On Monday, August 11th, Trump announced a takeover of Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan police. He also deployed National Guard troops and federal agents to the streets, all in the name of cracking down on crime. We called on political scientist and historian Dan Cassino to help us understand what happened, why it's legal and what could happen next.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:05] You're listening to Civics 101 I'm Nick Capodice on August 11th, 2025. President Donald Trump took control of the Metropolitan Police in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. he also deployed federalized National Guard troops and FBI agents to patrol the streets alongside police officers in the name of cracking down on crime in the city.
Archival: [00:00:32] Overnight confrontations in Washington, D.C..
Archival: [00:00:36] Are you proud of what you're doing?
Archival: [00:00:38] As protesters pushed back against President Trump's move to expand the National Guard and federal officer presence in the nation's capital.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:45] Both statistics and statements from D.C. leadership tell us that crime is at a 30 year low in the capital. And still, the president declared a crime emergency in the city using a federal law called the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which allows the president to seize control of the police under emergency circumstances for up to 30 days. This happened shortly after the 19 year old Edward Kirstein, former staffer of Dodge, who is known by a nickname. I will not say on a podcast that lots of high schoolers listened to, was carjacked earlier this month, and Trump posted his photo to Truth Social, promising to, quote, federalize this city. So since we at Civics 101 do shows on things like the Declaration of Independence or how a bill becomes a law, but we also do shows on things happening right now in our democracy. We wanted to jump into this quickly. We wanted to know how this action is legal. What mechanisms keep this situation in check, and whether this can happen where you live to get to it fast. Hannah McCarthy reached out to one of our most beloved, most trusted and certainly fastest responding guests, Dan Casino of Fairleigh Dickinson University. They talked on Thursday, August 14th. Since then, the Washington, D.C. attorney general has sued the administration, calling Trump's actions a, quote, hostile takeover. So here's Hannah and dance conversation, and we hope it answers your questions. All right, here we go.
Dan Cassino: [00:02:24] Yeah. So I'm Doctor Dan Casino. I'm professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, new Jersey.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:30] Excellent. Thank you. And, Dan, our listeners are very familiar with you at this point. All right. So we are talking about what is being referred to as President Trump's takeover of D.C..
Archival: [00:02:41] As President Trump's takeover of DC.
Archival: [00:02:43] Using the Trump administration's takeover of the police.
Archival: [00:02:46] Chief to execute a takeover of.
Archival: [00:02:48] And also extend his federal takeover of the president. Donald Trump's federal takeover.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:53] Is the word takeover an accurate one here?
Dan Cassino: [00:02:58] So in the case of DC, it actually is isn't accurate one. Dc, remember, is unique in the American federalist system. So generally we have all these other states. The states have their own local governments, and the state governments have power balanced with the federal government as per the constitutional design. Dc is not the same because DC is not a state. Dc is set up by Congress and government by Congress is a creature of the federal government. So the president is, by law, allowed to go into the case of an emergency. And of course, no one really gets to review when the president says something is an emergency, is allowed to have a full blown takeover of the DC police. He can just do that in a way that he couldn't do in other states or any other municipality in the country. So yes, the president is essentially can declare himself to be in charge of the DC police. He's essentially working the way a governor could in a state in sending in the National Guard, except, well, DC's National Guard, the president saying, well, I'm in charge. I can send the military, I consider the National Guard if I want to. And by law, he is allowed to do this in emergency. 48 hours of his own accord. After that, he has to inform Congress that he's doing it. And then he can do it for another 30 days, whether Congress likes it or not. Unless Congress passes a bill saying that he's not going to. Which, of course, will not happen.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:11] I do want to talk about this idea of the emergency, right. So Trump justified his crime emergency declaration by citing crime statistics. Now, a number of analysts have called these statistics false or misleading or inaccurate. The mayor of D.C. says that violent crime is at a 30 year low. Does a justification for a presidential action have to be true for the president to use it?
