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Post by the Scribe on Sept 16, 2022 23:17:25 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 16, 2022 23:22:08 GMT
Coronavirus is dividing blue cities from their red states
www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/politics/red-states-blue-cities-coronavirus/index.html
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein
Updated 7:06 PM EDT, Wed April 1, 2020
CNN
—
The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic has opened a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.
Across a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest cities and counties – most of them led by Democrats – moved aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials, meanwhile, refused to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.
A chorus of big-city officials in red states from Florida, Georgia and Mississippi to Texas, Arizona and Missouri urged their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercut their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease would cluster in neighboring areas – from which it could easily reinfect their populations.
Reversing an argument
In resisting statewide action, Republican governors such as Abbott in Texas, DeSantis in Florida, Brian Kemp in Georgia and Parson in Missouri stressed above all the need for local flexibility in responding to the crisis. Rather than impose common limits across their own states, DeSantis and Abbott imposed quarantines on people arriving from other states, particularly the New York region.
Ironically, stressing local flexibility is the opposite of the argument that GOP governors and legislatures have made over the past decade as they have passed an escalating series of laws to preempt or overturn liberal municipal ordinances on an array of subjects.
Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies state preemption efforts, says he “nearly fell out of his chair” when he heard Abbott call for local control in responding to the coronavirus because Texas has been among the most aggressive Republican-leaning states in preempting laws from Democratic-leaning cities over the past decade.
In those red states, Republican legislators have typically argued for invalidating local ordinances on the grounds that “there needs to be uniform statewide rules,” Briffault says. “That seems inconsistent with the [current] position that if you think it’s OK for your county you go ahead, but we are not going to deal with the rest of the state. It is certainly the opposite argument from the one they are normally making.”
The tension between Republican-run state governments and Democratic-leaning city governments has notably intensified over the past decade. The most famous of these confrontations came in 2016, when North Carolina’s GOP-controlled Legislature and then-Republican governor collaborated on the so-called “bathroom bill” that overturned a city of Charlotte ordinance intended to ensure equal rights for transgender individuals. But that conflict was only one drop in a torrent of state efforts to overturn city and county rules through recent years.
As Briffault documented in a 2018 law review article, states have acted to overturn a wide array of city policies, with the most common collisions occurring around municipal initiatives to raise the minimum wage, establish paid sick leave or family leave for workers, regulate gun sales and ownership, bar local rent control ordinances, establish environmental rules such as bans on plastic bags, or limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The “preponderance of … preemptive actions and proposals have been advanced by Republican-dominated state governments, embrace conservative economic and social causes, and respond to – and are designed to block – relatively progressive regulatory actions adopted by activist cities and counties,” Briffault wrote in his law review article.
The current struggle over responding to the coronavirus, in one respect, inverts this pattern of conflict: In this case, it’s the blue cities and counties pleading for a statewide standard and the red governors touting regional variation. But in the larger sense, the pointed collision over enforcing social distancing extends the underlying dynamic now driving politics in so many GOP-leaning states: an intensifying struggle for control of each state’s direction between major metropolitan areas that are growing more Democratic and a tenuous Republican majority that revolves around the outer suburbs and small towns beyond them.
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 16, 2022 23:25:16 GMT
Another example, Progressive Tempe Arizona wanted to raise the minimum wage in its city which was blocked by the RED governor.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 7:03:12 GMT
Sophie Kasakove
/
September 26, 2018
How Red States Stifle Blue Cities
newrepublic.com/article/151401/red-states-stifle-blue-cities
Republican statehouses have passed a raft of preemption bills to prevent cities from raising the minimum wage, strengthening gun control, and more.
In 2014, years before he became the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum was targeted by two gun-rights organizations, Florida Carry and the Second Amendment Foundation, which threatened to remove him from his post as Tallahassee city commissioner over a pair of local regulations prohibiting residents from shooting firearms in public parks. Despite the fact that these regulations, which were passed in 1957 and 1988, were no longer being enforced, the lobbyists argued that they violated a 2011 state law barring local governments from passing their own gun regulation ordinances. With the full weight of the National Rifle Association behind them, the gun groups sued the city of Tallahassee.
