This Is Not Liberation: When Federal Troops Came for Washington, DC

This piece is the longer version of the receipt.

The word

The administration called it liberation. That was the word in the press release announcing the federalization of the DC National Guard. Liberation from crime. Liberation from homelessness. Liberation from the elected mayor.

The residents of the District of Columbia, who are American citizens, who pay federal income tax, and who are represented in the United States Senate by zero senators, watched their own capital be turned into a permission slip.

The legal lever

The District of Columbia is not a state. Its relationship to the federal government is governed by the Home Rule Act of 1973. For everyday governance, the District elects a mayor, a council, and an attorney general. But the city's local authority sits on top of a federal subfloor — and the subfloor has trapdoors.

Section 740 of the Home Rule Act is the most consequential of those trapdoors. It allows the President to assume command of the Metropolitan Police Department for up to thirty days, on the President's own declaration, if "special conditions of an emergency nature" exist. The statute does not define emergency. The statute does not provide judicial review. The thirty-day clock can be renewed by Congress.

In August 2025, the President invoked Section 740. The DC National Guard, which has no state governor in its command chain (every other state's Guard is commanded by that state's governor in non-federalized status — the DC Guard answers only to the President), was federalized. Marines arrived at Joint Base Andrews for what the Pentagon described as a "domestic operations exercise." ICE expanded operations inside the District. Eight-foot security fencing returned to the Capitol grounds and the White House complex.

Mayor Muriel Bowser sued. The Justice Department defended the action. The fencing stayed up.

The Posse Comitatus question

The Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1385, prohibits the use of the US Army and Air Force to execute the laws domestically except where expressly authorized by Congress. It is the founding-era statute that keeps the federal military out of American policing. The Marine Corps is covered by Department of Defense policy that mirrors the prohibition. The National Guard, when federalized, is also covered. When not federalized — when operating under a governor's command — the Guard is exempt.

DC has no governor. The DC Guard does not have a Posse Comitatus exemption pathway through state command. When the President federalizes it, the Guard becomes federal military for the purposes of the statute. The exception the administration invoked to do this anyway was the Insurrection Act — except the administration did not invoke the Insurrection Act, because invoking it would have required a public proclamation under 10 U.S.C. § 254 ordering the insurgents to disperse. The administration instead leaned on a creative reading of Section 740 plus the President's Article II authority over the federal capital.

That reading has not been tested in court at the highest level. The lawsuits are pending.

The fences

The visual most DC residents remember from the August deployment is the fence. Eight-foot black metal panels, the same kind that went up after January 6, 2021, encircled the Capitol grounds again. They encircled the Treasury. They encircled the federal courthouses on Constitution Avenue. The Mall — the public park between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial — was patrolled by uniformed Guard members carrying long guns.

A fence is a sentence. It says: the people on the outside are the danger, and the building on the inside is the protected. When the people on the outside are the residents of the city the building is in, the sentence becomes its own indictment. The fences do not say the Capitol is safe. They say the Capitol is afraid of you.

The federal workers who came to work past the fences walked through screening checkpoints staffed by people in body armor. The tourists who came to see democracy were told to use a different entrance. The protests that did happen happened a block further away than they used to.

DC's specific position

The District of Columbia has approximately seven hundred thousand residents. That is more than the populations of Wyoming and Vermont. Its residents pay more federal income tax per capita than residents of any state. Its license plates carry the slogan END TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION because the District has no voting representation in the United States Senate and only a non-voting delegate in the House.

This is the specific structural fact that makes DC the test case for federal intervention. Federalization of a state Guard requires either an invitation from the governor or the Insurrection Act. Federalization of the DC Guard requires neither. Section 740 over the local police requires only an emergency declaration the President writes himself. The District has been a permanent constitutional experiment in what powers can be exercised without the consent of the governed. In August 2025, those powers were exercised.

DC residents could not vote in the 2024 election for the President who federalized their Guard, because the District votes in presidential elections — yes — but its three electoral votes were swamped by the federal architecture that defines its non-state status. The administration that came to liberate the District was not chosen by the District.

The fists

The design shows raised fists in the foreground of the fence. The fist has its own genealogy — it is the gesture that appeared in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics, in 2020 in Minneapolis, in 2024 outside the Hague. It is the gesture that always shows up when troops show up. It does not require translation.

The fist on this shirt is the fist of a resident, not a tourist. It is the answer DC residents gave when their capital became a backdrop for a deployment they did not vote for. The federal architecture of the District was supposed to make that answer impossible. The August deployment proved otherwise.

Statehood

The conversation the federalization should have started — and did, briefly, before the headlines moved — is statehood. DC statehood is not a sentimental policy. It is the only structural fix for a city of seven hundred thousand Americans being constitutionally available for the kind of operation August 2025 was. The legislation has cleared the House more than once. It dies in the Senate. The administration that wrote the August 2025 federalization order would oppose statehood for exactly the reasons it federalized in the first place: statehood would close the trapdoor.

The shirt is not a statehood pamphlet. The shirt is the thesis that the trapdoor is the lie. The word liberation belongs to the people inside the fence, not to the people moving it.

Statehood for DC is the sentence. This is not liberation is the answer to the lie that buys time.

Either one fits on a sign. Both fit on a shirt.