Dan Cassino: [00:04:38] This is a really interesting question. American constitutional law. So Congress does have all sorts of laws set up with tripwires in it where Congress says, all right, yes, generally we have to do this, but in an emergency you could do something different. We'll give you an out in an emergency. And this really goes actually back to the 1950s, where there was this idea that the world is moving so quick. We think we're in the Cold War. The nukes could start dropping any minute. Congress is all right. We need to let the executive branch do what they need to do. If there's an emergency and then after a couple of days, they can come to us, and then we'll have the sort of consultation proposed to have. Historically, in America, consultations are supposed to happen between the executive branch and the legislative branch, between Congress and the president. But there was a movement starting in the 1950s to make the consultation within the executive branch. So the executive branch has got to talk to itself. Think of what happened to the Cuban Missile Crisis, right. The president talks to all the secretaries, talks to the cabinet, and they all get together and they reach a decision. And it's thought in the case of Cuban Missile Crisis, that worked pretty well.
Dan Cassino: [00:05:31] So this is our model going forward. If you have a consultation within the executive branch okay. So we got all the consultation happening with the executive branch. The president is going to issue a statement of an emergency, a proclamation of this emergency. This activates whatever law Congress said you can do in case of emergency. The question is who gets to review that? Who can review this declaration? Does the decorative be factual? Does that be real? The answer is we have assumed that the president would never do something like make up an emergency. The law just assumes that because if he did, he would be poisoning his relationship with Congress. If the president just starts declaring emergencies and usurping all this power, the thought is, well, then Congress is going to start pushing back and the president is going to have real, real trouble passing any bills in the future. And that was essentially supposed to be the check in all of this. Now, if the emergency goes on for long enough, there might be some degree of court review. But the courts in general have been very, very unwilling to actually look at it. Essentially, an emergency is whatever the president says it is.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:29] Got it. All right. You know, you talked a little bit about how President Trump is allowed to take over the police and use the National Guard. D.c. is not a state. But what law permits the president to take control of the D.C. police?
Dan Cassino: [00:06:46] These are a series of laws that go into how Congress actually runs the District of Columbia. So the District of Columbia does have local government. It's got a mayor, it's got a city council. But that is entirely because Congress says they're allowed to have it. This is essentially Congress doesn't want to deal with, you know, traffic laws in D.C. so we'll set up some people to do this. The federal government, Congress in particular, still has ultimate control. The federal government, if they want to, it can go and overrule any law passed by the District of Columbia. They can do whatever they like. They probably wouldn't be allowed to like, remove the mayor because they didn't like her. But outside of that, the Congress and the president can do whatever they like. And it's actually a very similar relationship between a state and a city. You know, cities do not exist as their own legal entities. They are entirely subject to the state. So we've seen this in Florida in recent years where the governor can just say, no, that's he's not allowed to do that. And now you change the city policy. They can remove elected officials, but they can do all sorts of things because it doesn't operate as a separate legal entity. So Congress essentially, given DC some degree of autonomy, and Congress can take it back whenever it wants.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:51] I mean, this makes so much more sense when you think about DC regularly lobbying for statehood that it's this one city for whom essentially the president and or Congress is the governor. Right. It doesn't have the same thing as any other state in the nation.
Dan Cassino: [00:08:04] Exactly right. And they don't have that autonomy. And this is perceived by some people as being racist, that D.C., the district, Columbia is 44% black. And they say, look, we've got a lot of black people and we think we're being treated as second class citizens because we don't get the benefits of federalism. And that is not a phrase we hear a lot in American government. The benefits of federalism and federalism is a problem, but D.C. is looking for that protection. And, you know, D.C. state has been on the agenda for a long time. Democrats have been very skeptical about granting it in the thought that, you know, this could set off some sort of war where Democrats creating states and Republicans create states. And way back in the 1840s, before you know it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:42] All right. So going back to what Trump has done in terms of what he is legally permitted to do, has a president ever done this before for DC?
