Dismantling the FBI Isn't Enough
The District of Columbia is enemy territory.
Much has been made over the past three days about the weaponization of the FBI and the Department of Justice against Republicans that culminated in the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Many on the right have finally come to the realization that much of the security state must be “dismantled” if an outsider GOP administration (e.g. Donald Trump’s first term) is to operate effectively. No one agrees exactly on what it means to “dismantle” the FBI, but whatever it means, doing so is not enough, and fails to address the true source of the problem - the capture of its Washington DC leadership by Democrat partisans. Even if the FBI is ‘dismantled’, its core functions will have to be absorbed by other agencies[1], most of which have also been captured by the same partisan population. The reality is that these functions would be staffed by bureaucrats even more likely to be Democrat partisans, or they’d simply be the very same x-FBI agents hired to fill the same functions elsewhere. In other words, dismantling the FBI will change nothing, because the pool of candidates who live in Washington DC are monolithically partisan.
Nowhere is the effect of DC’s partisan monolith more visible than in the disparate treatment of January 6 defendants in DC courtrooms. Even if you think they deserve stiff punishment, it’s undeniable that the implicit partisanship of the DC jury pool has been proactively used by federal prosecutors to pressure Jan 6 defendants into accepting unfavorable plea deals that wouldn’t have even been considered if facing a non-partisan jury pool. In other words, the District of Columbia – as a population, has tipped the scales to punish its political enemies, including a whole host of Trump administration officials, to say nothing of the partisan environment that allowed security state officials to unlawfully spy upon and undermine the Trump administration without fear of reprisal or punishment. This has been going on for a long time. In 2008, when the taint of the DC jury pool was exploited to convict Republican Senator Ted Stevens on trumped up charges that were later overturned for prosecutorial misconduct, the modest ‘supensions’ handed down to the guilty prosecutors were later reversed by a DC “Administrative Law Judge” on purely ‘procedural’ grounds. The dirty DC prosecutors had their back pay restored, while the Democrats got the crucial 60th vote they needed to pass Obamacare in a partisan vote at midnight on Christmas Eve.
The District of Columbia offers one side of the political spectrum an enormous home field advantage to influence and control the federal government, no matter who is in office. Worse, this has had a chilling affect on the ability of a GOP president to even staff an administration from within the District of Columbia. Competent Republican individuals are reticent to accept appointments, knowing that every action they take within a Washington DC office stands the chance of being scrutinized and judged by a partisan jury conditioned to view such individuals as an existential threat. Compound this with the reality that the chance of being indicted is enormously high, when the DOJ is so hopelessly weaponized that it proactively hunts for ways to neutralize and destroy anyone brave enough to accept a high-level position within a GOP administration.
Dismantling the FBI and DOJ are not enough. Future GOP administrations must find a way to govern from jurisdictions free from the influence of DC’s hyper partisan population. For Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, this likely means establishing administrative infrastructure within the State of Florida. Lest you think this sounds crazy, there is actually a good deal of precedent. Harry Truman famously spent so much time in Key West during his presidency, that his home there is affectionately known as the “Little White House.” More recently, Presidents have used “vacation” homes to conduct significant amounts of business outside the influence of Washington establishment and prying eyes of political opponents. Both George Bush presidencies conducted significant portions of their Presidential duties from Kennebunkport, Maine, and Joe Biden routinely spends 3 to 4 days per week “conducting” Presidential business from the State of Delaware.
What the Bushes and Biden did is of course different from setting up an entire administration in Maine or Delaware, but the District of Columbia has long ago ceased to be the ‘neutral territory’ for which it was created to be, and it is pointless for the GOP to continue pretending otherwise. Washington DC was authorized by Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, for the purpose of providing a seat for the federal government that would be free of partisan influence. What the framers were attempting to protect against was the parochial interests of any U.S. State that might be at odds with the ‘federal’ interests of the other States. Unfortunately, centuries of bloat in the size and scope of the federal government have turned this calculus on its head. Today, not only is Washington DC the most partisan jurisdiction in the land with an entire body of interests that are wholly at odds with the interest of at least half of the 50 States, its suburban growth exacts partisan influence over the States that surround it. The people of Virginia – more exactly the ‘rest’ of Virginia, now find themselves subordinated to the interests of a population aligned with the partisan interests of the District of Columbia, but who just happen to sleep on the other side of the Potomac.
Setting up an administration within the territory of a U.S. State may crack open the Constitutional question that Article 1, Section 8 attempted to head off, but it would be a massive step forward for the country to finally grapple with this issue. Why should California and New York continue to enjoy a federal government wholly aligned with their parochial partisan interests, while the States of Texas and Florida are repeatedly subject to the punitive treatment of a federal government hostile to their own political interests. This is not a theoretical exercise. The federal bureacracy implements banking, energy, and environmental policy in a way that disadvantages States like Texas, and now the feds send a swarm of FBI agents into the State of Florida to raid the home of the State’s most powerful resident. The DC deck has for too long been stacked against half the country, and it’s getting exponentially worse by the day. It’s time for the GOP to address the problem head-on, or be swallowed by the leviathan.
[1] Out libertarian friends would argue that many of the FBI’s activities should be abandoned altogether, but that would likely require an act of Congress to repeal massive volumes of federal law – a topic for another day, and nevertheless, absent a return to pre-Civil War federalism, *some* portion of the FBI’s activity would necessarily need to continue somewhere.