When the D.C. Council votes on bills, all the interested parties gather: The 13 councilmembers, aides to Mayor Muriel Bowser, lobbyists, and advocates. But this week, the unseen presence of President Donald Trump seemed to be weighing heaviest as the council navigated a controversial issue: a beefed-up teen curfew for the summer months to come.
It reflects the uncomfortable reality that city officials find themselves in, with the White House pushing the city to more aggressively crack down on crime and lawmakers already divided on how best to respond to large, often unruly gatherings of teenagers.
“As members know, we are not alone in this discussion,” Chairman Phil Mendelson told his colleagues on Tuesday. “There are folks who are not friends of the District who are looking intently at what we are doing or not doing. I am not interested in giving them talking points or ammunition.”
How to respond to the administration’s demands has often split Bowser and lawmakers, with some arguing that giving Trump an inch to prevent him from taking a mile is the pragmatic course, while others argue the city needs to push back forcefully.
The current debate involves an issue that has persisted in D.C. since at least last year: how to deal with large-scale teen “takeovers” of places like Navy Yard, The Wharf, and U Street. (Driven by social media, they also take place in other cities.) Last summer, the council approved an emergency bill authorizing police to designate curfew zones where groups of kids under the age of 18 would be prohibited from gathering after 8 p.m. (The citywide youth curfew starts at 11 p.m.)
They appear to have tamped down on the takeovers, and police said that no arrests were made when the zones were declared. D.C. officials even boasted about them when confronted by congressional Republicans on what the city was doing to fight crime.
But the emergency bill lapsed last fall, and some lawmakers resisted extending it because they argued it wasn’t a long-term solution to deeper problems involving city youth. Facing pressure from Bowser and a resurgence of takeovers – including one where teens were chased by National Guardsmen – the council narrowly voted in November to extend the emergency bill, but only until April 15.
Earlier this month, the council again considered extending the curfew zones through the summer, but postponed a vote after it became clear that it didn’t have enough support. (It takes nine lawmakers to approve emergency legislation, which takes effect immediately; traditional bills, which require a second vote and undergo congressional review, only take seven.) Five holdouts argued that the zones had stopped being effective and expressed concern that police were becoming overly aggressive in their enforcement of them.
Curfew proponents sought to try again this week, and in hopes of turning at least one lawmaker, sweetened the pot by adding a provision requiring D.C. to offer more youth programming and events (which it has been doing periodically) whenever curfew zones are declared.
All the while, pressure from the White House has been bearing down. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro took to Fox News to criticize lawmakers for not immediately acting to extend the curfew zones when they lapsed in mid-April. Pirro (who has also been floated as a possible attorney general) has similarly called on the council to lower the age at which teens can be prosecuted as adults. On Tuesday, a Bowser aide speaking on the condition that they not be named told The 51st that the White House was “hyper-aware” of the council’s planned vote.
Bowser’s aides and allies initially thought they had managed to gather the votes to extend the curfew zones. But ultimately, no councilmember flipped, forcing Mendelson to again postpone consideration of the emergency bill for two weeks.
“Everyone is like, ‘The White House is watching.’ So if we don’t do this then the White House could do this or do that. It’s a slippery slope because what decisions do we make based on, ‘The White House is watching’?” Ward 4 Councilmember and mayoral contender Janeese Lewis George told The 51st. “That turns on who is the vulnerable group that is impacted. Here it’s young people and the impact on them can be life-changing and life-altering in a way that could make all of us less safe overall in the long-term.”
Kenyan McDuffie, who is also running in the mayoral race, also wants the city to invest in more alternative activities for teens but supports the teen curfew zones as a short-term tool. Speaking at the mayoral forum The 51st held this week, McDuffie said there’s a “real risk to those young folks when hundreds show up to places where some might have guns.”
This is hardly the first time that Bowser and lawmakers have had to balance the demands of a White House and Republican-led Congress that have shown their willingness to aggressively interfere in the city’s local affairs.