Dan Cassino: [00:08:50] Yeah, I believe there was a mobilization of the National Guard into D.C. in response to rioting and in response to, you know, protests that turned violent in the 1960s and 1970s. We haven't really seen that since then. And look, the reason is because, first off, the president, nobody has better things to do than to worry about D.C. and if you're really worried about crime in D.C., you give the government of D.C. more money to hire more police officers. In fact, we should note that Congress and President in recent years have actually done the opposite. They took a bunch of money away from D.C., the district used for law enforcement. So, president, nobody has better things to do. Also, the people who are most upset by this and get the most affected by this are executive branch employees, a lot of whom live in D.C. and they get a little annoyed when they're suddenly, you know, road stops and checks all the time.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:35] And in terms of the police take over as well. To my knowledge, this is not something that has ever happened.
Dan Cassino: [00:09:41] No, the police takeover is not. We've seen mobilization, National Guard. We have not seen the provision allows them to take over the police force if necessary.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:50] You mentioned the 30 days that the president sort of automatically gets, but Congress can extend it. How long could this last? In your opinion? What are we going to be looking at here?
Dan Cassino: [00:10:01] Oh, okay. So again, it's 48 hours after 40 hours. President has to notify Congress doing it. This is actually the same language you see in like if the president attacks a foreign country, he has he has to notify Congress. Then 48 hours and then it is 30 days. And unless Congress acts to say, okay, this is cool and passes a bill to that extent, actually, it's a joint resolution. So Congress passed a joint resolution saying it's okay, in which case the president can extend it indefinitely. If Congress doesn't, then after 30 days, he basically has to stop. Uh, I have to say these laws were not that well written, as in, there is not necessarily a way to for Congress to make the president stop. That is, even if they say, no, you can't do this anymore. The president could the next day declare another emergency. And it's not clear that the Congress can do anything about that. So, you know, if after 30 days, the president says, okay, emergency over, I'm taking everyone home, and six hours later they say, oh, no, there's another emergency and they can do it again. So again, all of this is based on the assumption of goodwill and comity and the idea that even. You don't have to worry about the laws because everything is based on the norms of behavior. And so when you violate the norms of behavior and people are doing things outside the norms, then you know, the system starts to fall apart a little bit. And there's all sorts of little areas of American law, especially constitutional law, where we get the sort of outcome where it's just like, oh, it turns out they just didn't fully think this through because they didn't have to, because the norms were controlling in the past.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:28] So Trump said that he, quote, doesn't want to call a national emergency, but he will if he has to. But he expects Republicans in Congress to basically give him what he wants, which is an extension of his control of the police.
Archival: [00:11:42] We're going to do this very quickly, but we're going to want extensions. I don't want to call a national emergency if I have to, I will, but I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:53] What would be accomplished by declaring a national emergency versus this crime emergency.
Dan Cassino: [00:11:59] So if we're declaring a national emergency, that would I think President Trump believes that would give him authority to go in and take over the police departments of other cities. Uh, so as far as a national emergency, what does it do with D.C.? I don't know what President Trump is talking about there, but President Trump has talked about doing the same thing in other cities in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and taking over their police departments as well.
Archival: [00:12:19] We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. And we have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem.
Dan Cassino: [00:12:31] That would be entirely unconstitutional. There is no legal path for the president to do that again, because federalism. So the president has no legal authority to do that. But I think the idea is under an emergency. Uh, the laws can be suspended, as Abraham Lincoln said, you know, shall we preserve all the laws? But one if we have to break some laws and in order to save the country, then it's Acceptable under the Constitution to break some laws in order to save the country. And so I think the president would be saying, well, we are going to therefore say we're just going to suspend these laws for a little while. And he thinks perhaps a resolution from Congress allowed him to do it. There is, again, no legal way he could go ahead and doing that. But this just assumes everyone's going to follow the norms and rules that have been in place before.
Archival: [00:13:13] Hmm.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:14] So what we know is that that would be entirely unconstitutional. And it also depends on how people behave.
