Audit finds Maryland can’t justify $410.9 million in office leases

Maryland’s Department of General Services has shifted state agencies to leased office space without proving that the moves are in the state’s best interests. One legislative auditor said he had “more documentation to buy my Toyota Corolla” than the state provided for major lease decisions.  (Bryan P. Sears / Maryland Matters)

Most affected by encampment closures stayed outside

People moved to new spots or began sleeping without tents, with a few moving into Maryland or Virginia, according to surveys from Streetsense. Streetsense has confirmed 24 encampment closures since August 11, despite the White House’s claim that federal and local efforts have closed at least 50.  (Streetsense Media. Tip: Miles Wilson)

Neighbors escort DC students amid ICE activity

Community members in Northwest DC aim to support attendance by walking students to school amid neighborhood ICE arrests. The Department of Homeland Security says that ICE isn’t arresting children at school. (This article may be behind a paywall.)  (Teo Armus / Post)

Plans for Commanders stadium feature tall dome

Domes are exempt from the 130-foot height limit for most buildings in DC established under the 1910 Height Act. The DC Council votes September 17 on $1 billion in public funding for the $3.8 billion project. (This article is behind a paywall.)  (Michael Neibauer / Business Journal)

Arlington County Board to consider housing, street improvements

At its Saturday meeting, the board will review a 316-unit mixed-use building at 2500 Wilson Boulevard and a 141-unit project at 1601 N. Fairfax Drive. Staff opposes the latter project for violating planning guidelines. The board can also allocate $4.9 million in funding for neighborhood street improvements.  (Scott McCaffrey / ARLnow)

Baltimore County rural land clashes with housing crisis

Baltimore County is short on land where it can develop housing under current zoning, which allows just one house per acre in two-thirds of the county. That land is designated for rural uses. Average rents have gone up since the pandemic, and the county has agreed to build 1,000 affordable units by 2027. (This article is behind a paywall.)  (Céilí Doyle / Baltimore Banner. Tip: Former Commenter)

Falls Church shifts trash collection costs

Homeowners in single-family homes and townhouses will now pay $236 to $336 per year for residential trash and recycling collection. The Falls Church City Council voted 7-0 to approve this change, which eliminates costs for apartment and commercial property owners who don’t receive city collection.  (Scott McCaffrey / ARLnow)

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Today’s blog post was supposed to be a more light-hearted post looking at various nonsense from around social media. That’s still coming this weekend, but today I want to talk about something more serious and more political. If you’d rather not read about gun violence and illiberalism, I don’t blame you. It’s a bummer. Here’s a baby rabbit with a grocery cart full of carrots for your trouble and I’ll see you at the next post. With that said, let’s talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed yesterday attending an event at Utah Valley University.

After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last year, I wrote a post called What is the purpose of liberalism? I’m going to quote from it heavily here, and frankly you may just want to go back and read that post as context.

When attacks like this happen, the first and most obvious thing that every political figure does is to condemn the violence. I think this is the morally correct choice, but it’s worth unpacking why.

Hundreds of years ago, pre-Enlightenment, Europeans discovered that they didn’t really agree on the nature of Christianity. Some were Catholic and followed the pope. Others were defecting to newer, hipper versions of Protestantism. Their solution to this problem was to murder each other.

It’s easy to forget from our modern, first-world vantage point that these religious wars were brutal and unrelenting. When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door, he kicked off almost two hundred straight years of barbaric religious violence. The French Wars of Religion. The Danish Count’s Feud. The Thirty Years War. The Hessian War. The Dutch Eighty Years War. The Nine Years War. The English Civil War. The Swedish War of Deposition. The Strasbourg Bishop’s War. The defining feature of European history for around 200 years is Catholics and Protestants killing each other.

The world today is so peaceful relative the past that most of us don’t have a good sense for how brutal and violent the world was for most of human history. Violence was not an exception, it was the rule. And it wasn’t just that wars happened constantly, it was the nature of those wars:

These were not gentlemanly affairs. These wars routinely involved genocidal massacres of entire towns/villages for picking the wrong religion. Soldiers paraded around enemy corpses as trophies. One side would execute the other by ripping their beating hearts out of their chests while still alive. Nobody was having a good time.

Enter Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism proposed the solution that both Catholics and Protestants would cease killing each other, and each person (or town, or kingdom) could choose for itself which religion they’d like to follow. Please don’t underrate how revolutionary this idea is because it seems normal now. For most of human history, ‘kill the outsider’ was a cherished tradition. But Europe was able to escape the cycle and miraculously stop the violence.

Liberalism formalized ideas like freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and governing via the consent of the governed. Catholics and Protestants still didn’t like each other much, and often tried to harass or discriminate against each other. Over time, liberalism developed norms to prevent that as well - political freedoms, tolerance, equal treatment before the law, basic human rights, etc.

Small-l liberalism at its core is a piece of civilizational technology to prevent civil wars. It’s the social contract that we settle disputes through ideas and laws, rather than at the end of a gun.