Facing personal fines of $5,000 and damages of up to $100,000 in addition to the threats to remove him from office—all for not officially removing the defunct laws from the books—Gillum defended his city in court. He did so without even the support of Tallahassee’s legal team, which was prevented by the same 2011 state law from supporting local legislators in such cases. In the midst of the lawsuit, he defined the stakes of the legal battle as a bid by red state governments to overturn the democratic will of blue cities: “It’s … about how these special interests and corporations, after getting their way with state government, are trying to intimidate and bully local communities by filing damaging lawsuits against officials like me.”
medium.com/@a_gillum/how-to-fight-the-nra-1a63f47d4a0c
Gun control is just one of many areas where Gillum confronted intimidation tactics, first as city commissioner and then as mayor of Tallahassee. In Florida, cities are preempted by the state from raising their minimum wage, enacting paid sick days, restricting smoking in public areas, regulating the nutritional value of restaurant food, establishing public broadband networks, or regulating Uber and Airbnb. Ultimately, the court ruled in Tallahassee’s favor, but it left the firearms preemption law intact.
Tallahassee is hardly alone. Across the country, the past few years have witnessed a spike in state preemption of local authority—every state except one has at least one such law on the books and nearly three-quarters of states have three or more. In the past year alone, 19 new preemption laws were passed in different states. The effort has been quiet, but nonetheless coordinated and precise: In many states, particularly conservative ones, preemption law has rendered left-leaning local policy-making largely impotent. It has revealed yet another way Republicans have paralyzed government, while underscoring the need for progressives to win back not just Congress, but statehouses across the country.
www.nlc.org/article/state-preemption-of-local-authority-continues-to-rise-according-to-new-data-from-the
For most of American history, preemption law was used differently. “Preemption was about aligning state and local law—making sure there were no inconsistencies,” says Kim Haddow, director of the Local Solutions Support Center, a national hub working to counter preemption. “It wasn’t used very often, and it was used by both Democrats and Republicans without much disparity.”
leap-preemption.org/index.html
One of preemption law’s most significant functions was to establish statewide standards on civil rights. It’s only in the past decade or so that it has been widely used to establish a ceiling—rather than a floor—on benefits, quality of life, and equality. “The laws are punitive, they’re broad, and they’re a denial and distortion of democracy,” Haddow says. “It isn’t the voice of the people being truly represented by their elected representatives—it’s that voice being deliberately warped.”
Preemption laws are not inherently anti-democratic but become so when used to amplify existing racial and economic inequality. “What we’re seeing is conservative, mostly white legislatures really tying the hands of cities that are majority people of color,” says Jackie Cornejo, an organizer with the Partnership for Working Families. Cornejo’s colleague Miya Chen Saika explains, “The pro-preemption industry groups use the argument that we need to protect the uniformity of wages across the state. But the reality is that the only uniformity these corporate interests want to protect is the uniformity of African Americans earning the lowest wage in all sectors in all geographies.”
This aggressive manipulation of preemption law by corporate lobbyists has played a big role in transforming preemption from a largely neglected policy tool to a conservative blockade against progressive interests. The American Legislative Exchange Council—known as ALEC—has taken the lead, drafting model legislation to preempt everything from minimum wage regulations to sanctuary city policies. Representing over 200 corporate and nonprofit members and a quarter of all state lawmakers, the organization has immense influence over state law nationwide.
