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President Donald Trump’s grip on Washington D.C.’s police force continued into a second week, spurring Democrats to reignite demands for the district to become a state.
Trump last week invoked a provision of the Home Rule Act, the law that gives the nation’s capital some autonomy from Congress, to effectively take over the Metropolitan Police Department in an effort to crack down on crime.
Since then, numerous federal law enforcement agencies and the National Guard, aided by reserves from states across the country, have patrolled the streets of D.C., and the White House has touted rapid decreases in crime and dozens of arrests.
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Because it’s not a state, Washington has no voting representation in Congress and, despite having a mayor and city council, is overseen by Congress.
But some lawmakers see the move as another attempt by the president to overextend his powers, and argue that it’s another reason that D.C. should be a state — a notion that Trump last week rebuked as “ridiculous.”
“If D.C. was a state, the president could not do what he is doing outside of the federal enclave,” Sen. Paul Strauss, the district’s shadow senator, told Fox News Digital.
Strauss, D-D.C., has long pushed for statehood in his role as shadow senator, Washington D.C.’s elected non-voting member of the Senate. He said the whole idea behind statehood is to give D.C. residents agency and self-determination, something he believed the crackdown was ignoring.
“It would be one thing if we actually had a crime emergency here, but we don’t,” Strauss said. “Violent crime in particular is down to 30-year lows. That’s not what’s happening here. He is using these national guardsmen and women as a stunt, and that’s wrong.”
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His colleague in the House, D.C. non-voting Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, also a Democrat, agreed.
“The president’s abuses are evidence of the urgent need for D.C. statehood so that more than 700,000 D.C. residents can finally have the full rights and privileges afforded to other Americans, including control of their own local resources and policies,” she said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers countered that violent crime in the district has “been spiraling out of control – and the Democrats are lying to the American people when they pretend there is no crime in our nation’s capital.”
“If they needed some anecdotal evidence, they could ask their own Democrat colleague about the time he was carjacked outside of his D.C. apartment by three armed criminals,” she told Fox News Digital. “The Democrats’ case of Trump Derangement Syndrome is so severe, they won’t even support President Trump’s commonsense policies to remove dangerous criminals from the streets of our nation’s capital.”
Strauss and Norton were joined by lawmakers from neighboring Virginia and Maryland, the states that Washington, D.C., was carved out of over two centuries ago, who argued that Trump’s move to federalize the local police shined “a light on the urgent need for D.C. statehood.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told Fox News Digital that the police takeover was “a prime example of why D.C. deserves the same rights as states.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., charged that “Republicans in Congress have been all too willing to play political games with the district’s funding for public safety and critical services while backing an authoritarian overreach by a lawless president.”
Van Hollen announced plans earlier this month to reintroduce a bill alongside Norton to grant statehood to D.C.
Van Hollen, Norton and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., introduced a joint resolution in the House to halt Trump’s takeover of the D.C. police, too.
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Raskin told Fox News Digital in a statement that the district’s residents are “the only people who live in a capital city on earth who are disenfranchised in their national legislature.”
“The people of Washington have petitioned for statehood and should be admitted as a state rather than treated as a MAGA-colonized populace,” he said.
But the reality of actually turning D.C. into a state, at least while Republicans have a trifecta in Washington, is slim at best.
“I think there’s probably not a pathway to get this done while Republicans control all three branches of the government,” Strauss said. “Because they have shown that they’re more interested in the partisan impact of controlling the legislative branch and not really interested in the principle of self-determination for Washington, D.C., residents.”
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