Because I am a liberal and because I understand the core value of liberalism, I am always aghast at acts of political violence. I condemn them without hesitation. I closed that piece with a plea not to take for granted what generations of liberalism have won for us:

As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.

Unfortunately, American society seems to be forgetting the purpose of liberalism. We’re backsliding into a new era of political violence. In the past few years we’ve seen:

• A plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan

• The storming of the capitol by an armed mob on January 6th

• Pipe bombs set outside both the DNC and RNC headquarters

• The assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare

• Multiple assassination attempts on Donald Trump

• The assassination and shooting of state-level legislators in Minnesota

• The attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi

• The murder of Israeli embassy staffers by a pro-Palestine gunman

• Shootings at the homes of New Mexico legislators

• The attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis

• The firebombing of the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania

• An anti-vax political shooting at the CDC headquarters

• And now, the assassination of Charlie Kirk

I’m worried about the state of American society. Our freedom from political violence was won over hundreds of years, and there’s no iron law that says that it’s permanent.

We’re in a dangerous place right now. And any honest accounting of how we got here has to include people like Charlie Kirk.

Charlie Kirk was not a good person. He did not deserve to be killed for his lack of virtue, but I won’t gloss over how vile his beliefs were or the massive negative impact he had on American society. He was an avatar for everything wrong with modern politics, a dishonest huckster at the best of times and one of the foulest and most cynical bigots in America at the worst of times.

I don’t want to focus on the many areas of policy disagreement I have with Kirk. That post would be far too long and far too pointless of an exercise for someone who’s now dead. Instead, I want to focus on a single area that’s relevant at this moment - Charlie Kirk was part of the machine that has been legitimizing political violence in America.

Kirk is obviously best known for boosting Donald Trump, a man who suggested that ‘second amendment people’ take matters into their own hands against Hillary Clinton, who asked police to shoot protestors and advocated for shooting migrants. But beyond his promotion of Trump, Kirk himself has also told his very large podcast audience that a ‘patriot’ should bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker. He heavily promoted a book that called for the systemic mass murder of leftists and used Pinochet and Franco’s fascist regimes as positive examples. He likes to muse about staging public executions and bringing children to watch them. He personally organized buses to send people to the January 6th insurrection. Last month he called for the full military occupation of American cities. He used language like ‘civil war’ and emphasized how violent the left was and how conservatives needed to be ready.

In the coming days, many people will laud Kirk for his ‘debates’, and it’s true that he did travel around to college campuses to debate students across the country. But it would be a mistake to paint him as a champion for non-violent engagement. Kirk was never truly interested in the democratic exchange of ideas, in good faith discourse and understanding. He was in it to dunk on 19 year-old sociology majors, he was farming clips to use on social media. And Charlie Kirk has long flirted with violence in his rhetoric and his actions.

Ironically, one of the few moments of honesty in Charlie Kirk’s political life comes on this exact topic. Comments Kirk made in 2023 have been making the rounds on social media in the wake of his death. The quote:

“"I think it's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."

Let’s give him credit - this is an honest look at the tradeoffs involved in American gun policy. Far too many gun rights activists like to pretend that America experiences outlier levels of gun violence for some other mysterious reason that has nothing to do with our incredibly permissive stance towards gun control. That’s nonsense. The reason America has far more gun violence than any other rich nation is because we have far more guns and a far looser set of regulations governing firearms.

The dishonest approach is to equivocate, to deflect to other issues, to pretend like a country with hundreds of millions of guns floating around can somehow end gun violence through other means. The honest approach, and the one that Kirk takes, is to admit that we’re going to have gun deaths but say that you think the trade off is worth it. It’s at least intellectually defensible to say that the freedom to bear arms will have serious negative side effects, but those side effects are an acceptable trade in order to safe guard that freedom. Violence, according to this position, is worth it.

This is an honest position that should be considered seriously. But having considered it seriously, I believe it’s seriously wrong.

Charlie Kirk had two children under the age of 4. They will grow up never truly knowing their father. Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota legislator assassinated earlier this year, also had children who will never get to speak to their mother again. The American conception of right to bear arms, with its unfathomably light touch and its inability to keep guns out of the hands of maniacs, was not worth their lives. It is not worth the lives of the more than forty thousand people that die every year from gun violence in America.

We should be clear about the scale of the problem here. In a turn that would be comedic if it wasn’t so tragic, the one thing that might push news of the Kirk shooting off the front page is a school shooting in Colorado that happened within an hour of Kirk’s shooting. There is no other wealthy nation that deals with gun violence at anywhere near this scale, and it’s because our gun policies are deeply broken. Charlie Kirk said that violent deaths were a necessary price to pay for the freedom to bear arms, but he’s wrong. His life and the lives of millions of Americans affected by gun violence are worth more than the ability to buy guns on demand.

Whenever someone calls for gun control in the wake of a tragic shooting, they are inevitably accused of ‘politicizing’ the tragedy. Now is not the time, say the angry comments.1 This is an absurd argument. In America we literally cannot go a week without a mass shooting of some kind. In 2025 so far there have been 309 mass shootings in the US, defined as shootings with four or more injuries or deaths. It is always the time to talk about gun control because we are always killing each other with guns.

