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If it wasn’t Big Balls almost getting carjacked, Donald Trump would have figured out a different excuse for deploying the National Guard in Washington DC. He was always going to come up with a pretext to send in the troops.
On Monday, Trump dropped two executive orders, two fact sheets, and two “articles” (who knew that the White House issues articles?) about his decision to federalize the DC police and deploy the National Guard. Then, he held a bonkers press conference where he gave Attorney General Pam Bondi control of the DC police “as of this moment,” at which point Bondi took the podium to declare that “crime in DC is ending and ending today.”
It’s important to be precise about what’s happening in DC and why. As Chris Geidner explains at Law Dork, calling this a “takeover” of DC itself or the DC police is inaccurate.
DC’s Home Rule Act has a provision that lets the president direct the mayor to provide District police force service for federal purposes if he deems it necessary and determines an emergency exists. He can do that for 48 hours without informing Congress. Once he informs Congress, he gets 30 days. Past that, Congress needs to enact a joint resolution to extend it.
In theory, the legislative branch should act as a check on a lawless president. But given that the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate have willfully abdicated their responsibility to do so, there’s no reason to think lawmakers won’t let Trump’s brownshirts occupy DC as long as he wants.
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There are no real impediments to the president calling up the DC National Guard. Unlike state National Guards, which are under the control of state governors, DC’s Guard is commanded by the president. Further, the position of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is that the DC National Guard can be used for federal work without being federalized, unlike state National Guards. This means it can be used for law enforcement purposes without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which otherwise prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian enforcement efforts.
So, the DC Home Rule Act, combined with the structure of its National Guard, gives the president a perfectly legal and relatively friction-free way to make local police do his bidding and to have the National Guard roam the streets.
At the moment, there’s a pretense that the DC National Guard will not be performing law enforcement duties. Instead, they have the authority to