After months of threats, insults and federal actions against the local government of Washington, D.C., the city’s leaders are poised to mount their defense on Thursday when they testify before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.
Much of the attention will be on Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, who after publicly standing up to President Trump in his first term has been trying a more diplomatic approach this time around. She has pledged to work with the administration on law-and-order issues, and said in a letter to the committee’s leaders that she looked forward to continuing a “productive partnership” on “shared priorities” such as public safety and return-to-work policies. But she said that her vision of the partnership “respects the will of D.C. residents and honors the principles of home rule.”
While many local officials and D.C. residents say they are sympathetic to the mayor’s position, given how vulnerable the city is to federal intervention, her critics say the diplomatic approach hasn’t kept Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans from coming after the city.
A “public safety emergency” declared in August by Mr. Trump — giving him legal authority to make demands of the local police department — expired last week, but hundreds of additional federal law enforcement officers and thousands of National Guard troops are still patrolling the city. On Monday morning, Mr. Trump threatened on social media to declare a new emergency after the mayor told reporters that with the expiration of the emergency order, the local police were no longer required to cooperate on immigration enforcement.
The House Oversight Committee has already endorsed 14 bills, mostly on party line votes, that would mandate changes to D.C. laws regarding criminal justice or expand federal control over the city’s affairs. Four of these — including bills lowering the age at which juveniles can be charged as adults, and repealing rules governing police car chases in the city — have since been voted on by the full House and passed.
Washington has always been a rhetorical punching bag for the right, and with no vote in Congress and limited say over its own affairs, it has always been vulnerable to federal intervention. But in the 52 years since Washington was granted the right to home rule, rarely if ever have efforts to chip away at its limited autonomy come so fast and furious. This has prompted different strategies among the officials who will be testifying on Thursday.
The mayor will be joined on Thursday by Brian Schwalb, D.C.’s elected attorney general, whose office prosecutes juvenile crime and some adult misdemeanors in the city. Mr. Schwalb, who will be testifying before a committee that just voted to turn his office into a presidential appointment, has taken an approach different from the mayor’s.
Since Mr. Trump declared the emergency last month, Mr. Schwalb has sued the administration twice. Both lawsuits challenge Mr. Trump’s authority over D.C., with the first leading to a negotiated retreat by the administration on the scope of powers it claimed over the city’s police.
The letter he sent to the committee’s leaders did not indicate that his tone was softening. “Substituting the will of D.C. voters with the whim of federal politicians is un-democratic and un-American,” he wrote.
The third local official at the hearing will be Phil Mendelson, the chairman of the D.C. Council, who has been a frequent target of critics of the Council’s progressive criminal justice legislation.
In a briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Mendelson pointed out that members of the committee had attacked the Council for crime rates in Washington while “failing to recognize” that much of the city’s criminal justice system is in fact controlled by the federal government. “There are things we need the federal government to do,” he said, noting that there are judgeships on the local court waiting to be filled by the White House, and that there is an acute shortage of prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office, which handles most of the city’s criminal cases.
Mr. Mendelson also said that other key parts of D.C.’s criminal justice system, including the federal agency that assesses whether judges should have defendants held in jail before trial, need more resources. “These are things that Congress and only Congress can do — we cannot do — and they have a direct impact on reducing crime and improving public safety in the city,” he said.
The members of the committee are adamant, however, that the fault for D.C.’s violent crime rate, which had been falling steadily for more than a year and a half, lies with the local politicians.
“All Americans should feel safe in their capital city, but radical left-wing policies pushed by the D.C. Council have created an environment for truancy and violent crime to flourish,” the chairman of the committee, Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, said in a statement announcing Thursday’s hearing.
While the questioning on Thursday is likely to be pointed, House Republicans did make one proposal this week that has drawn some local appreciation.
In the spring, the last time a federal shutdown loomed, Congress passed a short-term resolution keeping the government open but freezing federal spending. A routine clause in such resolutions exempting Washington from such a freeze, and thus allowing it to spend its own tax revenues, was left out of the text, leaving the city with a $1.1 billion shortfall.
Despite a unanimous Senate vote to restore the clause and even public expressions of support from Mr. Trump, House Republicans never voted to give the city back its spending power. After months of waiting, the local government ultimately resorted to little-used legal remedies and a litany of surgical trims to get through the year on a slimmed budget.
In the proposed resolution released by House Republicans on Tuesday, the exemption for the District of Columbia is included.