I will fully admit I’m not a policy expert in this area. I don’t know what specific steps would be best. I’d welcome a real discussion about red flag laws, universal background checks, magazine restrictions, mandatory waiting periods, ghost guns, and more. Perhaps some of these ideas would be helpful and others would not. But you don’t have to be a policy expert to look at the current situation and see how deeply broken it is. There has to be a middle ground between ‘nobody can have a gun’ and the nightmare millions of us are forced to live through now.

We shouldn’t have to live in a society where legislators, activists, and everyday citizens are routinely gunned down in broad daylight. But we’re at risk of entering the American version of The Troubles, and we’re doing it because social media is melting our brains, because our political commentators play fast and loose with calls for political violence, and because we have incredibly loose regulations on firearms. The best way to honor the victims of gun violence isn’t with words, tributes, or flags lowered to half-mast. The best way to honor them is to fix the problem. That will require a serious conversation about gun control. And it will require an honest assessment of the people who’ve embraced calls to violence (both on the right, like Kirk, and on the left).

We desperately need to lower the temperature and step back from this ledge, but I don’t know that we’re capable of doing it right now. Trump is still president and is almost certain to continue promoting political violence and a macho, tough-guy politics. The same social media systems that reward conflict and escalation are still in place. College students are increasingly comfortable with using violence to suppress speech. I’m afraid this might just be what America is now. We, like Charlie Kirk, can’t help but flirt with violence. We accept it as a side effect of the things we really want. We’re a rich, violent nation that is slowly forgetting what liberalism is for and descending further and further away from what we should be.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Wednesday passed a slew of bills targeting D.C., ranging from a measure that would allow President Trump to appoint the city’s attorney general (currently elected by residents) to a proposal prohibiting the city from using its traffic cameras to ticket scofflaw motorists.

The majority of the 14 bills that were approved touch on D.C.’s criminal justice laws, ratcheting up mandatory minimum sentences for certain violent offenses and allowing more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults – while at the same time undoing a 2020 law that imposed additional disciplinary measures on police.

The best D.C. residents may have gotten out of the marathon hearing was a bill that will allow the D.C. Council to email its bills to Congress, instead of having to hand-deliver them. (Seriously.)

The session took place on the final day of President Trump’s 30-day takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department, indicating that while one form of federal control was coming to an end, a new form of interference was just getting started. 

Republicans said they were simply fulfilling their constitutional duty to oversee the nation’s capital at a time when public safety was a concern. Democrats, however, repeatedly countered that the majority was enmeshing itself in plainly local issues – and without having to consult with or be held accountable by the residents who have to live with the changes. (There were no prior public hearings on the bills.)

“The D.C. Council has 13 members. If residents do not like how they vote, residents can vote them out of office or pass a ballot measure. That is called democracy. Congress has 535 members. None are elected by D.C. residents," said D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. "That is the antithesis of democracy.”

Republicans clearly disagreed. Below is a summary of all the bills the committee advanced, which will next move to the full House.

A MAGA attorney general for D.C.?

What limited democracy D.C. residents enjoy could be shrinking. Under a bill that cleared the committee, Trump would gain the authority to unilaterally choose D.C.’s attorney general (without Senate confirmation, to boot). This would effectively give him almost absolute power over enforcement of the city’s criminal and civil laws (some of which have been turned against Trump himself).

Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) backed the bill, saying that the city’s attorney general “must operate free from local politics.” But Democrats pushed back, noting that the Trump-appointed attorney general would instead be operating under the influence of national politics despite the majority of the office’s work being plainly local.

“The D.C. Attorney General, as the District’s chief law officer, is responsible for local legal issues, namely, protecting the District and its residents in a wide range of matters, such as enforcing child support laws, handling abuse and neglect proceedings in the child welfare system, enforcing our housing code, and defending District agencies and officers when they are sued,” said Attorney Brian Schwalb in a letter to the committee. “In no other place in the United States are such local issues determined by a federally appointed person with no local accountability.”

Were Trump to gain this power, Democrats said certain local crimes may never get prosecuted. Just this week, Schwalb filed a lawsuit against a company that provides Bitcoin ATMs that he said scammed senior citizens out of money; would Trump, himself close to the crypto industry, have allowed such a lawsuit to proceed? Would Trump, a real estate developer at heart, permit his attorney general to sue slumlords the way Schwalb has? What of the successful 2020 lawsuit against the Trump Organization, which netted D.C. a $750,000 settlement? Would that ever have happened?

Should this bill become law, D.C. would join only seven other states that do not have a popularly elected attorney general. And even in many of those states, the responsibility is still left to the governor or legislature – positions that are elected by the people. For decades, D.C.’s attorney general was chosen by the mayor, an arrangement that raised questions about the office’s independence. In 2010, 76% of D.C. voters approved changing the position to one elected by residents; the first popular election happened in 2014.

