“Abolish ICE” is the rallying cry heard from the streets of Minneapolis to the main stage at the Grammy awards. It’s the stick deployed against the Trump administration and the carrot consumed by Bad Bunny as he hops around at the Super Bowl.
Closer to the nation’s capital, however, people have been muttering “abolish ice.” The denizens of the Acela Corridor aren’t without their own misgivings about assertive immigration enforcement. But even the most hardened member of the Resistance—frozen solid—has to wonder why it takes two weeks after a moderate snowstorm for a Democratic-controlled city to plow a street or clear a sidewalk.
Businesses, schools, and government offices were closed for days after the last snowflakes fell. Massive snow drifts were permitted to become encased in ice—not ICE—impervious to cheap shovels. It was almost as if the pandemic had returned for a moment. There was simply no expectation of a reopening unless the sun helped.
When temperatures finally rose above freezing, crews rushed out to capitalize on the brief opportunity presented by melting “snowcrete.” This often meant deploying plows, vehicles, and heavy equipment in the middle of the afternoon, replacing streets unnavigable due to wintry excess with streets clogged with traffic.
According to one estimate, restaurant sales fell faster than the snow and some 40 percent of the D.C. workforce was rendered incapable of working for three days. The price tag of this lost economic activity could be as high as $100 million.
Joe Bishop-Henchman writes in Commonplace,
The storm and its aftermath very publicly exposed issues many of us who follow city government have long worried about: a patchwork approach to winter operations that mainly relies on the sun doing our work for us, secrecy and talking points instead of honest communication, and indifference to pedestrians and those on alleys.
This is the city that wants to run the country and, indeed, the world. Surely, they can create a democracy in Iran once they dig out of their snowcrete jungle holiday.
These complaints aren’t confined to Washington, DC, however. In New York City, images of trash and snow piled high were being recorded and widely circulated more than a week after the storm. “This is one of the worst snow removals that I’ve seen. It’s been a while since we’ve had this amount of snow but it is affecting the traffic,” an EMT told the New York Post.
And it’s not just the Posties giving newly minted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s warm collectivism the cold shoulder. Progressives on the city council were protesting that residents “need urgent coordination and clear communication” from officials including the mayor and “deserve better.”
“Mamdani Touts a Stunning View of the City, but Struggles to Clear the Sidewalks,” read a headline in the Nation, not National Review. Socialists and other progressives know how easily their ambitions will be buried in a snowdrift if the municipal government cannot competently perform its basic functions, seizing the means of production only when hell freezes over like the five boroughs.
“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” Mamdani vowed when he was elected late last year. He’s off to an inauspicious start if snow mounds are both too large to get rid of and too small to care about it.
People have limited patience for paying high taxes for poor government services. Census data released last month shows big, blue states hemorrhaging residents while conservative redoubts like Texas and South Carolina add them. It’s not just places with colder climates like New York. Sunny California lost more than 200,000 residents to other states between July 2024 and July 2025.
These trends could mean, after the 2030 Census, that recapturing the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—all won by Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, with Joe Biden taking them by the narrowest of margins in 2020—won’t be sufficient for Democrats to win the presidency.
Republicans, of course, have their own problems. Maintaining their congressional majorities in November may be a heavier lift than the ice-covered snow. But for left-wing Democrats eager to usher in a new era of big government if and when swing voters decide to throw out the bums, as incumbents are affectionately called, and for their beleaguered blue-city constituents, it is a winter of discontent.
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