Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett educated CNN host Dana Bash on Wednesday about why President Trump was deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C, and not to his home state.
Trump declared on Aug. 11 that he was deploying the National Guard to assist in tackling the capital city’s crime crisis. Bash, on “Inside Politics,” pressed Burchett on why Trump did not deploy troops to Tennessee amid its crime issues in Memphis, but he explained that Trump has specific constitutional authority over Washington that he does not have for other cities.
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“Six GOP-led states, including your home state of Tennessee, are sending hundreds of National Guard troops here to Washington, D.C., as President Trump is escalating his police takeover of the nation’s capital,” Bash said. “One of the most well-known cities in your state, Memphis, has a pretty high crime rate: homicide, robbery … Are you okay with your state’s National Guard resources being used to deter crime here in Washington? And why not in your home state?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am. Washington, D.C., of course, is a creation of the Congress,” Burchett said. “And I believe it’s within the president’s constitutional purview.”
Trump invoked the Home Rule Act, which allows the president to assume control over Washington’s police force and national guard for up to 30 days when “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.”
Burchett asserted Memphis politicians have run the city “into the ground.”
When Bash questioned why Burchett was not advocating for National Guard troops to be sent to Tennessee, the congressman responded that “It’s not a federally created environment. Washington, D.C., is a federally created environment. It is our nation’s capital.”
Democrats have claimed that violent crime has declined by roughly one-third, but Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) data on such incidents excludes cases of aggravated assault and felony assault, despite Washington laws characterizing those offenses as violent.
Washington Police Union Chairman Gregg Pembleton also said on “The Story” Tuesday that officers with the MPD have been ordered not to report certain crimes.
“Inevitably you will have a captain or a commander or sometimes a lieutenant show up on the scene and advise them to take a report for a lesser offense,” Pembleton said. “One of the things that we see them do often is sometimes there will be a shooting or a stabbing and if the victim is uncooperative with the police which is not uncommon in some areas of the city, they will be directed to take an injured person to the hospital report which is not even a crime at all but an incident report, sometimes you will have a robbery reported as a theft and other times you will have burglaries reported as unlawful entry or thefts.”
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