Fact-checking the BOWSER Act, line-by-line

We’re two months into Trump 2.0 and the attempts to strip D.C. of its autonomy are rolling along. 

In early February, two Republican congressmen introduced a bill seeking to repeal D.C.’s home rule and abolish more than 50 years of the city’s local governance. As you’ve probably heard, the bill is called the BOWSER Act, which is, I guess, supposed to be a sick OWN in the minds of AI-brain-rotted weirdos who overuse the 🤣 emoji and think wearing sunglasses inside is totally friggin’ epic. 

The bill (the Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident) comes from Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), a DEI-plane-crash truther, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an ex-Never-Trumper-turned-MAGA sycophant who posts stuff like this (?) and has spent a disproportionate amount of his time in office worrying about what’s happening in D.C. (For more context: Ogles’ other recent legislative contributions include a bill that would amend the constitution to give Trump a third term and another bill — “Make Greenland Great Again”  — that would authorize Trump to acquire Greenland.) 

The BOWSER Act faces steep odds in Congress — it would need at least some Democratic support in the Senate — but coupled with Trump’s recent pontificating about a federally controlled D.C., it adds further momentum behind Congressional conservatives’ obsessive crusade to run a city they actively and loudly despise. 

We got a comment a few weeks back asking us to fact-check the BOWSER Act, which we figured shouldn’t be too hard. Not only is the actual text of the bill only 11 lines long, but the one-pager justifying the bill’s necessity is —  predictably — slim on the facts and heavy on the same bloated, tired, and baseless assumptions about the city conservatives on the Hill have been making for years.

So let’s get into it. You can follow along or read the one-pager in full here. 

Ok, we’re off to a strong start! That’s right; in 1973, Congress approved a bill that gave D.C. limited home rule. You can read all about home rule’s history in our explainer here.

And don’t we know it! That’s also true. Nice. 

And there we go. The basic fact here is that yes, Congress granted D.C. its ability to govern itself, so it can also rescind that power. 

But it may be worth noting that the actual text of the bill granting D.C.’s home rule states: “The content of Congress is to delegate certain legislative powers to the government of the District of Columbia … and to the greatest extent possible … relieve Congress of the burden of legislating upon essentially local District matters.” 

Burden and responsibility have similar definitions but different connotations; do Ogles and Lee want to handle stuff like rats? Potholes? The roughly 1.5 million requests for 311 services a year? Martin speculated last week on what D.C. could look like if it were to come under some form of federal control — and if I were a federal body, I certainly would feel like that responsibility was more of a burden than anything. 

The rest of this sentence is almost too vague to break down. “Track record” by what metrics? The number of Fox News headlines you saw about carjackings? And I know that, personally, whenever I’m throwing “broadly” around in an argument, it’s usually because I’m trying to hide that I’m either too lazy or too uninformed to provide any specifics. 

If we were to look at D.C.’s "track record" in terms of, let’s just throw something out there, I don't know, government efficiency … the city would look like a well-oiled machine compared to the annual shutdown circus in Congress. D.C. has passed a balanced budget for 28 consecutive years, which is far more than our federal legislature can say for itself. They are literally on the verge of another shutdown right now!

Perfect! Some specifics. 

In 2022, the D.C. Council did pass the Revised Criminal Code Act — the mammoth result of a years-long process to review and update D.C.’s criminal code, most of which hadn’t been revisited since 1901. It involved years of research, planning, and feedback — not only from D.C.’s elected officials, but from an independent agency of experts, prosecutors like the U.S. Attorney for D.C. (a federally appointed position), and criminal justice advocates. 

The revision saga was long and contentious, but when all was said and done, the final product was applauded as a necessary and long-overdue step to bring D.C. law into the 21st century. In 2000, three law professors ranked the city as having one of the worst criminal codes in the country based on how outdated and ill-defined it was. (The code still contained language referring to stables and mules and a law against playing ball games in the streets.) 

Rather than summarily “strip[ing] away penalties for crimes,” the revision clarified definitions for crimes, removed outdated terms, adjusted penalties, and added gradations based on the severity of offenses. For example, the revised code expanded the right to a jury trial for people accused of committing misdemeanors (but stipulated that this change would happen over time, in order to account for the strain it could put on the city’s courts.) 

It also gave anyone who had served 20 years in prison a chance to petition a judge for a reduced sentence or early release — an extension of the city’s already-on-the-books Second Look provision, which allows anyone who committed a crime under the age of 25 to petition for early release after serving 15 years. One of the more controversial aspects of the revision revolved around mandatory minimums; the independent commission appointed to revise the code recommended nixing mandatory minimums completely, but after debate and negotiation, the final version of the code maintained mandatory minimums for murder, while removing them for all other crimes. 

