To insist, despite this, that the organization that has ultimate responsibility for the area ought simply to turn a blind eye is absurd. Quite obviously, the federal government has an interest in the security of the place in which the federal government does its work. In the last few weeks alone, a congressional intern has been murdered and an executive-branch engineer has been assaulted. Notwithstanding that Washington, D.C., is the nation’s capital — and thus an emblem of the country, as well as its diplomatic hub — this creates a clear link between the problem at hand and the authority being deployed. Wickard v. Filburn, this is most decidedly not.

 

Given my preference for robust federalism, and my respect for the Founders’ constitutional design, I would prefer that Washington, D.C., be transmuted into a genuine federal district, with the vast majority of the city’s area handed back to Maryland, Virginia, or any other state that is willing to take it. Until such time as that is achieved, however, it is entirely reasonable for the United States Congress — and, to the extent that he has been empowered by law, the United States president — to exercise control over land that is the undisputed preserve of the United States. America is unusual in that, unlike most nations, it features a host of overlapping sovereignties and conflicting legal machinery. Washington, D.C., does not. If, as seems plainly to be the case, the region’s experiment in political devolution has been a failure, it is not only right but necessary that the rightful ministry be restored.