Imperfect recall: How a city council fight is roiling Congress

Lawmakers and staff are on edge after a series of high-profile incidents in and around the ward. In October, Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and a staffer for Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt were carjacked on separate occasions. In February 2023, Minnesota Democratic Rep. Angie Craig was attacked in the elevator of her H Street apartment building. And an aide to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul was stabbed repeatedly, also on H Street.

Opponents of the recall campaign point to an encouraging drop in violent crime early in 2024. They say yanking a council member from office would cost taxpayers money and leave the ward without representation until the seat can be filled. While a similar effort has popped up in Ward 1, they reject the notion that removing any one person, whether Allen or Brianne Nadeau, will result in meaningful change.

Living in D.C. means dealing with a mix of federal and local bureaucracy, like a uniquely fragmented criminal justice system. Adults who commit felonies are prosecuted by a presidentially appointed U.S. attorney, and that office pressed charges on just 33 percent of arrests in 2022 and 44 percent in 2023. Allen notes that the city’s crime lab lost its accreditation in 2021 and didn’t regain it until the end of last year.

“When you talk to our prosecutors, they point to that directly and say the inability to get fingerprints, DNA, ballistics evidence had massive consequences on their ability to use the courts and get convictions,” Allen said.

The normies won

Rich Masters, one of the recall campaign’s organizers and Mary’s husband, said he isn’t out to paint D.C. as a dystopian hellhole. He doesn’t think Allen is solely responsible for the rise in crime, and like many of his co-organizers, he voted for Allen in the past.

But the pro-recall set can rattle off a list of grievances. They are unhappy with the direction he took as chair of the council’s public safety committee from 2017 to 2022, saying he “bragged about reducing the number of police officers on the beat.” Allen has defended his budget proposals and support for violence interruption programs. “We are reducing the size of our police force in a responsible way and shifting funds into other important priorities to make us all safer,” he wrote in a 2020 social media thread.

Recall proponents also accuse him of trying to “open the jail doors and let out violent criminals.” Allen led the revision of a 1985 law aimed at rehabilitating youth that The Washington Post found had led to “violent offenders back on D.C. streets.” Allen sought to strengthen that law by limiting eligibility, but the revision also raised the age of people who could participate in the program to 24. He championed a similar age expansion to a “second-look” resentencing law, angering critics who feel the city is showing too much leniency to adult offenders.

And along with the rest of the council, Allen supported an overhaul of the city’s criminal code that would have reduced maximum penalties for crimes like carjacking, among other things.

In a striking rebuke, Congress overturned that criminal code rewrite last year, using its power to review D.C.’s laws before they take effect. Thirty-one House Democrats, along with 33 Senate Democrats and independents, joined their Republican colleagues in blocking the local law, and Biden signed the disapproval resolution last March.

In Rich Masters’ view, policies like those are a relic of the calls for change that swept through the party after a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis in 2020. He believes Democrats went too far.

“The genesis of this whole movement is a group of Democrats who were fed up at having our party labeled extremists,” said Masters, who worked as an aide to Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in the late 1990s and early 2000s and said he marched for police accountability in the wake of Floyd’s killing. “We think Democrats can get back to a much more kind of mainstream, traditional Democratic role.”

But Easton, like Allen, feels the mainstream versus extremist framing is a false narrative. As crime continues to preoccupy voters in some urban areas, Democratic politicians — including in D.C., New York and California — have already shifted the way they talk about crime.

“People roundly dismissed ‘defund the police.’ You don’t hear even a lot of the progressive folks talking like that anymore,” Easton said. “The normie elements of the Democrats, with respect to criminal justice reform, won the argument — which makes efforts like this, around recalling a person who I would consider a fairly mainstream liberal Democrat, even emptier.”

Allen encounter

Thursday was a brisk night in the District, but not brisk enough for the recall campaign to cancel its petition signing “pop-up” on the corner of Eighth Street and North Carolina Avenue Southeast. The location was strategic. About a block away the same night, a private fundraiser for Allen was planned.

A little before 7 p.m., Allen came walking down Eighth toward the petitioners. He clocked them, hedged like he might cross the street, and then proceeded toward the group, who were gathered in the small front yard of a row house.

“Hello, how are you guys doing tonight?” Allen said, smiling as he walked by.

Sidewalk encounter aside, the recall group already felt it had gotten Allen’s attention. Earlier this month, he voted with most members of the council in favor of legislation that would implement harsher penalties for a variety of crimes. That’s a sign to some that he’s waking up to the current political realities.

Allen scoffed at the notion, pointing out the council started working on the bill last June.

But the run-in on Eighth Street was a cause for celebration for the petitioners, who face tough odds in their quest. No recall has succeeded at the city council level in 50 years of D.C. home rule. According to campaign treasurer April Brown, they’ve now raised more than $111,000, and Rich Masters said they’ve collected more than 1,300 signatures. But they’ve got a long way to go to get the 6,000-plus they need by mid-August to trigger a recall election.

As they gather those signatures just blocks from the Capitol, in a ward packed with political professionals and lobbyists, national attention might come with the territory. But it’s a D.C. story either way.

“This is not about Charles Allen. This is not about one person, to me,” Rivard said. “This is about sending a message to our local leaders, who I think all have some culpability in where we are.”

This report is part of an occasional series that touches on the safety of congressional staffers and threats to congressional offices.

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