Washington, D.C., and the victims of the violent, pro-Trump insurrection attempt on Jan. 6 lost an opportunity for recompense on Monday when D.C.’s attorney general dropped a civil lawsuit filed against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia groups.
In 2021, then-Attorney General for the District of Columbia Karl Racine announced the suit, relying on the Ku Klux Klan Act to bring the case. At the time, Racine said:
The history will show that when these acts like the KKK act and other laws were used against hate groups — what did they do? What do cowards do? They go running. They go hiding. They get decentralized, and frankly, they’re less dangerous.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the KKK Act was used to some success in breaking up chapters of the klan. It was also used more recently to punish extremists who held a deadly rally in Charlottesville back in 2017.
But D.C.’s current attorney general is Brian Schwalb. And the statement his office issued Monday explaining the decision to drop the case referred to “challenges currently facing the district.”
“Given the challenges currently facing the District and the relatively small potential recoveries the District could obtain, OAG’s resources are now needed and best used elsewhere,” the office said.
Let’s take a look a some of the “challenges” currently facing the district. The federal government just passed a budget that imposed steep cuts on Washington, which has long been the target of a Republican Party eager to impose federal authority over the city (the Senate passed a measure that would restore that funding, but it’s unclear whether Republicans in the House will support it). Meanwhile, Trump is on the record as saying he thinks the feds should “take over” the city altogether. When D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently authorized painting over a street mural in her city honoring the Black Lives Matter movement, she was fairly clear that it was in response to the White House, saying: “I’m not going to talk about specifics, about my conversations, but I think it’s safe to say that people don’t like it, didn’t like it.”
So it certainly seems like the administration is having its way with the city government, whether that’s through Trump’s appointment of Ed Martin, a pro-insurrectionist lawyer tapped as the district’s top federal attorney, or his initial backing of a budget that threatens to impose strict austerity.
This scenario is precisely why I was so disgusted by the Biden administration’s support for a 2023 GOP-backed bill that forced changes to D.C.’s criminal code, which had been changed by the city council in response to the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. In signing on to that power grab, Trump’s predecessor set the stage for the federal government to impose its will on the district’s residents.
And Trump seems more than willing to take that power grab to the next level.