Still, bill sponsor Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) said the measure would increase D.C. oversight, and improve public safety because, as he said: “In recent years, D.C. saw close to two-thirds of arrests go unprosecuted.” 

But Fallon had confused the D.C. Attorney General for the U.S. Attorney for D.C., the latter of which is already appointed by the president and prosecutes most violent crime in the city – and in 2022 was accused of declining to prosecute 67% of arrests brought by MPD. (The D.C. attorney general does prosecute juvenile crime and minor adult offenses.) 

“D.C. laws should not be written by people who don't know how D.C. actually works,” tweeted Schwalb. 

More time for Congress to interfere in local lawmaking

Under the 50-year-old Home Rule Act that gave D.C. an elected mayor and council, Congress gave itself the right to review – and possibly reject – any bill passed by the council. It has 30 days to do so, or 60 days if the legislation touches on criminal law.

But a bill from Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) would expand the review period to 60 days for all bills, as well as give Congress expanded power to veto provisions of local legislation, mayoral orders, and regulations. Gosar said Congress needs more time: “This is a unique city. You chose to live in it,” he said. “There needs to be accountability.”

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), the ranking Democrat on the committee, countered that the bill would mean “more congressional micromanagement and more meddling in the democratic process." Others were more blunt, saying it would create “chaos” in local governance.

The bill, warned D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, would “grind government functions in the District to a halt,” while Mayor Muriel Bowser said it would make the city less efficient, competitive, and responsive. “Bogging down legislative and executive action only adds costs and uncertainty,” she wrote to members of Congress ahead of Wednesday’s votes. 

A main concern is that the existing congressional review period already stretches far beyond its allotted time frame, largely because only weekdays or days when Congress is in session are counted towards the deadline. A bill passed by the council earlier this year banning female genital mutilation, for example, was subject to a 60-day review because it amended criminal law, but the actual review took twice as long as that. 

But bills can now be emailed to Congress!

Before the congressional review period can even start, the council has to transmit bills it passes to Congress. But that process hasn’t evolved much with technology: The bills are still required to be hand-delivered to multiple offices in the House and Senate. 

That seemed innocently old-timey enough until a few years ago, when such deliveries were literally blocked by the fencing placed around the U.S. Capitol in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection. (Some 60 bills passed by the council were held up until a workaround could be found.) Norton has since been pushing for Congress to allow for bills to be emailed instead, and committee Republicans seemed to want to grant her at least that – the vote on the measure was unanimous and bipartisan. (Email: It can unify America.)

Making it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults

If there is any issue that has long bedeviled public safety debates in D.C., it’s what to do with juveniles who break the law. Crimes committed by juveniles spiked during the pandemic, driven largely by carjackings but also extending into homicides – where kids were both perpetrators and victims. 

The number of crimes committed by juveniles has since fallen to below pre-pandemic levels, but local officials have still responded by creating a new unit in MPD to focus on juvenile crime and instituting an expanded youth curfew. Still, youth crime has become a point of emphasis for Trump and Republicans, who say that more juveniles should be treated like adults when they break the law.

One bill would do just that, allowing prosecutors to charge 14- and 15-year-olds as adults for certain violent crimes. Currently, that can only happen for kids who are 16 or 17. That point may be one where congressional Republicans and D.C. residents find some common ground. According to a Washington Post poll conducted last month, 58% of residents say that 14- and 15-year-old charged with murder should face the same consequences as adults. Support for charging children as adults, however, drops for other crimes, including carjackings and assaults. 

Another bill would make changes to the Youth Rehabilitation Act, a longstanding D.C. law that offers alternatives to jail, such as therapy or educational rehabilitation, for some juvenile offenders. The law was expanded to offenders up to the age of 24, but Republicans want it brought back down to 18. 

“If the D.C. Council will not do what is necessary and appropriate to ensure that the nation’s capital is safe, then it is a requirement of Congress to do so,” said Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida). 

But Garcia pushed back: “If D.C. residents don’t like their policies, they can vote for new policies or representatives. Our committee is not talking about violent crime in Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama,” said Garcia. “We continue to take away the rights of the elected officials that represent this community.”

Increasing mandatory minimum sentences

Beyond juveniles, Republicans say that what D.C. needs is more deterrence – and that there’s no better tool than longer prison sentences. 

A bill written by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) would increase mandatory minimums for a variety of crimes, from first-degree murder (currently 30 years or more to life imprisonment with no parole) to rape (currently seven to 25 years). Many of the new minimum sentences would also apply to juveniles. “What do greater sentences do? They provide specific and general deterrence,” he said.

But Garcia said that is far too simplistic. 

“There is no evidence that mandatory minimums actually significantly reduce crime rates,” he said. “Research instead points to the conclusion that it is the certainty of punishment, not the severity, that actually deters crime.”

Relatedly, the committee also passed a bill that would repeal a D.C. law that allows incarcerated felons who committed violent crimes before turning 25 and have served 15 years in prison to petition a judge for early release, and also another bill that allows certain offenders to request that their criminal records be sealed.

