The New York Times reports:
The District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to take over the city’s police department. The lawsuit comes after the Trump administration moved to expand its control of the city’s police department by installing an “emergency commissioner” and revoking policies that limited officers’ cooperation with immigration enforcement. Federal officials began sweeping homeless encampments in Washington on Thursday, after city officials and advocates urged homeless people to leave or risk arrest.
I assume this lawsuit was approved by the DC Council and/or Mayor Muriel Bowser. I haven’t seen the complaint, but it is hard to imagine what the grounds of the lawsuit could be. As we wrote here, the Home Rule Act, Sec. 740, specifically provides that the President can declare an emergency and take control of the D.C. metro police.
More fundamentally, this seems to be another instance where the Democratic Party has needlessly put itself on the wrong side of a black and white issue. Their hatred for Donald Trump has blinded them to the obvious facts: D.C. is a dirty, crime-ridden city haunted by vagrants and homeless shelters. As our nation’s capital, it is an embarrassment. And the only thing that President Trump is trying to do, is clean it up. The Democrats have somehow managed to put themselves on the side of crime.
UPDATE: I was on Sky News Australia last night, talking about the D.C. crime story. Right before this interview begins, the host played a couple of clips, in the second of which a liberal denounced President Trump as a “fascist dictator” because of his efforts to fight D.C. crime. That is what led to my initial comment. The segment ends with a discussion of the decline of late-night television:
