What Would Happen If Trump Revoked Home Rule

15 years in and the DC SEU is still at it. Still helping DC save money, reduce energy use, and build a cleaner, more affordable future. Together, did you know they've invested $120 million in low-income communities? They put $99 million in DC-based businesses, too. And they have turned out over 300 graduates trained for the new green workforce. That is economic mobility, y'all. And that is what it's all about. Still here, still redefining power in the district. Find out more at DCSU.com. Today on CityCast, D.C., anyone paying attention to the D.C. mayor's race knows that for all the talk of affordability and crime, the stuff all mayors everywhere have to deal with, there's one central issue that's unique to D.C. Home rule. Today, we're revisiting a conversation we had last year with Howard University's Robinson Woodward Burns about what home rule is, how it happened, and how it might go away.

Today is Wednesday, March 11th. I'm Michael Schaefer. Here's what D.C. is talking about. Robinson, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So, you know, the conversation these days about Home Rule is like, oh, my God, we might lose Home Rule. And for most of my life, and I'm 51, it's been like, is this sort of insufficient version of Home Rule? How can we get rid of it and get statehood? So DC's conversation has gone in a very different direction. But I feel like, given the current moment of real threat that Home Rule will disappear, can you just take us back for a second? What was it like before Home Rule? What was the system? How was Washington, D.C. governed? That's a great question. So the U.S. Constitution calls for the creation of a federal district under the Enclave Clause that gives Congress plenary or complete power over the federal district. The district was organized in 1790, and from this period between 1790 up to the year 1973. Congress exercised that authority, sometimes giving the district more discretion over its own affairs and sometimes giving it less discretion over its own affairs. So briefly in the 1870s, for example, D.C. was actually a territory on the path to statehood when that territory went over budget with these kind of capital improvement projects, infrastructure projects, Congress took away territorial status. So there's been a kind of a long period in which Congress. granted more power or less power to the district, often for partisan reasons, members of Congress would give more power to the district into its voters when they thought that those voters would support the majority party in Congress. And that happened back and forth all the way up to 1973 when the Home Rule Act was passed. After the bulk of that time, after the end of the territorial experiment, it was this so-called commissioner system. The coming of home rule, the end of this commissioner system, and the civil rights movement are pretty hard to separate from one another because it was ultimately driven by people being offended that you have this, this, it's un-American, this group of people who are being taxed and don't get to vote for who taxes them, and particularly it was an increasingly black city being run by a bunch of white segregationists. How did... home rule get accomplished? I think that's a great question. So there's this period in the mid-20th century where there's a change in federal politics around the district of Columbia. Remember Congress under the enclave clause has plenary authority over the district. So Congress is really what you want to look at in Congress. There is across both parties, a good deal of moderation. It's a period of very low polarization. And so there are pro-civil rights Republicans. And there's a pro-civil rights wing of the Democratic Party as well. Across the two parties, you can say that there's something like consensus for support for civil rights. It's the Democratic Party, especially in the 1960s, that drives this. But you'll note that the 23rd Amendment, which gives district residents the right to vote for president, was actually passed and championed by Republican President Eisenhower. And so this consensus across the parties in favor of civil rights reform.

