President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would deploy the District of Columbia National Guard and federalize the Metropolitan Police Department was met with the usual round of critical press releases and sternly worded X posts from Democrats in Congress.
But the one thing Democrats weren’t saying was the only thing that could actually stop Trump: They would use the appropriations process to get their way.
Of course, Democrats have limited tools to prevent Trump from effectively taking over policing in the District. Republicans would gleefully welcome the opportunity to vote down any legislation Democrats introduce on the matter. In fact, they already are.
But Democrats do have some leverage in this fight, if they want to use it. It’s just a question of how far Democrats are willing to go — and whether they’re willing to own a government shutdown for D.C.’s policing autonomy.
The tactic would look something like this: Democrats insist on a provision in government spending legislation that would limit the use of funds for the president to deploy the D.C. National Guard. If Republicans resist, Democrats threaten to withhold their votes on the government funding package. And faced with the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate, Democrats could insist on such an amendment — if they’re willing to live with the consequences.
That is the most serious and direct lever that Democratic lawmakers can pull to stop Trump, though they’ll likely also try to appeal to the courts and argue the president’s moves violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military from operating as a domestic police force.
At the moment though, Democrats don’t appear to be positioning themselves for a shutdown fight over D.C. Even the strongest allies of the District in Congress — Democrats in neighboring districts — stopped short of calling on their party to use the Sept. 30 government funding deadline to stand down the D.C. National Guard.
When NOTUS asked Democratic Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland whether he thought Democrats would try to block Trump’s actions in government funding bills, he said it was “possible.”
“But,” he said, “I mean, there’s so many things that would be in that conversation.”
There are some Democrats advocating for that strategy. When NOTUS talked to Virginia Rep. Suhas Subramanyam on Monday, he said that if his party does have any leverage in government funding talks he expects leaders will bring up D.C. “as one of the issues we want fixed.”
“We need to use every piece of leverage that we have,” Subramanyam said.
Top Democrats in Congress just aren’t going there at the moment.
Of course, Democrats are not responsible for Trump’s usurpation of the District’s law enforcement. And their party’s strategy for the upcoming Sept. 30 funding deadline is far from final. It’s possible Democrats take a hard stance on the D.C. issue, as well as a number of other spending fault lines — like future rescission bills, appropriations numbers, health care rollbacks, immigration crackdowns, the Department of Government Efficiency or some other topic.
Since March, the party has taken a more hard-line stance against the GOP, evident most recently in the explosive redistricting wars flaring around the country.
Top Democratic appropriators and leaders very well may take a more aggressive stance toward government funding this time. The question is whether D.C.’s autonomy ranks high enough on their wishlist for them to expend their limited political capital.
When lawmakers return in September, the first thing Democrats will do is introduce a batch of bills opposing Trump’s command of District law enforcement. It’s the sort of legislation that, in all likelihood, Republicans will happily, and successfully, oppose.
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Washington, D.C., Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton announced Monday their intention to reintroduce two bills to designate Mayor Muriel Bowser as the commander in chief of the D.C. National Guard instead of Trump, while also introducing legislation to repeal the president’s authority to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department.
It’s the fourth time Democrats have introduced legislation like the first measure, and the third time they’ve introduced the second proposal. But even when the party controlled both chambers of Congress, Democrats failed to win the requisite support.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, plans to introduce his own joint resolution, which would countermand Trump’s declaration of emergency that legally underpins his takeover of the D.C. police. But even Raskin’s fellow Democrats voiced concerns to NOTUS that their party is unlikely to win over enough, if any, Republican backers.
“It’s always an uphill battle given the fact that Republicans using critical thinking skills have overwhelmingly left the body,” Raskin told NOTUS, adding he hoped libertarian-minded conservative Rep. Thomas Massie might be an ally.
As for whether Democrats should pursue the more dramatic legislative option available to them — leveraging their votes to advocate for a carve out that blocks federal funding to deploy the D.C. National Guard during the appropriations process — Raskin demurred.
