NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE F or weeks, supporters of the District of Columbia’s permissive criminal-code overhaul have betrayed the weakness of their position. Progressive political actors and commentators tried through frenetic movements and threats to convince federal elected officials to respect Washington, D.C.’s right to govern itself, even if its self-governance is self-destructive. They failed.
The bill’s proponents exhausted all the ordnance in their arsenal attempting to prevent Congress from overriding it. They mourned the attack on the principle of “home rule” in D.C. from its fair-weather supporters, and they savaged the president for sawing off the limb onto which they’d crawled. None of it worked. And so, with no other options, “restorative justice” reformers are now defaming anyone responsible for their humiliation as racists, or, at the very least, propagators of the practices that perpetuate systemic racial discrimination.
No less an outlet than the Associated Press committed itself to this rearguard action when it accused federal lawmakers and, by proxy, the Democratic president of racial hostility. In an audacious shot across Biden’s bow, the AP called the overturning of the D.C. Council’s criminal-justice package part of a trend in which “predominantly white legislative bodies are seeking to curb or usurp the authority of local governments in cities with large Black populations, particularly on issues related to public safety and elections.”
The AP’s piece on the conflict between D.C. and Congress cited numerous examples of the same trend, including Missouri’s effort to strip St. Louis’s elected prosecutor of power. It linked to its own reporting on the scandal engulfing St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, whose efforts to thwart the prosecution of violent offenders extended to one career criminal who’d violated the terms of his bond 37 times but was nonetheless free when he crashed an illegally driven vehicle into a teenage volleyball star, costing her both of her legs. But it elided the details of this and other controversies involving Gardner included in that earlier story, presumably to preserve the credibility of the charge of racism.
As another example of this trend, the AP’s story cited the fact that Mississippi lawmakers had twice intervened to seize control of the levers of power in the city of Jackson — first to create a new district court composed of appointed judges and then again to seize control of the city’s water system. One state-level Democrat called it a “symbolic decapitation of black elected leadership.”
The state’s court reform established inferior courts in the Capitol Complex Improvement District, which was itself created in 2017 to fund infrastructure projects. In 2021, “a state-run Capitol police force” received broader authority to police the complex’s 8.7 square miles. The impetus for the expansion of the Capitol Police’s jurisdiction, which didn’t make it into the AP’s story, was Jackson’s historically high homicide rate in 2020, just as the city’s scandalous water crisis prompted state lawmakers to take control of its water system. Indeed, it’s not hard to envision an alternative narrative in which state-level lawmakers are accused of racism for failing to intervene in the public-safety and water crises, the effects of both of which were felt most acutely by the city’s primarily black population.
The AP was hardly alone in making the dubious case that racism was at work in Congress’s decision to override the D.C. Council’s bill. MSNBC columnist Jesse Holland wrote that Biden’s failure to intervene on behalf of the council and other majority-minority municipalities had rendered him complicit in “blatantly anti-democratic actions by white conservatives who are trying to reclaim their former apartheid-like power over Black people.” The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon used a subtler line of attack. It is “extremely disappointing,” Bacon wrote, to see Biden defer to a “heavily white coalition’s” efforts to reverse a verdict rendered by the elected officials of “heavily black D.C.” in order to “woo swing voters in Wisconsin.” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch mourned the degree to which Biden had sacrificed justice in the name of “political expedience,” and the ugly “optics” associated with “a white president throwing out a law enacted by a Black-majority city council.”
Those making these veiled allegations of racism seem to assume that Biden truly believes in Washington, D.C.’s sovereignty and the necessity of “home rule,” that he is betraying that belief out of political expediency, and that he can be bullied into reversing course. More likely, the opposite is true: Biden endorsed “home rule” when there were few political costs associated with doing so, and he abandoned it when those costs rose. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Biden’s decades-long political career can safely assume there is no principle he privileges above his own political fortunes.
And crying “Racism!” would be a poor means of bullying Biden into compliance even if he did have principles. He is all but inoculated against charges of racial animus from his left flank at this point. He’s been exposed to these allegations in small doses for years, and he’s since developed an acquired immunity to them. Biden’s Democratic rivals have tried and failed to impugn him over his refusal to endorse forced busing, his support for tough-on-crime legislation during a past period of high crime, and his unwillingness to disassociate himself from the ranking segregationists in his party early in his political career. Democratic voters shrug and continue to elect him.
As a matter of law, Congress’s intervention on behalf of D.C.’s rational-but-voiceless residents is uncontroversial. The Constitution grants Congress authority over the federal seat of government, and D.C.’s crime bill would have made the city a “more dangerous” place. So federal lawmakers saved the city from its own worst impulses.
As a matter of politics, the issue is just as clear-cut. Republicans in Congress led the charge against D.C.’s effort to “reimagine justice” as something resembling the word’s antonym. But Republicans were primarily echoing Democratic critics of the measure, including Washington’s mayor. And then Biden tacitly endorsed those critics’ grievances — and rather than suffer a humiliating rebuke, the D.C. Council announced on Monday that it would withdraw the criminal-justice bill and start over.
Instead of scorching the earth with spurious charges of racism, Biden’s detractors on the left would be wise to ask themselves why they so badly misread the political landscape and how they can recoup the political capital they committed to this losing fight.