America's capital city is broken, and its leadership seems incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. This past weekend, in just 48 hours, the complete indifference and dysfunction of the District of Columbia's feckless government were fully displayed. Our federal government has a responsibility to use its constitutional powers to fix it.
Going into the weekend, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was standing firm on an outrageous, draconian Covid-19 vaccination policy that would've kept 40% of the District's 11 to 17-year-old African-American students from attending school re-opening this week.
It took a right-of-center journalist, Doug Blair of Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal, to challenge the mayor on her policy and how it was severely affecting black kids:
I asked D.C. @MayorBowser how she could justify forcing 40% of unvaccinated black students to stay home from school. She said my numbers were wrong. They're her numbers. pic.twitter.com/Gmoidu1YuU
— Douglas Blair (@DouglasKBlair) August 15, 2022
In response to a question from The Daily Signal about how 40% of black school aged children were unvaccinated, Bowser responded, “I don’t think that that number is correct. We have a substantially fewer number of kids that we have to engage with vaccination.”
Ironically, the 40% figure came from DC's own Covid health website, and the data was absolutely accurate.
After the mayor took a week to evaluate her own numbers and verify that, indeed, her intolerant and unscientific vaccine policy was going to leave nearly half of the black students in her city home from school, she doubled down.
During a press conference, Bowser, a Democrat, admitted there are no alternative options, including virtual learning, for students who cannot attend school due to the District’s vaccine mandate, meaning unvaccinated children will effectively be left without an education.
So, DC was excluding unvaccinated children from the public schools and would not be offering virtual learning for the nearly 13,000 black students who would be turned away at the schoolhouse doors.
Even though the mainstream, corporate media had no interest in following up on the story or even raising the issue in the first place, nevertheless, they couldn't defend the indefensible policy. Without any cover from the Washington Post, Bowser reversed her policy in the final hours before the first day of school and pushed the vaccine deadline to January 3.
Because clearly, the science of these vaccines dictates that kids can go to school for the next three months and pose no dire public health risk to their fellow students or the faculty, but as soon as winter break is over, those kids have to be vaccinated, or people will die!
Bowser allowed her fealty to the Biden Administration's vaccine dogma to override basic common sense, and the children of her city were on the brink of suffering calamitous consequences were it not for a conservative reporter in the new media who dared to challenge the emperor on her new wardrobe.
Later the same weekend, the District's rising violent crime culture claimed its latest victim. This time, a high-profile football player set to start for the hometown Washington Commanders (formerly Redskins), who was shot in the leg after an attempted carjacking just a handful of blocks from the White House.
Washington Commanders running back Brian Robinson Jr. was shot in an attempted carjacking Sunday afternoon in Northeast D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee said Monday morning that Robinson fought back against one gunman and was shot by a second gunman as the two tried to take his car.
“At some point during the course of this robbery attempt, our victim in this case began to struggle with one of the suspects, was able to actually wrestle that firearm away from one of the suspects. And he was he was shot twice by the second suspect,” Contee said.
This latest incident came less than a week after DC experienced a dozen people shot in just one day. And the violence is happening in nearly every neighborhood of the nation's capital.
"We're trying to be as resourceful as we possibly can to put our officers and our detectives and our specialized units where the crime is," an MPD official said Wednesday afternoon.
"Unfortunately, that crime just keeps moving around," the official continued. "We'll be on one block, and we'll displace criminals to another area where they'll be shootings over there."
As Muriel Bowser claims that "black lives matter" by merely painting a street near the White House with the highly-charged political message, her anti-cop, pro-criminal justice policies coupled with her anti-science anti-children vaccination policies paint a very different picture.
Black lives matter as long as political fortunes can be made by proclaiming it. But when it comes to actually serving the black community by providing safe, secure streets and effective schools, forget about it.
The District of Columbia can no longer ensure safety in the streets of our nation's capital and no longer provide basic education to the city's most vulnerable, underserved populations.
The Home Rule Act for the District of Columbia still provides for a significant level of oversight from Congress. It is in the best interest of the American people that our capital city is safe and free of governmental dysfunction. The District government has proven they are anything but competent in this regard.
It's time for Congress to utilize its oversight role and fix this problem.