Dan Cassino: [00:13:20] Well, we should say there is actually there are ways the president can actually do a lot in terms of law enforcement in those other cities. So the Border Patrol can go into any cities within 100 miles of the border, including waterways. And that's all the cities, right? Unless we're talking about, you know, the middle of Oklahoma. Okay. No, but everywhere else. Yeah. The president could send Border Patrol into New York tomorrow. Fine. Um, the president can also send federal agents, even troops, to protect federal property. So if there's a courthouse that's under assault, he's allowed to send federal troops in there. He's allowed to send the Coast Guard in wherever he wants on any navigable waterway can be sent in, and they actually can do law enforcement activities.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:00] You know, the president basically authorizes his own control of the D.C. police. Why also include the National Guard? Why also include FBI agents sent on patrol? We know that there are already Ice agents out there. Why? Why basically mobilize all of these other national law enforcement entities alongside this action of taking over the police?
Dan Cassino: [00:14:23] So because you need to get more boots on the ground, if your goal is to get more boots on the ground, yeah, you could take over the D.C. police and say, all right, everyone's working two shifts a day now, but you're going to run out of people very, very quickly. And the president does have a whole lot of people working for him. This the whole executive branch. He could put people from the Department of Agriculture out in the street if he wanted to. So those are in direct, direct control of the president. The command and control is clear there. Right. If you want to order around the D.C. police, you've got to go to the police commissioner, order him to do it, and he'll do it. He's got to tell the sergeant he's got where if you just send the National Guard and the FBI, you just tell one guy and they go on doing it. Uh, this is the reason this doesn't happen a lot, honestly, with mobilizing the National Guard and the FBI is because you get burnt out real, real fast. So National Guard, generally, if they are sent out for 30 days, they're on active duty and they get all these active duty benefits.
Dan Cassino: [00:15:08] And so the tendency in recent years in America has been to send them out for 29 days or even 29.5 days, so you don't actually have to pay them housing benefits or anything like that, which saves you money. Good. But also really upsets the soldiers, right? Because you get to where you're stationed and they don't give you a housing allowance. They you have soldiers in California are sleeping on the floor of hotels. I mean, it's it gets real bad. And so you wind up burning out your troops and FBI agents. I mean, you spend four years in college and you go to Quantico, and you spend all these years studying, and they've got you walking a beat like a first year cop. Uh, that's real bad for morale. And so. And certainly, if you're an FBI agent, you're not used to standing on the street running a, you know, running a blockade on a on a city street and having people shout at you and boo at you. That's really bad for morale. So you don't want to do that over for too long.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:57] Yeah, that's something I've been thinking quite a lot about, is that you have all of these agents, these officers who are out on the streets, and you have so many people coming to them and saying, you don't want to be doing this. You don't want to be on the wrong side of history or screaming at them or throwing sandwiches at them. And I wonder, do we know of incidents where in either law enforcement or federal agents have gotten to a point where they say, I'm done, this is too much, I am either overtaxed or I don't agree with what's being done here.
Dan Cassino: [00:16:25] So what we do see is we get wildcat labor action essentially is we do get remember, these are all unionized employees. They complain to the union and we get sick outs. And we have seen that in the past. We saw that in California. People say, oh, I'm just sick. And so we get lots and lots of people calling in sick or pretending that they're injured or doing whatever in order to avoid going out, because this isn't pleasant for them. This is not what they train to do. It's not what they want to do. And so yeah, so we do get wildcat labor action, but that's kind of the extent of it because directly saying, oh, I don't want to do this. Well, that's a very quick way to get fired.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:02] What are the limits to using the military for domestic law enforcement?
