Home rule in Washington, DC
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Washington, DC licence plates carry the words taxation without representation, which Kiriakou describes as a plain statement of fact: a resident of the District pays federal income tax like everybody else but has no voting member of the House and no voting senators.  Until 1971 the city was governed by a congressional committee, the Committee on District of Columbia Affairs, in his account, and it was the administration of Richard Nixon, whom Kiriakou identifies with heavy irony as "that paragon of liberalism," that granted the city home rule.  Home rule, as he sets it out, means the District has a mayor who is genuinely the mayor of the city, a city council, neighbourhood councils, and the various bodies that run the place day to day. 

The Barry precedent

Kiriakou treats the mayoralty of Marion Barry as the case that establishes how far Congress will go. Barry was mayor four times, and Kiriakou's description of his conduct in office is unsparing. Even so, the federal government did not abolish home rule; it seized budgetary authority instead.  For a period of four years the budget was handed to an accountant, "he was just a nerd," Kiriakou says, whose name he initially could not recall and then produced: Anthony Williams. Williams subsequently ran for mayor, won, and in Kiriakou's judgement was "an absolutely fantastic mayor." The District then got home rule back in its entirety. 

The 2025 threat

The immediate occasion, in Kiriakou's telling, was the carjacking and beating of a well-known administration staffer by a group of teenagers, an episode he calls "no fun for anyone" before adding that with Donald Trump "it's always personal", that the president's anger runs on whether he knows someone involved.  Kiriakou reports that the same afternoon the Washington Post was leaked an account of a secret White House meeting convened to find ways of seizing control of the New York mayoral race and of the government of New York; he dismisses that as constitutionally impossible and, in Ted Rall's phrase, which he does not contest, "the very definition of fascism." 

The District, he stresses, is the different case. Federal intervention there has a long history, which makes a takeover "far easier to do," and Trump "knows there's no way for for Washingtonians to defend themselves. They just can't do it." 

What he thinks the city actually needs

Asked what he would do about crime in the District, Kiriakou does not dispute that the problem is real. He describes deep southeast Washington as "ungovernable, unsecurable," a place not to go even in daylight, and a national embarrassment, which is precisely why he cannot see why Trump would want to take it on.  His own answer is that the remedy is "multifold": first homelessness, which he says has been out of control since the pandemic, and then a strong push on education and vocational training, because a city cannot let people live "generation after generation after generation" on the streets. 

See also

- The National Guard in Washington
- The Lafayette Square tents
- Washington political culture
- Donald Trump