brings us the 23rd amendment. It's in the 1964 election that district residents are first able to vote for a presidential candidate. And then in 1967, the district gets its first appointed city council under Lyndon Baines Johnson. Now, still, there's this denial of the right to vote in the 1960s, D.C. The proportion of the population that's black is increasing, especially after the 1968 uprisings or riots. And so this kind of leads to the argument that the disenfranchisement is on the basis of race. And it is in 1973 with the passage of the Home Rule Act that residents of the district get to elect that council as well as a mayor. So, you know, I'll get to the civil rights piece a bit, but. One thing that sort of gets short shrift because it was sort of less dramatic than the civil rights implications, when it had a white majority, when it had a black majority. Either way, Washington was not very well governed. Like, the roads weren't that good and the schools weren't that good. We're talking about the pre-home rule, period. That was part of the argument for home rule, that government works better when, you know, the people in power can be unseated by if people are... pissed off about potholes. I think that's right. So we see the district going through phases in which it has more and less authority in the antebellum period in which black people were wholly denied the right to vote. We actually see the same pattern happening. D.C. briefly had representation in the U.S. House, albeit as a kind of adjunct to the U.S. House representatives to Maryland and Virginia, D.C. got an extra seat that was appended to the Maryland delegation and one appended to the Virginia delegation. Congress took that away, even when the district. its elector was entirely white. And so the story of kind of racial disenfranchisement can't explain the entire story of the district's disenfranchisement or push for enfranchisement. And often when Congress delegates more authority to the district, it's because it doesn't want to deal with the day-to-day struggles of governing jurisdiction, which in the mid-20th century had nearly a million people. So by the time the Home Rule Act came about, this was one argument for creating a district government, was that governance by... committee with the two congressional committees plus the old commissioner system. It was just an inefficient way to run things. In contemporary debates, there is sort of a push, and we can talk about this to repeal the Home Rule Act. I'm not sure members of Congress just during that direction actually understand how much work it would put on their plate. So in the early 70s, they get home rule, and it's incomplete in the sense that, you know, I think they didn't trust these black people to prosecute crime. So they kept the U.S. attorney at the DA. Locals didn't get to elect a DA or have a DA the way that regular Americans do. But it was more or less run like a normal city for a time. And now that time... There's talk of it coming to an end. What would have to happen for home rule to be ended? Could Trump just...

end it like that with the fiat, as he seems to be threatening to, or would they have to pass a law? They would have to pass a law to do it constitutionally. The enclave clause is pretty clear that Congress and only Congress has plenary authority over the District of Columbia, such that repeal of the Home Rule Act would have to happen by congressional statute. Now, Republicans do have a razor-thin majority in both chambers. It's not clear whether they would actually have the numbers to pass a bill like that, especially if under consideration they understood the amount of work it would be. put on their plate in terms of reassembling those committees. Would it be subject to filibuster? Yep. And any form of normal legislation that's not related to, for example, budget carve-outs would be subject to a filibuster. And the Congressional Research Service said that, you know, home rule, though it does relate to budgetary concerns, the Home Rule Act or a statehood bill, would be subject to filibuster short of her rules change or creation of a new rule for an exemption. So with simple majority or even with a kind of filibuster threshold, I think it's unlikely to see an act like that passed. Now, that being said, Donald Trump effectively abolished the Department of Education, which has to be done by statute. Effectively, the way this might work if you wanted to abolish the district's government is to simply defund it. And we've seen a gesture in that direction.

You already know D.C. is more than Destinations Capital. We gave America the football huddle, the blood bank, and go-go music. You're welcome, everyone. Our influence is everywhere, and now it's also on display at District Vibes American Pride, a free exhibit at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, running now from September 27th. It tells the story of how district residents like Chuck Brown, Dr. Charles Drew, and Carter G. Woodson shaped the culture of our entire country. I actually had a chance to see it recently, and I don't think I've ever been more stunned nor more blown away by a single exhibit. And I remember this feeling of swelling up with pride for my city just taking it all in. You get to stand in front of original works by DC artists, see the iconic Nixon resigns, a Washington Post front page. And my favorite part, play a jukebox loaded with the sounds that this city invented. So plan your visit at dc.library.org. That's dc.library.org, your library, your city, America's story. So what can Trump do legally? Trump has two legal or constitutional routes to exert authority over the district. One is to take control over the district guard. Unlike national guards in states, which answer directly to the governor, the National Guard and the District of Columbia answers through the Department of Defense to the president rather than directly to the mayor. This has sort of been a... recurring issue of debate in the annual defense authorization, National Defense Authorization Acts, but it does give Trump the authority to deploy or withhold deployment of the National Guard, as we saw, you know, this is pretty contentious. The second thing Trump can do is briefly for a one-month period take control over the Metropolitan Police Department, D.C.'s police force, and this is really reserved for emergencies. But we have seen Trump. really pushing the sort of constitutional limits on emergency powers, famously, you know, he's just claiming that tariffs can be passed through emergency executive orders, really sort of stretching the limits of what's constitutionally possible. I think the last thing to note, is that while there are these pretty strong legal restraints on what the executive can do in governing the District of Columbia, because Congress is controlled by this very slim Republican majority right now, the Republican Congress isn't really actively enforcing its constitutional powers. And I would not be surprised if Trump exceeded its constitutional powers in cracking down on the District of Columbia in ways that Congress was unlikely to contest. I don't think laws are really serious constrain against Trump in this case.

