For the second time this summer, President Trump is ordering the National Guard to a major American city, this time Washington, D.C.
At a White House press conference on Monday morning, Trump declared his effort to be “Liberation Day in D.C” with the announcement of “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor — and worse.” He cited violent street crime, disorder, homeless encampments, and open-air drug use, all of which are indeed persistent problems in D.C. although violent crime has been falling recently.
Declaring a “crime emergency” in the city, the president — to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s consternation — will assume temporary control of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, delegating the responsibility to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Can the president do that? Should he?
As we have noted before, the president has the legal authority to deploy the National Guard to American cities to protect federal property and personnel and to restore order during states of emergency, even if uninvited by state and local governments.
And because this is the federal District of Columbia, the president’s powers arguably go further in this case because the D.C. Guard reports to President Trump, not the city’s mayor; in the case of the states, it would be to their governors outside of limited circumstances. (For that reason, the president is not relying on Section 12406, which, during the controversy back in June over his summoning of the California National Guard, raised the thorny statutory question of how much he was required to consult with Governor Gavin Newsom, who opposed the deployment.)
Furthermore, the Justice Department has long argued that the Posse Comitatus Act (1878), which generally bars military forces from conducting civil law enforcement within the nation’s borders, does not apply to the D.C. Guard within the federal district.
And, finally, section 740 of the 1973 D.C. Home Rule Act specifically empowers the president to temporarily take control of the city’s police department for federal purposes after a formal declaration of emergency.
Accordingly — whatever the histrionics in the press or from the mayor’s office — President Trump’s moves are in no way an extralegal totalitarian takeover.
That does not, however, make what he’s doing necessarily wise.
As Americans from coast to coast learned the hard way in the late 20th century, the best way to fight lawbreaking and disorder in our cities is through sustained active policing, by putting more cops on the streets, by focusing on crime hot-spots and gang members, and by putting violent criminals behind bars. But hiring, training, and deploying more cops takes time, and it takes even more time to see results.
National Guard deployments, on the other hand, are by their very nature temporary. Whether in a month or in three months, the troops will be sent home. If Washington was experiencing a mass outbreak of social unrest and riots, as it did in the summers of 1968 and 2020, a deployment of National Guardsman to restore basic order would be warranted and, presumably, effective. The guardsmen might be able free up some police resources, but we are likely to see a lot of them standing post outside federal buildings. That may look like a tough response, but to the citizen soldiers of the Guard — called away from families, jobs, and schools — it will seem more like a waste of their time.
Washington, D.C.’s problems with street crime and homeless encampments are, at their heart, failures of local government to fulfill its most basic responsibilities. The criminal justice system is comprehensively under-resourced, and the city is not serious enough about arresting and jailing offenders.
D.C. needs more cops. It needs tougher shoplifting laws. It needs sane policies to control the growth of tent cities and vagrant encampments. These are chronic problems that, unfortunately, aren’t susceptible to instant fixes.
D.C.’s governmental sclerosis is a problem that only Congress has the power, under our constitution, to permanently fix. A couple of years ago it blocked a moronic soft-on-crime legislative initiative, but it needs to be more hands-on. After the troops go home and the Metropolitan Police Department returns to Mayor Bowser’s control, Congress should consider remembering that it is entrusted by the Constitution to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the federal district.