DC GOVERNMENT THROWS LEGAL SANDWICH AT TRUMP. Perhaps the most enduring image to come from President Donald Trump‘s anti-crime initiative in Washington, D.C., is the viral video of a 37-year-old man, a District of Columbia resident and, at the time, an employee of the Justice Department, pitching a fit and throwing a sandwich at a federal agent who was part of the anti-crime effort.
The man, Sean Charles Dunn, appeared to be very upset, jumping up and down and yelling at a Customs and Border Protection officer stationed outside a Subway shop last Sunday night. In Dunn’s hand, as he ranted, was a Subway sandwich.
“Dunn allegedly approached one of the CBP officers, pointed his finger in the officer’s face, and shouted ‘F*** you! You f***ing fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!’” according to a Justice Department press release. “About 11:06 p.m., Dunn forcefully threw a sub-style sandwich at the CBP officer, striking him in the chest.”
The officer appeared to be wearing a bulletproof vest that provided ample protection from a flying sandwich. After a brief chase on foot, Dunn was caught and charged with one felony count of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and employees of the United States. In a court appearance Thursday, he was released on his own recognizance. He was also fired from his job at the Justice Department.
Anyone watching the video would conclude that this was one of the dumbest political protests in recent history. One might think that a D.C. resident striking a blow against Trump’s crackdown would be hailed on the Left as a Hero of the Resistance, but Dunn’s actions were so idiotic that they inspired mostly jokes.
On the other hand, perhaps Dunn’s outburst said something about the Democratic response to Trump. There has been a lot of overheated rhetoric, some of it featuring the f-word, meaning, of course, “fascist.” And lots of jumping up and down, as if that will accomplish anything.
On Friday, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, Brian Schwalb, attempted what might be called the legal equivalent of throwing a sandwich at the Trump effort when he filed a lawsuit arguing that the president’s actions are unconstitutional.
Parts of the suit read like standard-issue Democratic talking points. The president acted after declaring a “crime emergency” in the district, Schwalb noted, but there can’t be an emergency because some measures of crime have been going down. “The president’s statements about rising crime in the District are hyperbolic and inconsistent with the facts,” the lawsuit said. “Publicly available data from both federal and local sources demonstrate that violent crime in the District is trending significantly downward.”
Of course, just because some crime indices might be moving downward does not mean that they are actually low, especially if, as is the case now, the movement is down from a pandemic-era spike in crime in the district. And, of course, the law specifies that the president determines whether “special conditions of an emergency nature” are present in the city.
Schwalb’s lawsuit was mostly about a directive issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi appointing Terrance Cole, the newly-installed head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the “emergency police commissioner” of Washington, D.C. “Commissioner Cole shall assume all of the powers and duties vested in the District of Columbia chief of police,” Bondi wrote.
Bondi did not stop there. Her order rescinded or suspended several city policies that make the District of Columbia a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. Basically, the policies barred police from discovering whether a suspect is in the U.S. illegally and kept officers from assisting federal authorities in the enforcement of immigration law. In one document, the Bondi order put an end to the bizarre situation in which authorities in the nation’s capital refused to enforce, or even recognize, federal law.
City officials immediately cried foul. They said Bondi had violated the 1973 Home Rule Act, which is the basis for Trump’s anti-crime action. This is what the relevant portion of that law says: “Whenever the President of the United States determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes, he may direct the mayor to provide him, and the mayor shall provide, such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the president may deem necessary and appropriate.”
The city’s argument was that the Trump administration could not appoint a police commissioner; instead, it had to tell the mayor to do things, which the mayor would then be required to do. It was a process argument, and one that won’t really diminish the Trump effort, but the city had a point. The law does require the president to go through the mayor, who then “shall provide” what the president wants.
But the Schwalb lawsuit went further by arguing that Trump’s initial executive order establishing the anti-crime action, and then everything done afterward, has been unconstitutional. “The EO and defendants’ subsequent actions to implement the EO, including by issuing the Bondi order, thus exceed the president’s limited authority … in violation of the constitutional separation of powers, Take Care Clause, and the District Clause,” the lawsuit said.
The issue went to court in an emergency hearing Friday. Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee who has ruled against the Trump administration in other matters, came up with a proposal. She made it clear to the government that she believed the Bondi order violated the Home Rule Act by not involving the mayor. But instead of issuing a broad ruling, she pushed both sides to negotiate an agreement. That was basically a suggestion to the Justice Department that it should change the Bondi order to comply precisely with the law. The department agreed.
A short time later, Bondi issued what she called “a new directive to Mayor Bowser requiring MPD to provide the services found necessary by my designee, Administrator Terry Cole, to comply fully and completely with federal immigration law and authorities, regardless of any policies MPD might otherwise have.”
Here’s the thing. Judge Reyes’s decision solved the one immediate and clear problem with the process of the Trump administration’s control of the Metropolitan Police Department. But Reyes put off everything else. Her ruling “left in place most of the structure of the federal takeover, maintaining less intrusive federal oversight of the police department and leaving federal agents and National Guard members free to continue patrolling Washington streets,” the New York Times reported.
Sometime later, Judge Reyes will plow through related arguments, like whether the District of Columbia’s crime rate is high enough to warrant federal intervention. In the end, though, after the correction made in the Bondi order, the president is going to win. He has the authority to do what he is doing. When 30 days after his original order have passed, he will have to receive the approval of Congress for further action, but right now, he is acting within his powers as president. The city can jump up and down and throw sandwiches all it wants, but the president has the authority to do this.