Yeah, it's a good question. It's really hard to make predictions in the current era in that some pretty important parts of our constitutional system have begun to fail. And I mean, that's happening at the national level. We see the abolition of the, as I said, the Department of Education without congressional statute. That's perhaps a problem for the Department of Education, but it reflects a broader constitutional problem in that the executive has now assumed powers of the legislature. This is a sort of kind of a third grade checks and balances thing that we're taught. that that's now begun to fail. So what does this mean for the district in this period of unconventional legislation? So I would expect to see this pattern continue but amplified in that with the case of district riders, the specificity is increasing, as you pointed out. Let's talk for a second about what it would actually practically day-to-day mean if DC lost home rule. Do you have a sense of what would replace it? Would we go back to the commissioners? Yeah, it's really hard to know what it would look like. if home rule disappeared. We have had home rule rolled back under the control board and through riders. Right, so during the control board, if I recall correctly, there was a control board. They basically hired a professional city manager who took over, I think every part of the DC government took it away from Barry except for the parks. Right. But the Home Rule Act did remain on the books such that this, I think, would be best understood as like an administrative or a fiscal restriction on the district's authority. And that's different from abolishing the District of Columbia's government wholly. The control board was set up as a temporary kind of override. And really, Congress did this because they didn't trust voters in the district after voters reelected Barry after. federal imprisonment. So, you know, to the original question, what repeal of the Home Rule Act would look like? It's not really clear. A repeal bill would have to establish some form of governance in its stead to wholly fail to do that would be kind of a remarkable abdication of Congress's authority over the district. But, you know, it would also be a moment when there are a lot of... Sometimes crackpot, sometimes earnest, right-wing ideas about governing, about privatizing schools, about ending abortion rights, et cetera, which would, it would be, I imagine, quite hard for some of these more ideological members of the House to not do these things. I could certainly imagine if home rule were repealed a situation in which the replacement included. basically long-term statutory entrenchment of the riders that we've talked about. So restriction of abortion rights, expansion of school voucher programs. These kinds of riders are generally unpopular in the district and really do affect the lives of district residents. So a famous example is that the district funded a needle sharing program. This did reduce. the rate of intravenously communicated diseases. When Congress defunded the program, the rate of disease communication and the death rate went up. Getting rid of the Home Rule Act and creating these basically kind of legalizing a lot of these rider policies indefinitely would probably have a similar effect. You know, jurisdictions know best how to govern themselves and taking away the rights of district residents to engage in self-government. It's not just kind of normatively a bad thing to do, but it also can harm.

And there's also this that, you know, over the years that I've been a reporter here, a lot of the sort of jerking around with the local government of D.C. by Congress has involved things that are programs that benefit or focus on a very small percentage of the people. So poor women who need abortions, right? That's an important thing, but it's not sort of a broad middle class or intervenious drug users or whatever. A lot of the stuff that would be quite tempting, I would imagine, to ideological members of Congress would actually affect, like, congressional staffers who send their kids to public, at least public elementary schools or who might need abortions sometime, even if they can pay for them. And I wonder if that would, you know, it would sort of be like a virtual representation insofar as they'd have to run into these people in the hallways. Yeah, that's an interesting point. So you are correct that once Congress passed the Home Rule Act, really kind of gained, retained authority over the District of Columbia most directly in budgetary and fiscal concerns. And often it exercised that by cutting federal funding for district programs. The people who needed those programs in the district were often the people who relied on federal or what would be state funding elsewhere, which is to say low-income people, it generally heard TC's black majority or black plurality most. Now, if you got rid of... The Home Rule Act and you left DC in a lurch without clear, say, trash collection or without the clear authority to fund or empower garbage collectors, this would be a problem for the Republican staffers who want to live in the Navy Yard neighborhood, right, which is kind of a slick new development for young transplants. All of the people who've been piling in from places like Kansas and want, like the kind of things that come with living in a city might be. disappointed to find what it actually looks like to defund or wholly abolish the district government. We're also in a moment when on the right, particularly on the tech world that has swung so hard to the Trump movement, there is this sort of this world of like fantasies about if only you could create your ideal city somewhere out there and it would be technologically run and we wouldn't have to worry about all this democracy of people asking for irrational things. That is, I think, currently... part of the culture of the Trump coalition. It's not the entirety of it. But I wonder if there would be a temptation to sort of live out some of that fantasy scenario stuff. That's a really interesting hypothetical one I haven't heard. So it is true that Congress has used throughout a district's history, its own authority, its congressional authority to. basically experiment with different forms of government governance in the District of Columbia. So there's a book by the historian Kate Mazur called an example for all of the land in which Congress during reconstruction, Republicans in Congress enfranchised black men. Congress has used DC sometimes as an authority, as a jurisdiction to test public policies that haven't been instantiated elsewhere. Now, what we've really seen from the last like 30 years is that Republican members of Congress will just ask budget items that they. don't want because they're worried about reelection without thinking about public policy consequences. What would happen, though, if Donald Trump and Elon Musk reunited, they're both famously Mercurial and then Elon Musk got, you know, appointed a permanent governor of the District of Columbia. You know, I think that would be, well, bad. District residents should have the right to govern themselves. And, you know, I think...

