EXPLODING THE STATUS QUO AND ENSURING LIFE AND LIBERTY IS NOT AUTOCRACY—IT IS A STRONG ARTICLE II PRESIDENT WIELDING CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
INTRODUCTION
The status quo in the Nation’s Capital has seen a disproportionate share of violent crime, the actual impact and effect of which seems to contradict so-called crime statistics. A politically broad swath of commentators and residents have reported feeling unsafe on the streets of the Capital of the free world and the only real working Republic resting on a constitutional foundation of Enlightenment ideals. There are strong reports backed with real evidence that police officials in the Metropolitan D.C. police are up to the typical mischief of such administrators, known as crime data manipulation, to let us think they are doing their jobs. Before the “Home Rule” of 1973, the District, as we will call it here, was overseen by Commissioners with Congress calling the shots. Congress still controls the budget and legislation. The DC Council is a quasi-Marxist, anti-police embarrassment. The Mayor is a clown show. The real world of the District is that a large part of it is comprised of federal agencies of all kinds as well as purely federal property. This National Capital Service Area includes all of those buildings and places that define the seat of national federal authority. The result is an overlap of federal and District law enforcement authorities that, in the event of a declared emergency, creates potential conflict. The President’s declaration is within his constitutional authority, as will be discussed below, and is designed to bring these forces into harmony, particularly in the field of immigration enforcement and cooperation. History has shown that where the home cooking of state and local authorities has failed to enforce the law, Presidents have not hesitated to act as Commander in Chief and mobilize the National Guard to see to the implementation of law and order. Here, there is a significant interest in the interdiction of crime committed in the District by both homegrown and imported criminals that places citizens, residents, visitors, and diplomats in danger. The tyranny of crime as an enemy of free discourse and movement is the real threat to democracy and freedom, not the actions of a diligent President with a mandate to reintroduce law and order to civil society.
THE AUTHORITY OF THE PRESIDENT TO DECLARE EMERGENCIES HAS STRONG HISTORIC SUPPORT, AND THE SEAT OF OUR GOVERNMENT BECAME A PROPER FOCUS OF THAT AUTHORITY
So-called “Home Rule” has led to a corrupt and crime-ridden hybrid that Congress can abolish tomorrow and return the core federal districts of power to exclusive federal control and cast the rest to the contiguous states. The President has a vested interest in seeing that order prevails in these areas and districts that comprise the foundations of federal power. Federalism is a key feature of our dual sovereignty system, but the District is not a state and has essentially become a tumor in the body politic. A President has broad assumed emergency authority, and where not expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution, any President may and can declare an emergency subject to Congressional veto or resolution as well as Judicial override. However, there is great deference to such authority, and this issue is squarely within such authority. Although in declaring an emergency in the hybrid District, the President expressly only cited the Home Rule Act’s provisions applicable in such situations, his ordering the National Guard to also provide a role in protecting federal functions derives from long-standing historically based authority.
Below we see cites to Article II provisions that provide a basis for such actions:
“Section 3
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information on the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States
Article II, Section 2, Clause 1:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
Examples of such authority are noted at Congress.org, when local officials failed to protect civil rights, analogous to the instant issue in the District when federal laws, including immigration laws, go unenforced:
“President Washington himself took command of state militia called into federal service to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, but there were not too many occasions subsequently in which federal troops or state militia called into federal service were required. Since World War II, however, the President, by virtue of his own powers and the authority vested in him by Congress, has used federal troops on a number of occasions, five of them involving resistance to desegregation decrees in the South. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus employed the Arkansas National Guard to resist court-ordered desegregation in Little Rock, and President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched federal soldiers and brought the Guard under federal authority. In 1962, President John Kennedy dispatched federal troops to Oxford, Mississippi, when federal marshals were unable to control rioting that broke out upon the admission of an African American student to the University of Mississippi. In June and September of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent troops into Alabama to enforce court decrees opening schools to Black students. And, in 1965, the President used federal troops and federalized local Guardsmen to protect participants in a civil rights march. The President justified his action on the ground that there was a substantial likelihood of domestic violence because state authorities were refusing to protect the marchers.”
The President has Article II authority to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, and in the case of the District, this includes areas of federal control as well as the proper execution of immigration laws, which the District police are ordered to essentially obstruct. Not anymore.
THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, WHO HAS OVERSEEN AND FAILED TO PROSECUTE SUCH LAWLESSNESS, SUED TO ENJOIN THE EXECUTIVE ORDER AS WELL AS ATTORNEY GENERAL BONDI’S ORDER IMPLEMENTING SUCH DIRECTIVE
Last week Brian Schwalb sought a Temporary Restraining Order in the D.C. United States District Court seeking to have the Court declare that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Order appointing DEA Director Cole as acting Metropolitan Police Chief and assuming the duties of the Chief law enforcement officer of the District for the pendency of the emergency—thirty days—unless extended or terminated by Congress—was a violation of the Home Rule Act and of the separation of powers. The Complaint can be viewed here. The Court heard argument and, short of granting the relief, at least temporarily, directed the parties in interest to discuss a resolution that did not include the federal usurpation of the DC Police Chief. Wisely, Attorney General Pam Bondi amended her previous Order but doubled down on ensuring that federal law, including immigration law, would be enforced and that the DEA Chief would be her designee for the purpose of directing what resources the DC Police and the Mayor will provide. This includes the de facto abolition of existing sanctuary policies, which obstructed and frustrated federal immigration enforcement—exclusively vested in such federal authority by long-standing precedent and law. Her directive may be viewed here.
Far from an exercise in dictatorship, the President invoked, by its terms, that provision of the Home Rule Act that foresaw such circumstances:
“EMERGENCY CONTROL OF POLICE SEC. 740. [D.C. Official Code § 1-207.40] (a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, whenever the President of the United States determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for Federal purposes, he may direct the Mayor to provide him, and the Mayor shall provide, such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the President may deem necessary and appropriate.”
Attorney General Bondi’s superseding Order unquestionably invokes federal authority to enforce immigration law on an unhindered basis and will ensure that the false crime statistics used to push back on the Presidents EO are just that—false and dangerously misleading. Meanwhile, the majority of those preyed upon are relieved that finally the status quo has been stopped in favor of freedom. Freedom to move, to work, and to engage in those aspects of daily life we cherish unhindered by lawlessness. Politically and structurally, the President and the Attorney General will prevail. Tyranny takes many forms, and negating tyranny by lawful means is not autocracy. The left again chooses the wrong side.
CONCLUSION
Stand by for the embarrassed DC Attorney General to go back to court to argue that the Attorney General’s new Order violates the Tenth Amendment and unlawfully requires state actors to enforce federal immigration law. Unquestionably, the sanctuary policies of this corrupt hybrid enclave that should in part be fully returned to federal control have allowed criminal aliens to prey upon civil society. It ends.“Home Rule” is a failure, and this is a referendum on why DC statehood should be an unattainable goal. The federal government lives here and should not be deterred by a feckless Mayor and a Police Department neutered by DC Council’s anti-police policies. It is time we all saw this.
Mike Imprevento
August 18th, 2025
