It’s time to move the seat of federal power to a Republican-run city until we can figure out what is going on.
Monday night, Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked at gunpoint in Navy Yard, a Washington, DC neighborhood just blocks away from the Capitol building. Cuellar’s chief of staff Jacob Hochberg said that three men held up the congressman. Police recovered the vehicle, a white Honda, but are still tracking down the suspects.
Cuellar is the second member of Congress to be the victim of random violent crime this year. In February, Democratic representative Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her Capitol Hill apartment building by a homeless man who demanded to be let into her home to use the restroom. The man punched Craig and grabbed her around the neck, but she escaped after throwing hot coffee on him.
Cockburn probably need not mention the irony of members of the political party who have been sympathetic to defunding the police becoming the victims of crime. Cuellar and Craig have rhetorically opposed the Defund the Police movement, but also both voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a sweeping overhaul of policing in America that would have removed qualified immunity from police officers and “redirect funding to community-based policing programs,” according to NPR. Local police departments that did not comply with the new policing standards laid out by the bill would “lose access to federal policing funding,” said Vox. The bill ultimately did not become law, but on the local level, Democrats have installed progressive prosecutors and shrugged at rising crime.
But this crime trend cannot merely be reduced to political schadenfreude. After all, a staffer for Republican senator Rand Paul was randomly stabbed in the head by a vagrant after leaving dinner with a friend in downtown DC. Surely he wasn’t the victim of karma?
Putting all of the nation’s federally elected representatives in the pressure cooker that is the nation’s capital seems a recipe for disaster. Cockburn wonders at what point the threat of random violence to Congress rises to the level of a national security threat — or worse, an insurrection!
Unfortunately, we couldn’t just move lawmakers to another big city worthy of their cache. Philadelphia would seem like an obvious pick, given its history regarding the Constitutional Convention. Alas, Democratic representative Mary Gay Scanlon was carjacked by five teenagers there in 2021. St. Louis nearly became the nation’s capitol in 1868; in 2021, Representative Cori Bush’s parked car was hit with errant gunfire. New York is out too, considering what happened to gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin on the campaign trail.
The threat of Democrat-run cities cannot be overstated. In the past seventy-two hours, three prominent progressives were killed within their borders. Ryan Carson, a social justice advocate who wanted to make New York a better place by lobbying for safe injection sites, was stabbed to death in Bed-Stuy after being accused of looking at someone the wrong way. Pava LaPere, a tech CEO named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list who touted that her company was “female and black-founded”, was bludgeoned to death in Baltimore by a rapist who was released early from prison. Josh Kruger, a journalist and advocated for LGBTQ+ and homeless people, eerily mocked Scott Adams’s prediction that if Biden were elected “there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year” shortly before he was shot to death in his home in Philadelphia.
It seems the only solution is to literally pick up DC and move it somewhere else — somewhere far away from the progressive enclaves that threaten to take out the Congress on a daily basis. Or, you know, start voting differently.