Dan Cassino: [00:17:07] Okay, so let's talk about the Posse Comitatus Act. So this is post reconstruction. And reconstruction is the whole era Civil war, north winds that go into the south, and the army does not come back north. The army sticks around the south for ten years, basically enforcing civil rights law. Now, this is not because the Republican Party that was running things really cared deeply about civil rights law. Mostly it's because they wanted to win elections. And so what they did is they moved federal troops into the South to make sure that black voters who were disproportionately voting for Republicans because Abraham Lincoln, uh, that they could vote and disenfranchizing white voters, they say if you worked for the Confederacy, you can't vote anymore, which, you know, Confederacy's traitors. So I can see that. But also, it made those voters very upset. Hey, why do I get. Up. So the South starts electing lots of Republicans. Black Republicans likes lots of Republicans, which is good if you're a Republican. You're in Washington DC because you want to win elections. So after ten years, this turns out to be tremendously unpopular. Imagine you're a mother. Your child has been sent out in the Civil War. They're still in Alabama for some reason. You're like, wait, it is 1876 and we're still down there. What? The junk. And it's so unpopular. The Republicans lose the election of 18, the presidential election of 1876 and make a deal with the Democrats and say, all right, we will agree to end reconstruction, pull the northern troops out if you let us steal the presidential election. And so the Democrats agree to it. And then suddenly you find all these voting irregularities and a bunch of southern states that happen to say, it turned out the Republicans actually won the election, and you get President Hayes rather than President Tilden.
Dan Cassino: [00:18:40] So now, as part of this deal, how are you going to make sure how are the Democrats going to hold the Republicans to this deal to make sure they're not going to go right back down there to make sure they don't start enforcing civil rights law and making sure black and African voters get to vote. And the answer is the Posse Comitatus Act. And the Posse Comitatus Act makes it illegal for the Army to go down and enforce federal law and enforce any local law. The Army cannot enforce the law. Period. Now you may be saying, oh wait, that sounds like an exception there. It just says the Army. And that's true. The version of the law passed in 1878 only says the Army, but it was later expanded to include the Marine Corps, and the Air Force cannot do it. Now, I will say it doesn't include everybody, because the Posse Comitatus Act actually specifically excludes as rewritten as recently as the Biden administration specifically excludes the Coast Guard, which is actually allowed. They are armed, they are allowed to go in and enforce the law if they need to. So they can be used for domestic law enforcement purposes. No one else can. And I will say the role of the Space Force here is also still up for grabs. So I'm not quite sure if the Space Force can be sent to enforce domestic law. But the Army, the Marines and the Air Force cannot.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:43] We're going to take a quick break when we return. I talked to Dan about the last time President Trump federalized the National Guard and deployed them in an American city back in June of 2025. Stay tuned. We're back. I'm talking to Dan Cassino, professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and stalwart friend of civics and democracy, about President Trump's recent takeover of the Washington, D.C. police and deployment of federal troops and agents to the streets of D.C.. I asked Dan about another instance of Trump sending troops to American streets when he federalized California's National Guard in response to protests over mass immigration raids. Trump says he did so to protect federal agents and property. California says his actions were illegal, a violation of posse Comitatus. Don't worry, Dan will give you a refresher, and we're waiting to hear how a federal judge will rule on the constitutionality of Trump's actions in California. So this brings me to, you know, There is currently a three day trial going on. If there is a federal judge determining whether or not Trump, when he basically took over the California National Guard and sent them in in response to protests in California, whether or not he violated the Posse Comitatus Act by doing that in terms of, you know, if you're just looking at the Posse Comitatus Act, how it works, does it seem as though the president did violate the Posse Comitatus Act?
Dan Cassino: [00:21:15] So this trial is getting a very, very narrow term so that we know the troops can be sent to protect federal buildings. And that's actually what they were doing. So they were stationed on federal buildings, or they were protecting federal workers who were doing stuff. So essentially, Ice agents and Border Patrol agents were arresting people. We called the National Guard to defend them, but they cannot do any domestic law enforcement. They actually can't arrest anybody. It's not clear what they're supposed. They're supposed to stand there to look intimidating. So nobody gets close to them, I guess. And we actually have one incident where it seems like they arrested someone. And this gets into the very weird distinction between detaining someone and arresting them. And essentially we did have soldiers. We have National Guard troops who arrested someone, who detained someone for about 25 minutes because, well, this person was going into restricted area. We told him not to. And then we held him for 25 minutes that letting him leave until the local police could come and pick him up. And the question is whether that's a detention that amounts to an arrest. Because if you say, can I go and the police say, no, congratulations, you're under arrest. Does that amount to a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act? And the question is basically about intent. Were they intending to hold him in, arrest him, or were they just kind of milling about and making him not leave until the local police got there? Is there a distinction? We don't know? Um, it certainly does seem like they were very clearly riding that line. But what they could and could not do because, again, the National Guard, the militarized National Guard. So we should distinguish here. If Governor Newsom had sent the National Guard in to California in order to patrol the streets and enforce the law, they could enforce domestic law all they want. The difference here is that the president Nationalized the National Guard, making them essentially the equivalent of the Army rather than the California National Guard. And that's why the Comitatus Act kicks in.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:58] Okay. And so this judge is not going to be attempting to determine whether or not those protests qualified as an invasion or a threat of rebellion.