San Francisco doesn't really have a full sense of just how big Washington is. Both, I mean, Washington is a city and then Washington is the national government. And I would guess that they probably will eventually get burned out in their attempt to take over the national government. The city government might be a little more easy. And, you know, your hypothetical is an interesting one. I just, I... I haven't thought about what would happen if members of Congress use that authority to allow tech pros to kind of experiment with our government. So listen, you teach political science. I'm curious, what do you make of the way Mayor Bowser is handling this sort of unprecedented threat? What do you make of her tactics defending home rule? Is there anything in history that might inform what she could do? She is in an unusual place, right? Trump's assaults on the rule of law in the United States are new. The United States has moved from a period of democracy into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism. Our elections matter, but, you know, power is so centralized in the hands of so few people that we now qualify as an authoritarian system. So it's really hard to know what to do and how to kind of contest these forms of government that are really new, this type of regime that's new in the United States. Bowser is in a difficult position. So you might say that this is kind of hypocritical or capitulatory. The counterpoint would be that the district is. solely and completely subject to the authority of Congress, that there are not many forms of legal recourse that the district has and that the courts have largely been hostile to claims from progressive petitioners so that, you know, even if Congress overextended its authority courts probably wouldn't find in favor of the district. And then the final thing to note is that Congress, at least the current Republican Congress, really has abdicated its lawmaking authority to Trump such that Trump as an individual really does hold all the cards and has extraordinary authority over or power over the lives of the three quarters of a million people who live in the district. Bowser is in a pretty tough spot in this sense. Whether she's handled it well or not, I'll leave to listeners. So do you feel like the statehood conversation, just to circle back to the beginning? Is it just so far on the bat burner that it's not even worth talking about? So Congress before last, Democrats had a trifecta and the statehood bill passed the House. Biden signaled his intent to sign it. There were 46 senators signed on and really needed. Four more. Two of them said that if, you know, they, and this is Kelly and King of Arizona and Maine, that if there was 50 votes in favor of it, they'd get on board. So the real obstacles just four years ago were just two people, Kristen Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, there were only two votes that stopped statehood from happening and had those two individuals been feeling a little bit different.

We would probably now be talking about the inevitability of statehood and the sort of 230-year struggle that brought us here. Now, that didn't happen, and Donald Trump won. He won the election pretty narrowly in 2024. Republicans retook both houses of Congress very narrowly. But Congress keeps flipping back and forth, assuming that we continue to have competitive free elections at the national level, assuming that we... you know, have a competitive and free system. I think Democrats will get a trifecta again. I would say if you zoomed out that we're closer to statehood than we have been in any other period, but again, there's no guarantee that that'll happen, right? That kind of remains to be seen. Right. And it's none of these people's top priority. Yeah, Democratic leadership, including Senate Democratic leadership, when they had the majority, didn't push for creation of two seats for the district, even though those would have likely been Democratic seats. Hey, Robinson, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. It was an absolute pleasure.

And that's all for today here on CityCast DC. If you enjoyed the show, why not? Tell a friend, rate the show, leave us a review, and subscribe to the morning newsletter. And become a neighbor. Head to membership.com.fm.combe. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. Bye.