ALEC has been advancing corporate interests in statehouses since the tobacco bills of the 1990s, but entrenched itself further after the Republican wave of the 2010s that decimated Democrats at the local level. There are currently 25 states where Republicans wield absolute power—controlling the legislature and governor’s mansion—compared with only eight for Democrats. For progressive city officials attempting to compensate for gridlock in Congress or to counteract the White House’s deregulatory efforts, this alliance of state and corporate interests presents a formidable opponent.
www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2016/09/how_alec_acce_and_pre_emptions_laws_are_gutting_the_powers_of_american_cities.html
www.sisterdistrict.com/statesmatter/statesovertime
Preemption laws have tended to sneak through state legislatures mostly unnoticed, with bills often passed in a matter of days. This quick turnaround has been a major obstacle in generating the public awareness necessary to build resistance. But there have been some successful efforts to thwart such laws. In Birmingham, Alabama, a federal appeals court ruled in July, after over a year and a half of pressure from local labor groups, that the state’s minimum wage preemption law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection rights. In California, organizers collected enough signatures to put a bill to repeal the state’s rent control preemption law on the November ballot.
www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632723920/in-battle-pitting-cities-vs-states-over-minimum-wage-birmingham-scores-a-win
psmag.com/economics/can-california-repeal-state-wide-l
The crucial next step, advocates believe, is to show these disparate movements that they are connected, and that the issue is larger than any one preemption bill. And they’re looking to a blue wave to make it happen—not in the House, but in state legislatures.
“Democrats for too long have been ignoring legislatures while Republicans have been, frankly, eating our lunches,” says Steve Farley, an Arizona state senator. “That’s why we’ve seen so much gerrymandering—Republicans have understood the power the legislatures have to be able to change a lot of things.”
Democrats are aiming to flip 14 legislative chambers in ten states in November, and advocacy groups are promoting a new generation of state leaders more favorable to local progressive power. Local Solutions Support Center, for example, aims to support progressive state legislators in challenging preemption law right away. “There is a reason Kris Kobach showed up on Trump’s doorstep on day one with a 365-day plan from the Heritage Foundation,” says Haddow, referring to the hard-line Republican secretary of state from Kansas. “Republicans are very good at thinking through ‘what do we want to move when we win?’ So, we’re taking a page out of their book.”
flippable.org/our-targets/states/
For his part, Gillum has a history of rallying leaders around the cause of local democracy, organizing a group of mayors into the first anti-preemption group in the country: the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions. Other candidates in this election cycle also have a history of anti-preemption work: Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia, fought in 2017 against a bill that preempts local governments from requiring employers to compensate workers for last-minute scheduling changes.
defendlocal.com/
Pushing back against preemption is becoming a theme for an emerging slate of local candidates. “There are a lot of young Democrats and progressives coming up and running for state legislatures who can have a big impact here,” says Mark Pertschuk, the director of Grassroots Change, an organization fighting preemption from a public health perspective. Pertschuk says preemption isn’t a cut-and-dry partisan issue. Democratic legislatures have also been guilty of overreach, such as this past summer when California’s overwhelmingly blue statehouse passed a bill preempting soda taxes in an effort to appease the American Beverage Association. The power of up-and-coming candidates to challenge preemption lies not just in their party ticket but in their good-government politics. “These candidates are much less likely to care what multinational corporations or trade associations want them to do than the old time political hacks,” says Pertschuk. “And they’re much less likely to listen to ALEC and others because of a campaign donation.”
Sophie Kasakove @sophiekasakove
Sophie Kasakove is a freelance reporter based in New Orleans. She is a former reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 7:07:44 GMT
Intersection DC
Blue Municipalities in Red State and the politics of preemption
intersectiondc.substack.com/p/blue-municipalities-in-red-state
Any reversal will be a protracted, but necessary crusade for Democrats
Lawson Brooks
Aug 3
Preemption in political terms simply refers to the actions that a higher level of government undertakes to expropriate the authority of a lower governmental tier. For more than a decade, GOP-dominated legislatures and their governors have dramatically and aggressively increased the use of this weapon as the party has expanded its chokehold over state governments. In battleground states, particularly those located in the Sun Belt, Republican politicians have embedded themselves into almost every area of local government policymaking in order to suppress the agendas of blue jurisdictions.
To further complicate matters, these metropolitan areas are the economic engines that are driving diverse population growth, jobs, and productivity, not to mention serving as social and entertainment hubs. Conversely, the less inhabited areas of these states are hemorrhaging population and jobs, suffering from a lack of quality education, and serve as the home for residents who are older and Whiter than their urban and suburban counterparts. But through an astonishingly effective display of gerrymandering, the GOP has not only held onto power, but the party has extended its ability to impose its will on their states' larger and more progressive jurisdictions.