More pretrial detention, and a return of cash bail

A related bill from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) would mandate pretrial detention for anyone charged with a violent offense. 

If this issue sounds familiar, it’s because local lawmakers have been similarly debating it in recent years. Eventually, the council settled on giving judges more discretion in deciding when people charged with certain violent crimes can be held pending trial. Stefanik’s bill, though, would remove that discretion altogether. Existing data shows that 92% of those released pending trial do not reoffend, and for those who do, they rarely commit another violent crime.

“No one on this committee wants dangerous people on the streets after they have been arrested,” said Garcia, adding that D.C. law was similar to federal law. "Decisions are based on an assessment by a judge of a defendant's risk of flight and danger to the community. And that’s how it should be. In our system you are innocent until proven guilty.”

Stefanik’s bill would also bring back cash bail – which hasn’t been used in D.C. for 30 years – for specific crimes, including rioting, burglary or robbery, or fleeing from a police officer. Republicans argued that it would merely ensure that offenders don’t skip out on returning to court for their trials, while Democrats said that it would merely lead to more people being held simply because they can’t afford bail.

Repealing police discipline reforms – again

A constant point of friction between the D.C. Police Union and the council over the last five years has been the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act, a bill passed by local lawmakers in 2020 that imposed new police discipline reforms. The union (which represents MPD’s 3,200 officers) has fought to have the law repealed, and Congress went along – but then-president Joe Biden did not. Republicans are now trying again. 

The law requires that body camera footage from police shootings be made public within five days, limits the use of tear gas during protests, strengthens the independent Office of Police Complaints, clarifies the ban on chokeholds, and removes disciplinary matters from collective bargaining with the union.

The union argues that the law has in part caused the decrease in manpower at MPD over the last five years, but supporters say it includes common-sense provisions to ensure that police operate under the rules – and are held to account when they don’t. 

A harsher law against homelessness

Trump’s federal surge into D.C. also sought to address homelessness – or at least make it less visible. Dozens of existing homeless encampments on federal land were quickly cleared in August, leaving many residents with no place to go.

But Rep. William Timmons (R-South Carolina) says more needs to be done. His bill would increase enforcement by making camping in public – or even sleeping in one’s own car – a crime punishable by a $500 fine or 30 days in jail. 

“The District of Columbia is more than a city, it’s the front porch of our nation. Millions of visitors come here every year to see their government, monuments, and history. They expect and deserve to see a capital city that is clean, safe, and welcoming. When our public spaces are taken over by encampments, that sense of order and pride is lost,” he said. 

Homeless advocates say the bill would be harmful and ineffective; what they need is housing. (While D.C. has cleared encampments for years, it has usually done so after working with residents to identify housing options for them.) Garcia echoed that point.

“A bill that makes it a crime to be unhoused or poor is wrong and immoral,” he said. “A person who lives in a tent can’t pay a $500 fine, so instead we’re going to put them in jail?””

Make police chases great again

Police car chases are a staple of any Hollywood thriller, but on Wednesday they also became a policy matter for Democrats and Republicans to disagree on. A bill sponsored by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) would loosen D.C.’s existing rules on chases, restoring what he called “the power of discretion to pursue a vehicle if it’s the right thing to do.” 

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the council adopted a bill limiting car chases to pursuits of accused violent offenders or to prevent someone getting killed or injured. At the time, local lawmakers pointed to the case of Karon Hylton-Brown, who was killed during a police chase over a minor traffic offense on Kennedy Street NW. Before that, in 2016, a D.C. man was killed when a carjacking suspect being chased by police slammed into his car. 

The council slightly relaxed the restrictions in 2024, giving individual officers more leeway in deciding when a car chase is appropriate and necessary.

Democrats on the committee argued that Higgins’ bill would go too far in making those chases permissible and frequent. “High-speed chases are dangerous and often cause needless deaths, injuries, and property damage, and are initiated over minor traffic violations,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). 

Last month the federal government relaxed the existing policy restricting car chases by the U.S. Park Police, and the impacts were immediate – the Washington Post reported that of 10 chases initiated by those officers over traffic offenses, six resulted in crashes. 

No more traffic cameras, but many more right turns on red

Amidst what was an hours-long debate over criminal justice in D.C., Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) jumped in to speak for “one of the largest special interest groups in the world”: drivers.

His first proposal would ban D.C. from using traffic cameras to catch motorists in the act of speeding or running red lights. (There are almost 500 cameras across the city, which can be used for speeding, red lights, bus lane enforcement, and more.) “These cameras are a shameless money-grab that deter tourists and aggravate tourists and residents. It is unconscionable,” he said, adding that it was questionable whether or not they actually improved traffic safety.

City officials say that the traffic cameras have actually led to a decline in speeding, and decreases in traffic deaths in 2025 show that traffic enforcement measures are starting to work. But Democrats on the committee wondered why the nation’s legislature should be concerned with traffic regulation in D.C. at all.

“This is pretty ridiculous. We are now arguing about local traffic enforcement in the U.S. Congress. If we’re going to micromanage traffic and public works and the way our traffic lights work, this is not the place to do it. This is what city councils and mayors do,” said Garcia.

