5 hours ago
3
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
One month ago, President Trump declared that “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in Washington, D.C., represented such a dire emergency that he was placing the local police department “under direct federal control.” The announcement, coming a year and a half into a steady decline in D.C.’s violent crime rates, was one of the most aggressive encroachments on Washington’s self-government since Congress passed the D.C. Home Rule Act more than five decades ago.
At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday, that particular intervention will end. The 30-day window that temporarily grants presidents great powers in the city’s affairs will come to a close, a moment that city officials and many residents have been looking to as a sort of deliverance after four surreal weeks.
But it is unclear how much, if anything, will immediately change.
The end of the 30-day period has no bearing on the thousands of National Guard troops, drawn from the District of Columbia itself and from eight Republican-led states, who have been deployed to Washington. Neither does it directly affect the hundreds of additional federal law enforcement officers — from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies — who have been sent out into the city to patrol. And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will continue to take people into custody around Washington, as they did long before the emergency was declared.
Congress is marking the last day of the emergency by taking up a range of legislation that would eat away at D.C.’s self-government, including bills that would expand federal oversight, cancel local laws and eliminate some locally elected positions. (Although the district has about 500,000 eligible voters, they do not have congressional representation.)
For now, the specter of ever-greater federal control over the city, even if it has loomed particularly large over the past month, is going nowhere.
“With this administration and this particular crop of individuals in the Congress, you give an inch, they will take a mile,” said Christina Henderson, a member at large of the District of Columbia Council. “This is a group of people that require you to have your head on a swivel at all times.”