Dan Cassino: [00:23:06] No. It's irrelevant. It's irrelevant to this. The question is for the Posse Comitatus Act. Let's take is a given that the troops are there. All right. Troops are there. Fine. What are they allowed to do? Were they not allowed to do? And were they violently attacked by being there at all?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:21] Okay. Got it. Thank you. So when it comes to how DC might respond to Trump's actions this week, we know that DC is very different. Dc is not a state. Trump is permitted to mobilize the National Guard the way that he has. If DC were to issue any kind of legal challenge, what might it look like?
Dan Cassino: [00:23:39] Legal challenge is really tricky here, because the only thing they really could do is try and challenge the declaration of the emergency and say, this is not really an emergency. This was illegitimate. It never should have been allowed. That said, courts are very, very reticent to question the president's declaration of emergency. The thought is, I mean, because Congress does give the president this power. So this falls under what we call the political questions doctrine. I mean, in American constitutionalism, if you think the president has exceeded his power in a way like this, the solution we have is impeachment or removal, and we don't have any other solutions for this in the American system, which is a problem. It has been known to be a problem for, oh, I don't know, 200 years. So we know it's a problem, but that is the only solution here. So this is if he violated this. The solution is for Congress to impeach him and remove him from office. And that's the only solution we have. Um, or Congress, of course, could use the power of the purse and say, hey, we're going to you cannot use any money in this, in this budget to do this thing we don't like you doing. Also possibility. But of course, even that budget power has been cut pretty substantially in recent months.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:40] And I assume that whatever comes out of the federal judge's ruling with Posse Comitatus will not have any impact on what's going on in D.C., correct?
Dan Cassino: [00:24:48] Well, in theory the so first off the plastic contact. Yeah. Is not going to kick in in DC because he's not sending the military in DC. And if you send National Guard troops those National Guard troops are under his control anyway. So it is as if he is the Gavin Newsom in this who can send the National Guard in California if he wants to. He can let the National Guard in DC if he wants to. None of this really kicks in. Um, it could potentially kick in if he actually took the Marine Corps and put the Marine Corps on corners so it wasn't the D.C. National Guard and had them arresting shoplifters. Yeah. Then PCA would kick in. Um, but, you know, I don't see that happening. And and if he did, he always could just use the Coast Guard in the Space Corps.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:26] So looking at sort of the politics or the PR of this, what are the impacts of the president of the United States saying that the Capitol is essentially a wasteland of crime and bedlam and bloodshed?
Archival: [00:25:42] I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.
Dan Cassino: [00:25:50] Well, so this goes back to something President Trump has been talking about since his first inaugural address in 2017. We talked about American carnage, that cities are horrifying and unsafe. And so he believes that rhetorically, this works to his advantage, that in times of chaos that people are going to want a strong hand at the wheel. And so if you portray things as being chaotic, that they're going to say, well, we'll put someone in charge who knows what they're doing, who can actually really fix these problems. And of course, it matters that these cities are mostly run by Democrats. And so they're going to say, these Democrats cannot fix this crime problem. We need someone strong to come in and do it so rhetorically among Republicans. It works for him and his. He and his advisers certainly believe that this makes sense to portray cities in democratic states as being hell holes. Now, the data does not back this up. The most dangerous cities in the United States are small to medium sized cities. Many, many in the US South, in New York City, Boston. These are not in the top ten of the most dangerous cities in the United States on a per capita basis. That said, there we have a continuing problem in America, and this has been not just America, which has actually seen this in data from Europe as well over the past 20 years, where there's been a disconnect between people's perceptions of crime and the actual crime rates.