“I’m very hopeful to get all the Democrats aboard a joint resolution,” Raskin told NOTUS. “And then we can take it from there and see where else it goes.”
Even if Raskin gets every Democrat on board and a few Trump-critical Republicans, the 60-vote Senate threshold makes it near impossible to get any Democratic-led bill through Congress. After all, when Republicans cut $1 billion from the D.C. budget in their March funding bill, House Democrats voted — unanimously — against it. Ten Senate Democrats backed it, however, arguing they would rather swallow the provision than shut down the federal government.
(The Senate did pass a measure led by Van Hollen and Republican Sen. Susan Collins to undo the massive D.C. cut, but the House GOP never brought the fix to a vote.)
By the time the funding deadline arrives, Trump will have used up the 30-day legal limit on his federalization of the D.C. police force. To surpass that deadline — Sept. 10 — two-thirds of both chambers of Congress would have to back a joint resolution. With Democrats loath to fork over any votes, the federalization issue may be moot by Sept. 30. But Trump could always issue a new emergency order, and either way, the D.C. National Guard may still be active in the city.
There is an obvious political drawback with congressional Democrats centering the District of Columbia in their messaging. In 2024, Republicans secured a trifecta with their “law-and-order” platform, casting Democrats as weak and passive on crime and blasting them for supposedly “defunding” police forces.
Although they expressed outrage at Trump’s flex of power, early public messages from top Democratic leaders didn’t exactly deliver Democratic lawmakers marching orders to defend the District.
“Violent crime in Washington, D.C. is at a thirty-year low,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted on X. “Donald Trump has no basis to take over the local police department. And zero credibility on the issue of law and order.”
“Get lost,” he said.
After Trump’s press conference Monday morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t offer a public statement for nearly four hours. Exemplifying the Democratic challenge of trying to juggle all that Trump throws at them, Schumer then posted twice about tariffs and again about Trump stripping labor protections at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Neither Jeffries nor Schumer’s offices responded to inquiries from NOTUS about what, if anything, Democrats planned to do in response to Trump’s D.C. actions.
Short of a blueprint for how District policy fits into the upcoming government funding fight, and lacking the votes to enact their own legislation, Democrats are turning to perhaps their last line of defense: public relations.
“Our job is to make it politically unpopular,” Subramanyam said.
“In this case, people need to know that the D.C. crime rate was going down, that the biggest impediment to D.C. safety was actually the president and House Republicans playing games with the D.C. budget,” he continued. “And people need to know that the National Guard is here right now and could be in your community soon if the president thinks that it’s good politics, good PR for him.”
Subramanyam suggested that Trump would only stop making these sorts of moves if Democrats get their message out and “make it unpopular for him.”
Democrats beating a Trump policy to death with their words might be wishful thinking. But the party was at least aligned in its messaging early this week. A slew of Democratic lawmakers offered statements blasting Trump for slow-walking a call to the National Guard during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection while rushing to welcome them into D.C. as crime rates fall.
“Donald Trump has personally incited more crime in Washington, D.C., than perhaps anyone else living,” a group of nine Democratic lawmakers from the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area said in a joint statement led by Rep. Don Beyer.
Democrats also repeatedly accused Trump of using the D.C. takeover as a headline-grabbing distraction from his administration’s bungled messaging on Jeffrey Epstein.
“It’s very clear there’s no emergency,” Raskin said. “I mean, the emergency is the public relations crisis Donald Trump is in because he refuses to release the Epstein file. That’s the emergency.”
Still, it’s unclear whether Democratic leadership will treat Trump’s takeover as its own emergency.
While saying he is appreciative of Democratic leadership’s support of lawmakers in the DMV taking the lead on the D.C. response, Subramanyam said, “I’m biased.”
“I think this should be a bigger issue that the Democratic Party talks about,” he said.
Ivey said, for now, he’s not even sure his colleagues in Congress are paying attention.
“I don’t know how much it has penetrated,” Ivey said. “Frankly, a lot of people are out of town, and we’re not in session. But I think as people hear about it, they’ll speak up.”