When Trump declared a crime emergency, took over control of the Metropolitan Police Department, and flooded the city with federal agents and the National Guard last summer, Bowser quietly worked to cooperate. From her perspective, the non-antagonistic approach worked; Trump didn’t extend his crime emergency after it ran its 30-day course. Bowser has also called protecting home rule her “north star,” and thus far, the administration has not moved to fully repeal it.
On the other side, many councilmembers loudly protested the federal intervention and cheered when Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued over the National Guard’s continued presence in D.C. Late last year, they also rejected proposed compromises from Bowser on a slate of Republican bills making their way through the House that would target the city’s criminal justice laws. One such bill would allow teens as young as 14 to be charged as adults (currently 16- and 17-year-olds can be charged as adults only for a limited number of serious crimes); Bowser proposed keeping the current ages but expanding the list of eligible crimes, but lawmakers turned her down.
At-Large Councilmember Robert White – one of the five holdouts – told The 51st that he doesn’t believe compromising with the White House is worth it on the curfew issue.
“We’ve thrown them a lot of bones, and they never say, ‘You know what, you guys are pretty cool, we’ll start to work with you.’ It never works that way,” he said. “If there’s a place where I don’t like the position but it’s not going to cause serious harm, OK, we’ll eat that one. But you can’t eat them all, especially when we feel pressure to do something that’s just wrong and not working.”
Mendelson counters that the council risks “self-inflicting some wounds that we don’t need.” And Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who also supports extending the teen curfew zones, added that if the council doesn’t take the lead, Trump simply will.
“We are in a precarious moment right now, and we saw what happened this fall when we didn’t have the juvenile curfew in place. That’s when we saw the overreaction and response from federal agents who were chasing after young people,” she said, referencing an October takeover in Navy Yard where the National Guard chased after teenagers. "I want to avoid that."
What makes the situation even more confusing is that even as the council didn’t vote to extend the curfew zones over the summer, it did give preliminary approval to a bill that would permanently codify the city’s authority to declare the curfew zones whenever necessary. (Recall that permanent bills only take seven votes to pass, while emergency bills need nine.) But that bill couldn’t take effect until fall, potentially leaving the city without teen curfew zones for the summer months.
Mendelson and Pinto seem to hope that they’ll be able to swing one vote over the next two weeks to get them in place for summer, though Bowser may have to engage in old-school horse-trading to get there. Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker told The 51st that he’s open to a curfew extension if it was paired with a "comprehensive package” addressing youth mental health, jobs, and recreation.
“I take the mayor at her word that she genuinely wants to solve the problem, but what I can continue to hear her say is this is a tool. We know this is not working, so we have to find a better one,” he said. “I have a commitment from the mayor’s team that now they’ll sit down and we can talk about these things, which is great, but I can’t vote for this with the promise of a meeting in a week or two.”
After the delayed vote this week, though, both Bowser and Pirro tore into the council, with Pirro saying it “doesn’t take this stuff seriously enough” and needs to “get its act together.” For her part, Bowser said that “people need to put their political ambitions to the side and do their jobs.” (In addition to the mayoral race, both White and Pinto, who fall on opposite sides of this issue, are running for D.C. delegate.)
While that may have played well with the White House, it seemed to have landed flat with Parker – the very vote she’d need to flip.
In a tweet, he called Bowser’s comments “offensive.”
“Everybody knows the curfew isn't working. Instead of working to advance alternative solutions *with* the Council, she continues to lob insults and dog whistles that play well with the MAGA base,” Parker wrote on X. “As of yesterday, it was my understanding the mayor’s team would sit with me and others to figure out alternatives. But when in front of the cameras, again and again, the mayor insults the very people she should be working with.”
Martin is a longtime reporter and editor in D.C. He formerly worked for WAMU 88.5 and DCist.com, and has contributed to the Washington City Paper and other publications. He's been in D.C. for 25 years, and tries to ride his bike everywhere he can.
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