Case file 11-04-A. Subject: the nation's capital, a duck's liver, and a city that finally found something it could afford to ban.
I've been in the tunnels a long time. I've seen a rat survive three city budgets, two shutdowns and a garbage strike on one dropped croissant. Never once did I see him order the foie gras. Down here we call that a balanced diet.
Here are the facts, per the Washington Examiner. Voters in Washington, D.C., passed Initiative 86 on Tuesday with roughly 73% of the vote. It bans foie gras, the fatty liver of ducks and geese that are force-fed until the liver swells.
Starting July 1, importing and distributing it is banned, and restaurants and retailers have to stop selling it. Violators face fines of $1,000 to $5,000. Repeat offenders could lose their business licenses.
So let me read the charges back. The most expensive appetizer in the city is now the most wanted.
The campaign behind it, Pro-Animal DC, collected 31,726 signatures through a viral push. Its campaign director told Axios, "Tonight D.C. decided that force-feeding a bird has no place here."
No place here. In Washington. The city where Congress force-feeds the country a 2,000-page bill every spring and calls it a budget. The birds got a ballot initiative. The taxpayers got a continuing resolution.
The D.C. shadow representative, Oye Owolewa, backed the ban, saying "compassion isn't separate from the fights over housing, health-care, and statehood." I agree with him completely. It's just in front of them. The ducks cut in line.
Think about what a D.C. voter actually dealt with on the way to the polling place. The rent. The parking ticket. The $14 sandwich. The Metro escalator that has been "temporarily" out of service since the Obama administration. Then the voter got to the ballot, saw a chance to fix something, and fixed the duck.
Now the bill. The city's chief financial officer estimates enforcement will cost $314,000 over four fiscal years. That's $78,500 a year to police a dish most residents couldn't pick out of a lineup. You will never meet a man in D.C. who got priced out of his apartment by foie gras. You will meet plenty who got priced out by the city that just found $314,000 for the duck.
And the case isn't closed. The ban is expected to face a court challenge, the Examiner reports, the same way a similar ban has been held up in New York City. So the most likely outcome is lawyers billing by the hour to argue about a liver. In this town, that's called economic development.
The mayor-elect, democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George, told reporters she voted for the ban, citing her commitment to animal rights. Fair enough. A socialist administration has to start seizing the means of production somewhere, and the ducks were the only constituency that couldn't vote.
I went back down and found the croissant rat. I told him the city had outlawed foie gras. He stopped chewing. "So the rich folks upstairs can't eat the fancy liver anymore?" Correct. He thought about it for a long while, then went back to his croissant. "Tell 'em welcome to the tunnels. The crust is free. The rent is still $3,400."
Case remains open. The ducks are protected, the enforcement budget is funded, and the only thing in Washington still being force-fed is the voter.
The Demorat is satire. This article is a parody based on real news reports and is not meant to be taken as literal fact.
The real story that inspired this
