Washington, D.C., picks a new mayor Tuesday for the first time in more than a decade, and the result is about as suspenseful as a Metro escalator repair. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is all but assured to win, according to The Washington Post.

Conservatives are panicking. Liberals are celebrating. Both of you are wrong, and frankly I expected more.

Let me explain it slowly, since nobody else will. Lewis George won the June Democratic primary with 54 percent, beating moderate Kenyan McDuffie by nearly 27,000 votes. In D.C., winning the Democratic primary is the election. November is just the part where they mail you a receipt.

Her agenda, per CNBC: universal child care, affordable housing, lower utility costs and a new business activity tax. Socialism in the capital, the right says. The end of America.

Calm down. Look at who the tax actually hits. CNBC reports it targets partnerships like law offices and lobbying shops based in Washington whose owners live outside the city, with the first $200,000 exempt. Read that again. The first democratic socialist mayor of the nation's capital wants to tax lobbyists who live in Virginia and Maryland.

I hate to tell my fellow conservatives this, but that's the most popular idea in the country. You could put it on a ballot in Oklahoma and it would pass by forty points. The left finally found a tax the right can't argue with, and it took them a hundred years.

Now, my liberal friends. You think this is a revolution. It isn't. D.C. is the one city in America where Congress can overrule the mayor. The president has already federalized the city's police department once, and the National Guard has been deployed across Washington for 14 months, according to CNBC. Republicans in Congress are already preparing to limit her authority. A political science professor at American University told CNBC her term will likely be "more symbolic than anything else."

So here's the real situation, and you won't like it, whoever you are. She's not powerless. She's the most strategically positioned socialist in America. Every promise that fails can be blamed on Congress. Every bus that's late, every rent that goes up, every child care center that never opens: Congress did it. Trump did it. The federal government did it. She gets to run the only city in America with a built-in landlord to blame for the broken heater.

Zohran Mamdani has to explain New York's budget to New Yorkers. Lewis George has to explain D.C.'s budget to Senate appropriators who don't take her calls. That's not a weakness. That's tenure.

And to the readers nodding along right now thinking, "Exactly, Crow, this is why it doesn't matter": wrong again. It matters because the city that writes your tax code will now be run by someone who wants to try new taxes on the people who write your tax code. Strange things happen when lobbyists get billed.

Washington spent twelve years with a moderate mayor and still couldn't fix the escalators. Now it gets a socialist who can't be fully in charge. Honestly, that may be the most efficient form of government ever devised. Nothing gets done, and everyone has someone to blame.

I'm not endorsing it. I'm just saying you should have seen it coming. I did.

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The Demorat is a satire publication. This article is parody and commentary based on real news reports; jokes, exaggerations and fictional elements are not factual claims. Quotes attributed to real people are drawn from published reporting.

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