But that wasn’t Perry’s only extremely-local traffic concern. His second measure would prohibit D.C. from enforcing a new law that bans right turns at most red lights. “Drivers in the District want to be able to drive freely without dealing with nuanced turning laws,” he said.

At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson had her own take on Perry, though it wasn’t particularly nuanced: “​​Been in Congress for 12 years and these bills are his battle cry?! Come on,” she tweeted.

D.C.’s judges, now more conservative?

Even though judges on D.C.’s Superior Court handle local crime, they’re nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It’s been a persistent problem, with lags in the process leading to judicial vacancies that slow down the legal process and overwork existing judges.

But instead of working to speed up the confirmation process, a bill from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) would merely eliminate the D.C. Judicial Nominations Commission, which for 50 years has recommended nominees for judgeships to the president. The commission includes members appointed by the mayor and council, so by getting rid of it, Sessions would effectively be removing any local input into who serves as a judge on D.C.’s local court. 

“As recently as last month, President Trump nominated three federal judicial nominees who were selected from the Commission’s candidate pool – a process that demonstrates the value of maintaining local input,” wrote Bowser to Congress. 

Sessions said dumping the commission would simply be more efficient, and he seemed unbothered by the possible consequences of giving the president more unfettered power to appoint judges who serve in Superior Court.

“This is a federal city. The president could more quickly make decisions about who could be serving… Will they probably be conservatives? Yes. I would not doubt that,” he said. “And at the time when the people of the U.S. make a decision to elect someone else, they would also have that equal right. It’s a good process.”

I’m hesitating to publish this because emotions are high and social media is volatile. But I’m doing so anyway because I believe erring on the side of empathy is only human. Hannah Arendt once wrote, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

That quote has echoed in my mind as I reflect on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We’ve seen a disturbing cruelty take hold in our politics. I want to be clear: I extend empathy to Kirk and I pray for his family, not because of who he is, but because of who I am. I do so not because I find a single redeeming quality in his personality or character. I honestly don’t. But instead, because I care about how we move forward as a country when violence has tragically and increasingly become the norm? This is not sustainable. Let’s Address This.

Why Have Empathy For Those Who Never Extended It?

I know this is hard. We saw the cruelty of the MAGA right when MN Democratic State Senator Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a targeted attack. To this day Donald Trump never bothered to condemn that political violence or extend his sympathies.

Why have empathy for those who show none?

It gets even more difficult to have empathy when you recall that Kirk once sneered, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up new age term, and it does a lot of damage.” Moreover he falsely claimed “guns save lives,” and even argued it was “worth it” for some people to die from gun violence every year just so the Second Amendment could exist. He dehumanized immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, Black people, Palestinians, women, and more.

Why have empathy for those who show none?

And yet, even as he refused to take seriously the epidemic in gun violence in America—which has created the annual atrocity in which guns are the leading cause of preventable death for American children—we saw another school shooting today. Today, while Kirk was the victim of gun violence at a university in Utah, at least four students, including the shooter, were injured in a school shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado. Our nation has already suffered more than 300 mass shootings in 2025, and it’s only September.

Why have empathy for those who show none?

And finally, Kirk particularly detested Muslims and the religion of Islam. He constantly demonized Muslims, referring to us as “Mohammadens” in an attempt to berate and deny us our identity. So why would I, an American Muslim who gets plenty of hate from Kirk supporters due to the disinformation he fed them on Islam and Muslims, bother to have empathy?

Faith and Empathy

Despite his hatred for me and my faith, I return to what my faith teaches me on how to treat those who mistreat me. I turn to a powerful verse of the Qur’an, which teaches:

O ye who believe! be steadfast in the cause of God, bearing witness in equity; and let not a people’s enmity incite you to act otherwise than with justice. Be always just, that is nearer to righteousness. And fear God. Surely, God is aware of what you do. — Chapter 5, Verse 9

Two things can be simultaneously true. I can detest what Kirk stood for and the hatred he spread and work ferociously to counter his hate. And, I can be sure to not allow Kirk’s injustices make me act like him. I will not allow his fear of the other infect my ability to see the humanity in every person.

My standard is justice, always, and that will never change.

And here’s the thing. You don’t need to agree with me. For those who feel no empathy for him, I get it. He inflicted harm on countless people, and none of us are light switches who can flip our feelings on and off at will. So if you have no empathy for Kirk, no judgement from me. None.

And if you are struggling, take the time to find your peace, your center. Pray. Meditate. Eat ice cream. Tickle a baby. Snuggle a puppy. Go for a run. Watch your favorite film. Remember what makes you human.

I can only express how I feel and how I am managing these moments in our nation’s history. Indeed, we are living through one of the most volatile times in our nation’s history. Yes, Kirk bore much responsibility for spreading disinformation and misinformation that fueled the division and violence we’re seeing right now. But his death cannot tempt us into abandoning the one thing that can save us—our empathy.

Because the current trajectory of increasing violence is simply not sustainable.