While these tensions were prevalent prior to 2020, the Pandemic exacerbated them as states, counties, and cities throughout the country grappled with what became the most severe public health crisis in recent memory. Republican state lawmakers and leaders of their large metropolitan areas locked horns on a variety of issues, but none were more polarizing than mask mandates. Multiple efforts by states were initiated to undermine the command of local leaders as they worked to develop and implement policies that they believed were beneficial to their citizens. Consequently, many of the conflicts that resulted from these diametrically opposed approaches on how to best address the Pandemic ended up in the courts.
Although we have largely emerged from the torrent of COVID-19, the strife between red state governments and their blue metro areas has taken on a new stridency and new issues. States are presently seeking to limit local control over property taxes, zoning, firearms, and many other issues, including abortion rights, making it difficult for cities and counties to consistently and effectively manage their jurisdictions. Given this trend, these preemptions will only continue to grow. As Columbia University Law School professor, Richard Briffault who studies local preemption told CNN in an interview, “What you don’t see is any sense of constraint. What’s so striking now is as soon as an issue gets hot it gets translated into this debate.”
But on the surface, these blue civic enclaves have few options in combatting this phenomenon. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been extremely effective in focusing on building GOP-led legislative majorities in battleground states, while also working with their corporate partners to write model bills that are introduced and passed annually. The organization has also spawned another group, the American City County Council aimed at influencing local governmental bodies. Democrats have been slow to react to these efforts and now find themselves struggling to catch up.
Given that preemption will continue in the near future and possibly longer, the best hope for Democrats is to elect as many governors as possible in these states. But even in pursuing that option, the odds are stacked against them. In this year's mid-terms, there are 16 GOP Gubernatorial seats that are up for election. Two are in decidedly blue states, Maryland and Massachusetts and 12 are in solidly red southern and midwestern states, with New Hampshire being the geographic outlier. According to the Cook Political Report, as of now only Arizona is considered a Toss Up, with Georgia considered as Leaning R and Alaska, Florida, Ohio, and Texas as Likely R.
Given these probabilities, it will likely be several more election cycles before the Democrats can make any significant headway in turning the tables in Sun Belt and other undeniably red domains. This is all the more reason for the party to concentrate on building from the ground up local political and governance operations and revisit Howard Dean's 50 state strategy. On a more positive note, if Democrats can prevail in Arizona and surprise in Texas or Ohio, that could be a start that will begin to build momentum. As Professor Briffault noted as he ended his exchange, “You have to elect governors who would veto some of these things.”
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 7:12:30 GMT
Preemption is How Red States Screw Blue(r) Cities
seeingrednebraska.com/nebraska-politics/preemption-is-how-red-states-screw-bluer-cities/
Post author
By Amanda Gailey
Post date
January 5, 2018
If you don’t know what preemption is, you should. If you live in a city that’s more progressive than the state it’s in, chances are good that preemption is coming to oppress you.
grassrootschange.net/preemption-watch/
Preemption is when a higher government authority (usually a state) removes the right of a lower government authority (a city) to pass laws on certain matters. It violates the longstanding conservative principle of home rule–the belief that matters that can be left to local governance should be left to local governance. But we don’t live in an era of conservative principles anymore, so home rule has been cast in the crematorium of Republican ideals that don’t serve megadonors along with deficit reduction.
Preemption and Corporate Profits
Preemption is typically how a pernicious industry ensures it doesn’t face irritating obstacles to profits. The failure of Big Tobacco taught other industries that preemption is an important part of the death industry playbook –as communities around the country passed tobacco ordinances and people started to prefer their public places with less lung cancer, anti-tobacco regulations spread. Other industries saw that they should block this kind of pesky community improvement from the get-go to ensure maximum profits–it’s a lot easier to pay for a few cheap-date state legislators than to battle every community that tries to put its residents’ lives above your business. So the pesticide industry and the fossil fuel industry have preempted local ordinances impacting their profits in states around the country. Now restaurant owners’ associations are working to preempt local living wage laws, and construction organizations are preempting some local fire code requirements. In seven states, the junk food industry has preempted local governments from requiring food sellers to post calorie counts or other nutrition information. Thirteen states now preempt local governments from regulating factory farms.
