american thinker

by Allan J. Feifer

    Washington, D.C., its institutions, and the people who choose to live there are the epitome of everything the rest of us hate about the direction our country has taken. It’s as if a foreign enemy governs us. For decades, the Washington elite have come after traditional America, and they’re winning.

    In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump received only 21,076 votes in D.C., which was 6.47% of the total cast. That’s not just because it 41.4% of its population is black. Nationwide, blacks voted for Trump at around 16–17%. It’s the 39.6% of whites who make the difference. Immediately outside of D.C., in the affluent suburbs where many of D.C.’s very white political class live, the share of votes for Harris was in the 70-80% range.

    D.C. is not a microcosm of America; it is its political inverse. Yet this single, self-contained enclave of ideological uniformity sits at the apex of the world’s most powerful nation’s governing apparatus.

    D.C.-based bureaucrats write the regulations that govern every American business, farm, and household. Senior managers at the EPA, DOJ, HHS, and Education determine how laws passed by a divided Congress are implemented—and most pointedly, how aggressively. Political appointees set enforcement priorities and policies that flow outward.

    Elected officials, their staffs, lobbyists, contractors, and consultants all coalesce around the same political culture—where a 90% consensus is normal. In an environment such as this, Donald Trump never had a chance to enact his agenda—the agenda American voters supported.

    The judiciary, layered atop this structure, only deepens the imbalance. The U.S. District Court for D.C. and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—the second most powerful court in the nation—are the primary battleground for every consequential challenge to federal executive action, and both are filled with Democrat appointees.

    In 2025, Chief Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, issued a restraining order halting President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua members, ordering deportation planes to turn around mid-flight. The D.C. Circuit voted 7-to-4 to reinstate Biden-appointed members of the NLRB and the Merit Systems Protection Board whom Trump had removed.

    These were not procedural corrections. They were examples of raw judicial power over immigration, blatant demagoguery, and the intentional structuring of the federal government itself—issued by progressive judges in the most politically one-sided jurisdiction in America, with reverberations affecting us all.

    Time after time, Washington judges override presidential orders or reinstate fired officials to their posts, transferring power from the executive to judges, once thought to be umpires, who are now something entirely different: reliable political operatives working for leftists.

    Look at the pattern of reversals. When the Supreme Court overturned Boasberg’s ruling in April 2025, it didn’t merely disagree with the merits; it also declared D.C. an improper venue entirely, ruling that the case should never have been filed there because the detainees were held in Texas.

    That exposed the specific slant and bias of D.C.’s judicial overreach: forum shopping—a deliberate strategy by progressive advocacy groups and Democrat AGs to file in D.C., knowing the bench will not only be receptive but also on virtual standby for their call. We witnessed sweeping nationwide injunctions that froze executive branch policy nationwide, handing a single sympathetic D.C. judge a one-person veto over presidential discretion and power that no other president, except Trump, has endured.

    The Supreme Court found this constitutionally untenable. In June 2025, it issued its landmark 6-3 ruling in Trump v. CASA, stripping all federal district courts of the power to issue universal injunctions—stopping what D.C. courts had normalized.

How did we get here

    D.C. federal judges, like their other government-employee neighbors, attended leftist colleges and law schools. They live in a deep blue bubble, where there is only one set of acceptable values.

    The result is a judiciary that doesn’t merely lean left—it virtually regurgitates the same propaganda and progressive worship as every other member of the Democrat cadre in D.C. The result: law and precedent no longer govern, and any prior restraint concerning the president’s power becomes a judge’s next target —constitution be damned—naked, raw, and unbridled usurpation of the will of the people.

    With an out-of-control bureaucracy (of dubious constitutionality) and an equally biased judiciary, something needs to be done, and one of those tools is in the congressional pipeline. Congress must pass the REINS Act, which requires congressional approval of every major federal regulation. That would end the D.C. bureaucrats’ unfettered power to govern 330 million Americans by D.C. fiat.

    Congress should override D.C.’s home-rule provisions protecting the city’s political apparatus to mandate that no less than half of all federal agency personnel move to states that better represent the national mainstream.

    Congress should also pass and enforce the SWAMP Act, which bans new federal leases in D.C. and distributes entire cabinet-level departments across the country—placing the people who regulate America’s heartland inside it, not above it.

    The other thing Congress can do is enact venue reform using its plenary constitutional authority. That would end the forum-shopping racket that lets progressive groups hand-pick friendly judges to undo an elected president’s actions.

    If any of these things can be done via reconciliation (which avoids a Senate filibuster), then that’s what Republicans, while they control the House and Senate, should do.

    Congress must now act, mustering a vigor not seen in recent years to ensure that one unrepresentative city—where nine in ten voters chose the losing presidential candidate—can never again substitute its political preferences for those of the nation it was built to serve.

    God Bless America!

    Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow.