Lots of misinformation is being spread about President Donald Trump’s decision to federalize law enforcement in Washington, D.C.  Much of it is the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome: “fascist” tendencies toward “authoritarianism” at the expense of “black and brown” people because of DJT’s “racism” and desire to bury the Epstein scandal.  There’s no “emergency” justifying the takeover.  The “solution” is to do what Democrats failed to do for decades: Make DC the 51st state so it need not undergo such “humiliation.”

Where to start?

My point of departure is political.  Washington is the “federal city.”  The Constitution is explicit.  Congress has exclusive jurisdiction over “the district constituting the seat of government.” 

Washington was a political compromise — neutral territory between North and South, chosen as an uninhabited swamp between Maryland and Virginia (and conveniently upriver from George Washington’s Mount Vernon).  It was supposed to be apolitical.  Democrats want to make it hyper-political.

The reaction to the Trump federalization of D.C. law enforcement is to claim that “this proves we should have made D.C. a state!”  Well, no it doesn’t.  All it proves is your naked political ambitions to guarantee the left two senators and a bunch of congressmen. 

There’s a lot of jabber about “home rule.”  There are two largely unmentioned facts about “home rule.”  First, it is an historical anomaly.  Nobody talked about D.C. “home rule” until 1974.  For nearly 185 years of the Republic, D.C. functioned under its constitutional identity as the “federal district.”  And don’t tell me that the string of........

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