Empathy and Humanity

Therefore, for me, this is a moment to double down. To expand our spheres of compassion. To deepen our service to humanity. To increase our engagement with those willing to engage. To refuse to give up hope on this country and this world. And to continue our fight for justice for all people. Because at the end of the day, I have little doubt that those in power will try to use Kirk’s death as an attempt to further divide, create discord, and create distrust.

So why have empathy for those who show none?

Because empathy is our inoculation to that hatred and fear. It is not weakness. It is strength. It is not acceptance of violence and bigotry. It is rejection of cruelty and hate. We have empathy, not dependent upon whether others behave like decent human beings—but because we are decent humans being. That is how we build a future committed to justice, not violence. We have empathy, because it is what keeps us human.

And that is something we cannot afford to lose.

When driving 5 mph over the 65mph speed limit on Orange County freeways, I notice many motorists passing me. This occurs so often I’ve concluded that most people are “speeders”, that is, in technical violation of the traffic laws. Not surprisingly, society has felt it necessary to create a separate term for people going far over the speed limit—say 125mph. Those are often labeled “reckless drivers”. You might say that speeding 5mph over the limit is less wrong that going 60mph over the limit. The financial penalty is certainly much lower.

There are many areas, however, where society has decided to extend the same pejorative term over a wider set of infractions. This is usually done to impress upon the public that the relatively milder infraction is also really, really bad. At the end, I’ll consider an example of the opposite—creating a softer term for something that seems (objectively) just as bad. I’ll also focus on society’s view of the situation, not my own. Please try to keep that focus in the comment section.

Here are some terms that have been extended over an increasingly wide range of situations:

Genocide: Most people believe that genocide in the sense of destroying a culture is less wrong than genocide in the sense of mass murder.

Segregation: Most people believe that de facto segregation is less wrong than de jure segregation.

Slave Labor: Most people believe that slave labor in the sense of exploitation of migrant workers is less wrong than chattel slavery.

Pedophilia: Most people regard sex with a teenagers as being less wrong than sex with a young child.

Rape: For a given age, most people believe that statutory rape is less wrong than forceable rape.

Homelessness: Most of America’s homeless live in shelters such as motel rooms. But most people regard living on the street as being worse than living in a motel.

Drunk driving: Most people believe (at least implicitly) that driving a with a blood alcohol level of 0.10% is less wrong than driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.20%. (BTW, the legal limit was 0.15% when I was young, now it’s 0.08%.)

Child labor: Most people view having 14-year old children working is less wrong than having 8-year old children work.

Child abuse: Most people believe that spanking a child is less wrong than intentionally injuring a child.

Racism: Most people believe that unequal outcomes, aka “structural racism” is less wrong than intentional discrimination against minorities.

In the comment sections, I noticed that many people struggle with nuance. If you say X is less wrong than Y, you are seen as saying X is “perfectly OK”, or “not a problem at all”. Thus, people seemed surprised by my claim that even after the recent crackdown, the situation in Hong Kong is still much better than on the mainland.

In fact, that claim should not have been even slightly controversial. And yet people conflate the true claim that “bad things have recently been done to Hong Kong”, with the false claim that “things in HK are just as repressive as on the mainland.”

A recent FT story about Hong Kong University illustrated both the negative:

Academic freedom has shrunk, many say. Several of its academics have been attacked by Chinese state-backed media outlets in Hong Kong. US human rights law academic Ryan Thoreson, who was hired by HKU, was denied a visa in 2022.

and the positive:

The total number of students at HKU, meanwhile, has increased from 29,099 in 2018 to 42,330 in 2025, with the proportion of mainland Chinese students studying under government-funded programmes rising from about 15 per cent to 24 per cent during the period.

Many mainland Chinese people who studied abroad come “to HKU for [its] western education,” said a HKU social sciences lecturer. “They don’t want us to tell them [the] Chinese party line or propaganda . . . [in that sense HKU] maintains a competitive edge.”

The world is complex. It can be true that Hong Kong has gotten worse in several important ways, while also being true that Hong Kong is still freer than the mainland in many other important ways.

Scott Alexander directed me to an interesting tweet by Richard Hanania:

According to Wikipedia, the age of consent is roughly two years higher in the US (16-18) than in Europe (where it is 14-16):

More surprising to me is the fact that the differences seem sort of random, not correlated with cultural differences in the way that I would have expected. Norway aligns with Spain, Germany aligns with Portugal, Sweden aligns with Greece, etc. And the same sort of seemingly random pattern occurs throughout the US.

Alexander comments on Hanania’s tweet:

I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox.

That’s a reasonable take, but I suspect there’s more that could be said on the subject. For instance, spanking is allowed in the US but banned in many European countries. So there does seem to be a real cultural difference regarding the question of how best to “protect kids”. Put simply, Europeans seem more horrified by violence and Americans seem more horrified by underage sex. And yet the difference is not absolute—it’s a matter of degree. Europe does have age of consent rules, and America does ban excessive violence against children.