Outside of D.C., in “federal Washington,” much of the attention on the criminal code revision boiled down to this “reduced penalties” line, which fit neatly in the driving conservative narrative of D.C. as a “soft on crime” city. 

While the code did reduce penalties for some crimes, it actually raised the penalties for others –  all in an effort to solve one of the biggest problems with the original code: that the offenses and penalties often did not align in degrees of severity. But none of this seemed to matter much in the misinformation tailspin the revision process set forth. (We saw Republican congress members claim that D.C. was trying to “decriminalize carjacking” – not true!)

Like many cities across the U.S., D.C. did see an increase in violent crime during the early years of the pandemic — but according to MPD data, violent crime actually decreased in 2022, as compared to the year prior. In 2021, the city reported 4,095 incidents of violent crimes (including homicides, robbery, assault with a dangerous weapon), and in 2022, the city reported 3,822 — a 6 percent decline. 

And as we explained, the revised criminal code didn’t automatically make those convicted of carjackings, robberies, or homicides eligible for reduced sentences; while it did seek to eliminate mandatory minimums (sparing first-degree murder), reduced sentences and early release would still need to have been petitioned, and ruled upon by a judge, after someone served 20 years. 

To tackle this argument regarding the false causation between reduced penalties and increased crime: the Republican thinking seems to be that if D.C. reduced the minimum sentence for carjacking from seven years to say, five years, the city would see a huge rise in carjacking. But according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s own National Institute of Justice (and pretty much anyone who applies even a sliver of critical thinking), sentencing rarely plays a role in deterring crime, because average people often don’t know the sentencing details of a criminal code. 

“Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes,” reads the NIJ’s one-pager on deterrence, compiled using a large body of research on crime policy and deterrence. 

(It adds that sentencing policies do, however, play a role in recidivism.)

Well, this part is true. For the first time in 30 years, Congress exercised its ability to control D.C.’s local governance by blocking the adoption of the criminal code revision in 2023, with approval from congressional Democrats and Joe Biden himself. While misinformation, Republican fear-mongering, and intentional misunderstanding of the bill played a role in its demise, let’s not give them full credit. 

The bill’s defeat was certainly helped along by a variety of other, closer-to-home political factors, including the BOWSER Act’s namesake, who wasn’t fully on board with the bill to begin with, some branding fumbles on the councilmembers’ part to market the bill properly to Democratic allies, and, of course, congressional Democrats’ ceaseless commitment to the art of the own-goal. 

It’s hard to fact-check a hypothetical that D.C. would be more dangerous today had the code passed; most of the reforms weren’t set to begin until October 2025 anyway. 

“Rich history of our country’s unique founding” is certainly doing some linguistic gymnastics here. The only distinguishable fact in this section is that D.C. is indeed the nation’s capital. 

The rest is, as one might call it in a writing workshop, purple prose: language that obscures any real meaning by stuffing the sentences with filler words and useless cliches. “Cesspool” is a heavy-hitter in the Trumpian lexicon, frequently relied on whenever MAGA-heads are referring to an urban area with low-income people, people of color, or immigrants — so basically, many U.S. cities. And at the end of the day, this rhetoric is nothing new: for the 50 years that D.C. has had home rule, scare tactics around crime (which typically bely racial prejudices) have been weaponized to hinder D.C.’s autonomy. 

Lastly, I don’t know which D.C. residents are asking their city to be some sort of biblical “beacon of light” — most would prefer to be left alone. (In fact, the resistance campaign that sprung up in opposition to federal interference in D.C.’s criminal code revision was literally dubbed “Hands Off D.C.”) 

D.C. ought to be a place where normal people can affordably and safely go about their normal, congressionally represented lives, just like residents in any other town in America. And if D.C. can only be this supposed center of democracy par excellence when its nearly 700,000 residents are denied their democratic rights … well then, that is saying something about the definition of democracy we’re working with, right? A bit of a tough circle to square. 

LOL. I can think of one major, once-in-a-lifetime visit to the U.S. Capitol that one could point to as proof that this “experiment” is long past the point of failure. 

Imagine, if TikTok-addicted eighth graders can’t wander around the Rotunda in matching t-shirts with their eyes glazing over, the Founding Fathers will have done this all for not! Enough with the melodramatics, Mike and Andy. You sound ridiculous … I thought libs were supposed to be the soft ones! 

I’m tired; there’s nothing more of substance here. 

If you’re curious about what’s been happening at the D.C. Council (where elected officials are introducing and passing laws that impact the lives of everyday residents) we’ve got a semi-weekly column that rounds up the news of the Wilson Building.