Dan Cassino: [00:27:03] And if you go back before about the 1990s, they moved along with each other and crime was up. People thought crime was up, crimes down, people thought crime was down. And since about 2004, 2005, we've seen as those become increasingly disjointed and now people think crime is way up. People think crime is much, much worse than actually is. In fact, there was a big a bit of a spike in crime around 2020 2021 during the pandemic. It's since come down. You know, murder rates, crime rates everywhere in the country are way, way down. Nobody quite knows why. Um, lots of weird theories about why that might be. But murder, crime, you know, all these rates are way, way down. But people are scared. More scared than they used to be. Which is so weird because people's, of course, it doesn't matter what the actual crime rate is. If you think everything is dangerous, you're gonna want someone to somebody protect, you're going to want more police. And so the fact that the crime is actually down almost doesn't really matter.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:55] Is there anything that we didn't talk about that's really important and should be in this episode?
Dan Cassino: [00:28:00] I do think, look, this is supposedly the sort of thing that is consultation between President and Congress. That is the way this is definitely envisioned by the founders, definitely envisioned by the law that was passed by this. But that has fallen apart. I mean, Congress has is not doing its job and has not been doing its job for about 30 years now. And Congress has just stopped doing his job. And when Congress gives up power, that power doesn't just fly away into the ether, it goes somewhere else. And we've seen that power because Congress has given up its power. It's not doing the things it's supposed to do because of that. That power is flowing to the executive branch and to the courts. And so we see the courts and the executive branch getting so much more powerful than the Constitution ever intended for them to be. This is something that we would have never seen in a previous president, because Congress would have stepped in and done something, or Congress would have, or the president would have been scared that the Congress would do something. They would only do it in consultation with the leaders of Congress. And we've seen the leaders in Congress are just saying, you know what? Let the president, whatever the heck he wants. That's the real crisis here, is that we've got this long term crisis of members of Congress just being afraid to actually exert the enormous powers that Congress has under the Constitution.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:06] To your eye and ear, is the American public paying sufficient attention to the divesting of power in Congress and where it is going?
Dan Cassino: [00:29:15] I only when it gets to outcomes. So the public cares deeply about outcomes. The public does not care about process. There's lots of laws. Congress would like to get people like Congress to pass. It doesn't happen and people are upset about that, or a law does get passed that they don't like or the president isn't. They don't like. They care about the outcomes. They don't really care about what's going on there. And honestly, if you ask them, do you want Congress to have more power? There's always going to be no, because no one trusts or likes Congress. Um, and you're not supposed to. I mean, Congress has always been widely despised. People generally like their own member of Congress, and everyone else is terrible. And I live in new Jersey, so we actually also think our own members of Congress are corrupt and terrible. So people don't want Congress to have extra power because they don't trust Congress either. But I'm not sure they like the outcome. So this is why presidential elections and, you know, appointments to Supreme Court appoints judges have gotten so much more fraught because we've just given all the power over to them and all the decisions people from the Supreme Court like or don't like any of these could just be overturned by a law, almost all of them. But Congress isn't willing to do much. They've just given that power over the public cares about outcomes. They don't really care about the process.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:24] Just a reminder that this episode was taped on Thursday, August 14th and released the following day, so there's almost certainly more to know on the situation, including how Congress votes on an extension of President Trump's federal control of the D.C. police, and how a federal judge will rule in the Posse Comitatus challenge to Trump's federalization of California's National Guard. Stay informed, dear listeners. That does it. For this episode, I warmly recommend you check out Dan Cassino's books, which include Masculinity in American Politics and Fox News and American Politics How One Channel Shapes American Politics and Society. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Our senior producer is Christina Phillips, who is leaving the team to become Senior news editor at NPR. And we couldn't be more delighted for her and our news team. Or more bummed for us. We love you, Kristina. We'll miss you. Rebecca Lavoie, Executive Producer don't you go anywhere, Rebecca and Marina Henke, our producer. Same to you. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.