Blue State Failure Is Destroying Federalism And The Constitution: Washington, D.C., is Now in Charge of Making Sure that Dogs in Los Angeles aren’t Mistreated

CHRIS BRAY/THE FEDERALIST

Blue State Failure Is Destroying Federalism And The Constitution:

Washington, D.C., is now in charge of making sure that dogs in Los Angeles aren’t mistreated.

Personal note to Democrats: If you hate Donald Trump and really believe that he yearns to rule as an authoritarian, stop voting for dismal failures like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. They’re creating power vacuums with enormous zones of unchecked failure, and those vacuums are being filled.

The examples are everywhere, but start here: In Los Angeles, a long-running animal abuse crisis has been going unaddressed, and is getting steadily worse. An animal rescue activist named Joey Tuccio documents the problem as he tries to solve it, posting an endless flood of videos of caged and wounded dogs dying in homeless encampments.

Skid Row is a disaster, for people and for animals, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Homeless drug addicts breed pit bulls in encampments as a street business, and do it about as carefully as you’d expect in a place called Skid Row. Tuccio finds dogs being bred with untreated broken bones, being tossed into the gutter to bleed to death, starving to death, and on and on. It’s a parade of horrors in a place of endless degradation.

This dogs are dying in their cages with no water. They are trying to chew their way out. @MayorOfLA says this is not neglect. Call (323) 307-7401 and demand they are removed NOW. pic.twitter.com/MjA3qZqkSm

— JoeyTuccio (@joey_tuccio) February 22, 2026

One of Tuccio’s recurring themes is that he can’t get local officials to do anything. Los Angeles has animal control officers, and they sometimes drop in on Skid Row. Then they shrug and leave. The city, Tuccio argues, would rather not know about it.

The Frenchie we just rescued was dumped by breeders who also are dealing drugs & selling guns. It is common that these types of breeders do other criminal activities. This is one of many reasons why @MayorOfLA wants to ignore it. More crimes she could pretend are not happening.

— JoeyTuccio (@joey_tuccio) March 5, 2026

But someone has finally taken action. Last year, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles announced the formation of an animal abuse task force: “Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli today announced the creation of a federal animal abuse task force aimed at prosecuting violations of the federal Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act signed into law by President Trump in 2019.”

That task force is making arrests. This week, federal prosecutors charged a 53-year-old man in the suburban community of Hacienda Heights with many felonies after they allegedly caught him breeding pit bulls for dog fights. Federal agents serving a search warrant found “an emaciated pit bull that was bleeding and chained to a cable in the yard; a second pit bull with scars in a bloody caged area; five dog treadmills; a rope with a scale for weighing dogs; and a skin stapler and syringes.” The FBI’s Los Angeles office posted on social media about its role in the arrests.

This is great news, and it’s also completely insane. It means that someone is finally bothering to address an obvious, serious, and long-neglected problem. But it also means that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is searching for “dog treadmills,” doing the role of local animal control officers, because blue states do everything poorly. A problem that cries out for simple local action is being done by the central government. Washington, D.C., is in charge of making sure that dogs in Los Angeles aren’t mistreated.

The American constitutional order assigns limited power to the federal government, assigning it — in the now mostly discarded theory — to military, diplomatic, and interstate matters. States are supposed to have independent sovereignty, entirely performing their own internal regulation. And now the FBI is driving around Los Angeles, looking for evidence that people are hurting dogs in their backyard. The retreat of state and local government from basic state and local governance in favor of endless symbol-performance about trans rights and Orange Man Bad lawsuits … --->READ MORE HERE

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