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As we prepare for a new presidency, we need to think about fixing Washington, DC.
No, I’m not just talking about the “drain the swamp” sense of reforming — and hopefully shrinking — the federal bureaucracy. I’m talking about fixing the actual District of Columbia itself.
The Constitution, in Article 1 Section 8, directs Congress to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.”
The idea was that the seat of government should be a neutral zone, one not dominated by any state or party, dedicated to the running of the government.
Instead of a local government or legislature, the District was to be governed by Congress.
A place that was meant to operate on behalf of the nation as a whole, it was thought, should be governed by the nation as a whole.
That gradually changed.
First, the passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961 gave the District the right to be represented in presidential elections.
In 1973, when Congress passed a “home rule” law, the District became a self-governing municipality with its own elected officials, prosecutors and courts.
This might not have mattered so much if the political makeup of DC matched that of the nation — but in fact, it’s a one-party jurisdiction.
Its local government is utterly dominated by Democrats, and it lopsidedly favors Democrats in presidential elections: Despite losing decisively to Donald Trump last month, Kamala Harris got 92.5% of the DC vote to Trump’s 5% — not much less than the 93% racked up there by 2016 loser Hillary Clinton.
That has sobering implications for any Republican facing criminal charges there.
Because it’s our nation’s capital city, DC is the scene of many political trials, yet its jury pool is as lopsided as the one that tried the Scottsboro Boys.
In fact, when special prosecutor Jack Smith was looking to charge Donald Trump, Democratic lawyers were openly bragging about how biased the DC jury pool is.
Marc Elias gloated that in a city of 700,000, Trump won just 676 GOP primary votes in 2024.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell joked that Trump was more likely to win the lottery than to get a sympathetic juror in DC.
Likewise, DC juries are notoriously willing to acquit prominent Democrats like lawyer Michael Sussman, charged by special counsel John Durham with lying to the FBI about “Russiagate” rumors but acquitted by what observers called a “nightmare jury.”
(Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson called the verdict proof of “two systems of justice” in America.)
Meanwhile, DC’s status as a blue bubble of Democratic technocrats and fixers produces one-sided and often one-eyed government.
Washington is a company town where the vast majority of federal employees, lobbyists and journalists are Democrats.
Its business is government and the influencing of government — and nearly everyone is a product of the same social class, the same elite schools and the same social milieu.
Having a one-party capital city governing a two-party nation is clearly a bad idea, and as we’ve seen, its one-sided judicial system makes the problem even worse.
But I have some suggestions.
The most extreme solution would be to simply abolish the District of Columbia.
The Constitution empowers Congress to create and govern such a district; it doesn’t actually require that district to exist.
What’s now DC could be ceded back to Maryland, where it came from in the first place. Since Maryland is already a blue state, this wouldn’t affect its political makeup much.
But it would change political trials significantly.
The Fourth Amendment says juries must be drawn from the state and district where the crime took place.
Without DC as an entity, the judicial district encompassing federal agencies could be drawn to encompass parts of adjoining states, enlarging the jury pool and making fair trials possible.
Meanwhile, an even better solution would be to move most of the federal government out of the District entirely, and relocate agency headquarters to lower-cost areas far from the capital city.
Put FBI headquarters in Plattsburgh, NY; move the Department of Agriculture to Kirksville, Miss., or Quincy, Ill., and so on.
The DC that remained would probably wind up more diverse than the company town it is today.
Decentralization would also spread federal dollars around, instead of concentrating them.
(Five of the richest counties in America are clustered around Washington, DC.)
And it would make life tougher on lobbyists, influence-peddlers and the like.
Even simply getting rid of home rule for the District and returning it to the government by Congress would help.
It’s beyond historical dispute that DC was a more functional city before 1973 than it has been since.
But I think we need deeper change.
We need to get creative and give these and other solutions a try.
A politically diverse nation shouldn’t be ruled by a narrow single-party monoculture.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.