When questionable behavior occurs along a sort of continuum, there will naturally be differences as to where to draw the line. And those differences are not just regional, they also occur over time. During my lifetime, I’ve seen many of the terms listed above extended over a wider range of situations. At the same times, terms like adultery, sodomy and promiscuity have lost a bit of their sting.

When a pejorative is extended over a wider range of situations, there is generally a policy agenda hovering the background. Proponents of the extension would argue that there is increasing awareness of the harm done by various types of behavior, and the use of a pejorative term for even milder forms of wrong behavior has real social utility. It’s a sort of wake-up call. “You may think there’s nothing wrong with driving home from a bar while slightly inebriated, but people die almost every day because of that sort of behavior. That’s why we need to categorize a blood alcohol reading of 0.10% as drunk driving.”

Unlike with drunk driving, I’m not aware of any major changes in America’s age of consent laws during my lifetime. Nonetheless, I would argue that the extension of the term “pedophile” from those having sex with young children to also include those having sex with teenagers has effectively changed the public policy, making it at least slightly more restrictive due to what Alexander calls “shaming.”

Indeed, most of the terms that I listed above have been extended to a considerably wider range of activities than when I was young. In at least one case (racism), a backlash has recently begun, and there’s now some pushback against the concept of “structural racism”.

Why is word choice so effective in public policy debates? I think it goes back to the lack of nuance that I noticed in response to my China post. Many people have trouble understanding that if X is really bad, and Y is a little bit like X, that does not imply that Y is really bad. It might still be wrong, but considerably less wrong. Or it might not even be wrong at all.

Very few people would wish to defend things like genocide, slave labor, racism, and pedophiles preying on children. Thus, if you can successfully extend the definition of these terms to a wider range of activity, you can discourage people from pushing back against your policy agenda.

Defenders of the definitional change would argue that it provides a sort of wake-up call. Go back to this comment by Alexander:

whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting.

I suspect that Alexander is alluding to the fact that people tend to have a more accepting view of “Romeo and Juliet” situations than they do of older men preying on younger girls. Those who defend broadening the definition of pedophile presumably see this as a sort of wake-up call to society—stop romanticizing young love.

[Note: The term pedophile has an ambiguous meaning in one other respect. At times it refers to behavior, while at other times it refers to a psychological profile. In this post I am referring to behavior.]

Thus far we’ve considered using the same term for situations that are quite different, at least as a matter of degree. But the opposite situation can occur when society is trying to create distinctions regarding seemingly equivalent activities. The connotation of escort is less negative than prostitute, and not just regarding sex. You can “escort” someone to the party, but you “prostitute yourself” by being paid to advocate policy views that you do not actually hold.

Both escorts and prostitutes provide paid sexual services for money. But escorts are generally seen as being more discreet. The use of a different term may relate to the fact that much of society worries more about prostitution as a social blight on our streets, than about the abstract concept of sex for money. Is it prostitution if a billionaire gives a woman a diamond neckless necklace at dinner, and she later sleeps with him? In many cases, our ethical intuitions are difficult to codify into law.

The prostitution taboo might also help us to better understand laws regarding underage sex. Drunk drivers often go to prison, while less severe driving infractions result in a fine. But (AFAIK) there are no fines imposed on borderline cases of underage sex. It’s either “that’s perfectly OK” or “prison for you”. I suspect that’s because having a man pay a fine for slightly underage sex would remind people too much of prostitution.

This post is subtitled “using words as weapons”. Is a weapon a bad thing? I’d say it is a good thing if in the hands of a Ukrainian soldier and a bad thing if in the hands of a Russian soldier. Some definitional changes probably have positive effects while others have negative effects.

But I also see some value in precision, having more terms rather than fewer terms. Thus, I often see people refer to China’s activities in Xinjiang as “genocide”. Presumably they are using the “cultural genocide” definition. But then I see people claim that today’s China is like Nazi Germany, which seems kind of ridiculous. Is the more expansive use of terms like genocide impacting the way that we view the world?

While I won’t deny that the wake-up call aspect of an expansive definition may have value in selected cases, I believe we are generally better off in the long run with a more precise use of language.

If we lived in a world full of people like Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander, then things would be much simpler. “You say the bombing of Hiroshima was an act of terrorism? That’s obvious. We were trying to terrorize the Japanese public into doing what we wanted—surrender. Now let’s discuss whether it was justified terrorism or unjustified terrorism.” Or “You say taxation is theft? Fine, now let’s discuss whether it is OK for the government to steal by taxation.” Or “Indentured servitude is slavery? The military draft is slavery? You say that like it’s a bad thing.” (I use quotation marks because I don’t agree with all of those imaginary claims.)

But we don’t live in a world of rational people. We live in a world where words have an almost mystical power. To the average person, successfully labelling something “terrorism” or “theft” or “slavery” is enough to shut down debate. To the average person, these things are wrong by definition. In our world, those who define words get to determine public policy.

PS. I was thinking of entitling this post “Defining Deviancy Up”, but then I thought about how few of my readers would even be old enough to remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan.