MIKE DAVIS: Here’s what can be done about the dump that is DC

The District of Columbia is our nation’s capital, where foreign leaders go to meet our presidents at the White House. On the way, these leaders do not see a shining city on a hill as they peer through the windows of their motorcades. Instead, they see a crime-infested dump riddled with drug addicts, disturbed homeless people milling zombie-like around their tents and gangs of thugs in stolen cars who yearn to target innocent residents.

The D.C. legal system is an utter disaster. Richard Nixon won approximately 20% of the D.C. vote in 1972 in his landslide over George McGovern, the most “success” any Republican presidential candidate has had since D.C. has been part of the Electoral College. In his three presidential elections, Donald Trump topped out at a whopping 6.6% of the vote in 2024, and the lowest performance by a Democrat was Hillary Clinton’s 90.9% in 2016. D.C. is chock-full of Democrats, many of whom fill bureaucratic jobs in the federal government. These voters comprise the grand and petit jury pools for D.C. cases.

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It is no wonder that Biden Special Counsel Jack Smith did everything he could to rush to a D.C. trial of President Trump prior to the 2024 election. Regardless of the merits of his case, Smith knew that he had a conviction in the bag based on the composition of the jury pool. He took extraordinary measures to secure a pre-election trial, even attempting to bypass the appellate court to obtain faster Supreme Court review during President Trump’s pretrial immunity appeal. Smith’s belief was well-founded; for instance, a D.C. jury recently had acquitted Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer, for plainly false statements made to Special Counsel John Durham during the probe of the Russiagate investigation. A rabidly partisan D.C. civil jury hammered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani with a $148 million defamation judgment for statements he had made about election workers concerning their work in the 2020 presidential election.

The utter farce of D.C. became crystallized recently because of the actions of Sean Charles Dunn. This degenerate, then a career Justice Department Criminal Division official, threw a Subway sandwich at federal law enforcement officers. (Yes, you read that correctly: the same DOJ staffer who helps represent federal law enforcement in court is assaulting them on the DC streets.) He ran like a coward after he had thrown the food, but the police caught him quickly. D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s all-star pick, sought an indictment under 18 U.S.C. § 111 for felony assault of a federal law enforcement officer. A D.C. grand jury, however, disgracefully declined to issue one. This development infused D.C. leftists with glee to the point that they are now calling Pirro’s office and claiming that they are going out to buy more sandwiches.

D.C. is unique in that local crime prosecutions are under the control of the D.C. Superior Court. This is not an Article III court, even though the president appoints the judges by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The president must choose from a commission where only one member is a presidential appointee. The rest are appointees of, among others, the D.C. mayor (currently Democrat Muriel Bowser), the chief judge of the U.S. District Court (another Democrat) and the D.C. Bar (full of Democrats). This group is filled with leftist zealots who recently moved forward with the despicable disbarment of Trump 45 and 47 attorney Jeffrey Clark based on a legal memorandum he drafted and never even had sent. Even if vacancies arise on the D.C. Superior Court and the D.C. Court of Appeals (D.C.’s supreme court), President Trump can only pick from a slate of bad and biased candidates.

Leftists in D.C. mostly inhabit safe spaces in N.W. D.C., like Georgetown, Logan Circle, Dupont Circle and Embassy Row. As such, they are not as exposed to the rampant crime as the poor, innocent D.C. residents face daily. These limousine liberals thus have decided to protest President Trump’s takeover of the D.C. Metropolitan Police. The police chief, Pamela Smith, used to head the department’s equity office.  DEI-infested law enforcement is bad law enforcement. D.C. needs to adopt the “broken windows” approach of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and prosecute every provable crime. For the past four years, federal prosecutors under the Biden Justice Department wasted their time on January 6 cases. Thanks to President Trump’s clemency, these prosecutors now have much more free time on their hands. A large chunk of the D.C. federal prosecutors should get reassigned from their fancy U.S. District Court assignments and go slum it in the D.C. Superior Court, where they can prosecute street thugs terrorizing our nation’s capital. Force defendants to go through the process, even if leftist grand juries will not indict, leftist juries will acquit, or leftist judges will hand down pitifully lenient sentences. Make the process the punishment for these D.C. criminals and their enablers on the bench and in the jury boxes.

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We pay nearly $1 billion in taxes as part of appropriating money for D.C. Mayor Bowser has acknowledged the staggering progress that President Trump’s two-week-old takeover has had in the form of drastic crime reductions. But this progress can only go so far if the D.C. citizenry will not join in. The Trump administration should move every government job it legally can out of D.C. This relocation would eliminate a lot of bureaucratic jobs from the city–and leftist from the D.C. jury pools. While D.C. would still be the seat of government, it would not be quite the magnet that it currently is for federal government employees. The Vicinage Clause of the Constitution requires that defendants be tried in the district where the offense occurred, so D.C. defendants must face D.C. juries unless they ask for and receive a change of venue. The government cannot obtain one. But perhaps fewer government employees as grand and petit jurors will result in tougher jury pools composed of ordinary citizens who have had it with D.C.’s rampant crime.

Because of our Constitution, fixing D.C. will be tough. Democrats want to make it a state and install two Democrat senators forever, and we must use all legal tools to defeat this effort. President Trump is doing all he can to improve D.C., highlighted by his appointment of tough-as-hell Judge Jeanine Pirro as the top D.C. federal prosecutor. But thanks to unconstitutional laws like the D.C. Home Rule Act, the administration can only do so much. This law needs to be repealed, a feat which would require overcoming a Democrat filibuster. In the meantime, President Trump must employ every legal strategy to continue improving D.C. His takeover of Union Station will lead to more businesses returning to what had become a cesspool of homeless camps and thugs. If Congress does not permit the takeover to continue after 30 days, the president should declare a national emergency to keep it going; let the legal chips fall where they may if the local government challenges his authority. Our nation’s capital belongs to all Americans–not local D.C. violent thugs and their enablers on the bench and jury pools. President Trump is admirably leading the fight to preserve and protect it.