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The first thing President Trump should do with the District of Columbia police force, which he took over on Tuesday, is fire or retire much, if not most, of its upper tier of leadership, and replace them with the most successful law enforcement professionals he can recruit to the nation’s capitol.
And, yes, President Trump can do just that, though D.C. may have to pay out some settlements if contracts are broken. (Union agreements and individual contracts do not trump Trump in this situation.)
The president will be blamed by the left for everything that happens while he is in control of the District’s “thin blue line.” An example of this style of “reporting” comes from ABC News, which posted at 6:03 PM Tuesday evening: “Roughly nine hours after President Donald Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington, D.C., and took control of the city’s police force, a 33-year-old man was shot and killed in Logan Circle, less than a mile from the White House, officials said.”
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“The killing marked the 100th homicide in Washington, D.C., this year,” the ABC story continued, “and the first since the Trump administration took over control of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), according to statistics.”
The legacy media and its left-wing journo-activists will be eager for the president to fail in his attempt to restore the sense of safety that has disappeared from much of the nation’s capitol. “Failure” is going to be the “narrative” from the legacy media regardless of the facts because so much of legacy media loathes everything the president does. So, as the president will be blamed for every crime while he’s in control of the Metropolitan Police Department (“MPD”), the president should use his statutory authority over the D.C. cops to its fullest extent.
Doubt the authority of the president to remake the D.C. police from top to bottom? Then read up on the underlying law governing the District.
Law professors in the United States are among the most politically vociferous and ideologically committed of all academics, and the vast majority of them are men and women of the left and often the far left.
Some of them are objective, even if from the left, though, and that includes Professor Steve Vladeck of Georgetown University Law Center, who earlier this week provided a great summary of the history of the District of Columbia and the links to the statutory authority the president invoked Monday.
In his “One First” newsletter this week, Professor Vladeck concedes that “the Home Rule Act gives the President the power to take control of the D.C. Police ‘whenever [he] determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes.’”
“The authority is limited to no more than 30 days (it’s limited to 48 hours unless the President sends a special notification to the Chair and Ranking Members of the relevant congressional committees explaining why he needs the authority for longer),” the professor adds. “And even within those 30 days, the authority is simply to use the MPD ‘for federal purposes.’”
“In other words,” Vladeck concludes, “the President can borrow the MPD for his own priorities; but he can’t control how they discharge their other duties.”
In other words, about Professor Vladeck’s “in other words” phrase, the president’s control of the D.C. police is complete for at least 30 days. He’s in complete charge of the department. That means President Trump’s authority is “plenary,” in other words: “full,” “entire,” “absolute,” or “comprehensive,” and that includes all aspects of a topic or situation, which means hiring, firing, retiring or reorganizing.
It is arguable from the face of the statute that the president can renew the authority for many 30-day periods, if Congress does not provide him a resolution making his control of the D.C. police explicit and limited to a certain time. Perhaps he ought to make them non-consecutive to err on the side of complying with the law, but repetitive 30-day periods separated by a day or two could work. What isn’t in doubt is President Trump’s control of the MPD for another 28 days.
How to make a lasting change in 25 days if the president would prefer to both reform policing and yet not have to litigate his way through successive 30-day declarations? Personnel is policy, of course, so switch up the leadership.
The president should thank the existing hierarchy of the department for their service and then dismiss them and bring in his own people to run the department while simultaneously expanding its budget for officers on the street significantly.
The president need only ask GOP governors for suggestions on a new chief and other senior leaders, and then select a new #1 from the suggestions offered by the governors (or from his FBI Director Kash Patel). The president and the new chief should appoint a new senior level of leadership.
There is no doubt that there are many fine, courageous and superbly trained professionals already within the department, and some, if not many, will want to stay on the job, and the president and the new leadership will want them to stay on. But for a clean break to occur with the culture that has allowed chaos to spread in the city over the past decade and beyond, a sharp separation from the past will be needed.
Some retirement or farewell receptions will be teary-eyed, but not as sad as the funerals taking place because of brazen and increasingly shocking crime. (The murder of the two employees of the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, on May 21 is only the most shocking of the many awful crimes of this spring and summer. For a rundown of the climate of lawlessness in D.C., listen to Tuesday’s episode of “The Ruthless Podcast.”)
Among many disturbing allegations about the District is the one that reported stories of the purposeful mischaracterization of crimes that are being committed in order to minimize the shock of the bleak statistics. Very few people who have lived in or near D.C. doubt the allegation because the happy talk about falling crime rates does not match the experience of downtown, even in its relatively peaceful Northwest quadrant. Near-by residents of Maryland and Virginia are of the same mind as the non-criminal class within the District: The feeling of safety that was common in D.C. even a decade ago has faded away, slowly at first but accelerating rapidly in the years of President Biden’s tenure when Democratic Party political posturing was more focused on getting the District statehood and two United States senators rather than the equal of any police force in the city. (This DNC talking point is unconstitutional gambit absent an actual amendment to the Constitution replacing the 23rd Amendment)
President Trump asserted lawful authority on Tuesday. Now he must use it —lawfully of course— to effect the reforms of MPD that almost everyone inside the Beltway longs for, even if only inside their thoughts. It’s a “deep blue” District, but parents in deep blue cities want their children as safe as parents in deep red jurisdictions.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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