Congress should seize control of DC

The world judges a country by its capital. Paris, London and Rome are showcases of national ambition and a source of pride. How might one judge the United States after visiting Washington, DC? Corrupt, lawless and increasingly unsafe after dark?

In a city meant to project strength and stability, one finds instead great domes and marble colonnades sharing the streets with open-air crime scenes.

This July, a 21-year-old congressional intern, Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, was shot to death after being caught in an ongoing dispute between two rival groups.

In 2023, Phillip Todd, a staffer for Senator Rand Paul took a knife to the chest. The attacker punctured Todd’s left lung, slashed his left ear and inflicted “a puncture wound to the left side of his head, which penetrated the skull and likely caused an internal brain bleed,” according to court documents. 

Earlier this month, Edward Coristine, who had formerly worked for the Department of Government Efficiency, was violently assaulted during an attempted carjacking. Grisly photos of the aftermath were shared online, a shocking reminder for the rest of the country of just how dangerous DC has become.

Residents in our nation’s capital have become increasingly numb to these types of headlines. 

In 2023, the city recorded more homicides than at any time in the last two decades. Carjackings doubled. Tourists, residents and government employees are now interchangeable prey.

In too many cases, these criminals face little or no meaningful punishment.

The DC Council’s response to this breakdown was not to stiffen penalties or support law enforcement, but to join the fashionable chant to “defund the police.” They sought to decriminalize dangerous drugs and reduce sentences for armed robbery, carjacking and even homicide. Congress was forced to step in to block what would have been a catastrophic criminal-code overhaul.

Time and again, the council was given opportunities to clean up the city. Time and again, it refused.

In the face of this crime and the warnings from President Trump that failure to act would force his hand, one might have expected a flicker of contrition. Instead, February produced the spectacle of the DC Council being forced to expel one of its own, Trayon White, who was indicted for pocketing $156,000 in bribes to funnel millions into “violence prevention” schemes. Well-padded, soft-on-crime grifts such as these soothe the conscience of the political class while leaving the streets to the predators. The charges include videotaped exchanges of cash-stuffed envelopes and the promise of a 3 percent kickback.

In any functioning government, that would be the end of a political career. But this is DC. In July, White won a special election for the very same Ward 8 seat he had been expelled from. He was sworn back into office this past week. An indicted councilman is now making laws for the nation’s capital while awaiting trial. 

In Federalist No. 43, Madison warned that the seat of the federal government must not be “left in the hands of a single State” and that any such arrangement would “abridge its necessary independence.” He could just as easily have been warning against what we see today: a capital captive to its own small-time operators and their rackets. Washington, DC, is not a state. It was never intended to be one. Our Founders deliberately placed the capital under the “complete authority” of Congress to ensure the nation’s government would never be held hostage to the petty politics of a single jurisdiction.

President Trump has said what is blatantly obvious to anyone who has visited Washington, DC: the capital is “out of control.” Now he is federalizing the police, deploying the National Guard and taking direct control of DC’s public-safety apparatus, as provided in Section 740 of the Home Rule Act. 

But restoring order long-term requires Congress to do what the DC Council will not. That’s why I introduced the Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident (BOWSER) Act. It would repeal the Home Rule Act one year after passage, returning full governing authority over DC to Congress.

Under the Constitution, that is precisely where it belongs.

President Trump should use every tool at his disposal to restore law and order and make Washington the “shining city on a hill” that Reagan said America was meant to be. Congress should follow his lead and pass the BOWSER Act to ensure that the safety of our seat of government is not dependent on the current occupant of the White House. 

We have no other choice. The district’s government has proven unable and unwilling to meet even the basic obligations of governance. It’s gotten to the point where Washington is no longer merely a local embarrassment. To allow it to remain a showcase of crime, corruption and incompetence is an act of national self-harm.