President Trump can unilaterally deploy thousands of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and attempt a total takeover of its police force, because the capital is not a state.
Trump can demand Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional maps in between censuses to maximize his party’s chances of maintaining control of the House, because there is no federal law to prevent it.
What if I told you that Democrats had a chance to stop both of these developments from happening just four years ago?
Back in the spring of 2021, Democrats controlled the House and Senate, albeit with narrow majorities, and Joe Biden was in the White House. There was big talk about a robust Democratic agenda and liberal dreams of reshaping the country, even as Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s victory remained top of mind.
The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was just weeks in the past. Republicans, wrestling with Trump’s stolen election lie, were trying to restrict voting access in one statehouse after another.
House Democrats, citing the urgency of the political moment, passed a long sought voting bill that set new national rules and standards for a host of election-related issues. Among other changes, the legislation would have forbade mid-decade redistricting and required states to establish bipartisan redistricting commissions to draw their congressional lines. A separate House-passed bill would have made D.C. a state, giving it two senators — who most certainly would have been Democrats — and control of its own public affairs.
With Republicans united against both measures, it came down to whether Democrats had the appetite to scrap or circumvent the Senate filibuster, the chamber’s rule mandating 60 votes for most legislation. Senators from both parties have, over the years, created plenty of exceptions to that rule — more than 116 times, Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, said when I spoke with her recently.
Most Democrats had rallied around the idea of weakening the filibuster to pass voting rights and other priorities. But they were stymied by members from their own ranks.
Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who would both eventually leave the party and the Senate, nominally backed a compromise version of the voting bill that included redistricting and gerrymandering reforms, but would not entertain a filibuster exemption to overcome a Republican blockade.
Yesterday I called former Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland, a Democrat who spent years trying to pass the voting bill, which was known as H.R. 1., to ask how he views his legislation in hindsight.
“It’s almost impossible to overstate the difference it would have made,” Mr. Sarbanes told me. “It was a huge missed opportunity, though I do take some satisfaction from the fact that we at least knew which fight it was that we had to go fight.”
With Trump and his allies engaged in a maximalist exercise of power across the government and American society, Democrats are debating whether they would have been better served by taking a page from his playback all along.
Texas Republicans, at Trump’s behest, redrew their state’s congressional map this month, likely flipping five House seats red in the process. California Democrats led by Gov. Gavin Newsom are asking voters to suspend a redistricting commission to flip five Republican House seats blue and even the playing field. But that outcome is far from guaranteed, and Democrats’ ability to win back the House next year and act as a check on Trump is on the line.
“They could have prevented this situation we’re in now with Texas,” Klobuchar told me of her colleagues who didn’t vote for redistricting reform. She insisted she does not hold Manchin and Sinema responsible for being unwilling to flout Senate tradition in favor of the reforms.
“I refuse to look at it that way, because it was the Republicans that opposed it,” she said. “And now the president is encouraging this, and they’re following him over an anti-democracy cliff.”
Manchin, through an aide, declined to be interviewed. Sinema did not respond to multiple messages this week.
The issue of D.C. statehood faced similar hurdles. The House approved that in April 2021, but it too failed in part because of opposition from Manchin.
Had Senate Democrats followed the House’s lead on D.C. statehood in 2021, Mr. Trump could still dispatch federal law enforcement agents to Washington, as he did earlier this year in Los Angeles and has threatened to do in Baltimore, Chicago and New York, but the city’s police department would not be forced to help them.
And Washington would have two senators and a House member, instead of a lone, non-voting delegate who has not made any in-person public statement on the military occupation of her city, to represent its 700,000 citizens.
Instead, police officers in Washington are being forced to take federal agents in their cars on routine patrol shifts. Charles Allen, a D.C. Council member, said he has spent recent days watching footage of federal agents taken from body cameras of Metropolitan Police Department officers.
In one, Allen said, an ICE agent jumped out of a squad car on Capitol Hill and tackled a food delivery driver who did not have a license plate on his scooter. Allen said the man’s arms were broken before he was arrested and sent to a deportation facility in Virginia.
“With statehood,” Allen said, “M.P.D. is not compelled to give that guy a ride.”
The Moment
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was thrust into turmoil this week after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted its director, Susan Monarez, and multiple other high-ranking officials resigned.
On Thursday afternoon, a crowd gathered outside agency headquarters in Atlanta for a tribute to those senior leaders called a “clap out.” Attendees showed up to honor the scientists — Dr. Debra Houry, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis and Dr. Daniel Jernigan — and to protest what they see as moves by Kennedy that endanger public health. Monarez had refused to acquiesce to Kennedy’s demands related to personnel and vaccine policy.
Photographer Nicole Craine was there to capture the moment outside the C.D.C.
Though the three officials were ushered out the door by security before the gathering, a crowd of hundreds, including C.D.C. employees in uniform, still came together. Many carried signs and wore supportive apparel, Nicole recalled.
“It was just a very emotional moment,” Nicole said. “The doctors believe they’re on the right side of history on this, and so there was a sense of empowerment as well in this action.”
Jacob Reber and Kitty Bennett contributed to this newsletter.
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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