But the king of preemption is the National Rifle Association. The NRA has been quietly working since the 1990s to get state legislatures to screw their residents through preemption laws that typically 1) nullify existing local gun ordinances, 2) prevent the passage of new local gun ordinances, and 3) give the NRA special standing to sue local governments that attempt to crack down on firearm deaths. They have been wildly successful at this–currently 43 states have passed broad firearm preemption laws. The remaining seven states include six flaming blue states (all of which see low per capita gun death rates) and little red Nebraska. We will soon write more about the ongoing attempt by the NRA to screw Nebraska with firearm preemption, but for now we want to stick with the concept of preemption.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/disarmed-how-cities-are-losing-the-power-to-regulate-guns/284220/
Preemption and Social Justice
If it weren’t bad enough that big nasty industries were erasing local democracy by wiping out communities’ rights to regulate their own health and safety, Republican culture warriors are also using preemption to oppress city-dwellers on social justice issues. In many states around the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed bathroom bills that preempt local ordinances preventing LGBT discrimination–in North Carolina, a contentious and partially repealed bathroom bill not only preempted an existing ordinance in Charlotte but also tacked on preemption of local minimum wage laws just for the morally bankrupt hell of it. In Arkansas and Tennessee, local governments are banned by state law from protecting classes of people from discrimination beyond what the state provides.
www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2015E2/Bills/House/PDF/H2v4.pdf
codes.findlaw.com/ar/title-14-local-government/ar-code-sect-14-1-403.html
codes.findlaw.com/tn/title-7-consolidated-governments-and-local-governmental-functions-and-entities/tn-code-sect-7-51-1802.html
Preemption laws are double whammies: they not only actively oppress entire classes of people or jeopardize public health, they also wipe out a basic structure of American democracy, the right of the people to local governance. In Nebraska, we are waging a battle over the NRA’s preemption bill (a piece on this is forthcoming in Seeing Red), and we are also seeing preemption pop up in other contexts, such as an effort last year to preempt local regulation of short-term rentals like AirBnB. Nebraska voters should be on the lookout for any talk by conservative legislators about wiping out local democratic control.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 7:25:38 GMT
POLITICS
Red State, Blue City
grassrootschange.net/2017/03/red-state-blue-city-2/
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/red-state-blue-city/513857/?utm_source=feed
The United States is coming to resemble two countries, one rural and one urban. What happens when they go to war?
By David A. Graham
Stephan Schmitz
MARCH 2017 ISSUE
SHARE
The united states now has its most metropolitan president in recent memory: a Queens-bred, skyscraper-building, apartment-dwelling Manhattanite. Yet it was rural America that carried Donald Trump to victory; the president got trounced in cities. Republican reliance on suburbs and the countryside isn’t new, of course, but in the presidential election, the gulf between urban and nonurban voters was wider than it had been in nearly a century. Hillary Clinton won 88 of the country’s 100 biggest counties, but still went down to defeat.
American cities seem to be cleaving from the rest of the country, and the temptation for liberals is to try to embrace that trend. With Republicans controlling the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most statehouses, Democrats are turning to local ordinances as their best hope on issues ranging from gun control to the minimum wage to transgender rights. Even before Inauguration Day, big-city mayors laid plans to nudge the new administration leftward, especially on immigration—and, should that fail, to join together in resisting its policies.
But if liberal advocates are clinging to the hope that federalism will allow them to create progressive havens, they’re overlooking a big problem: Power may be decentralized in the American system, but it devolves to the state, not the city. Recent events in red states where cities are pockets of liberalism are instructive, and cautionary. Over the past few years, city governments and state legislatures have fought each other in a series of battles involving preemption, the principle that state law trumps local regulation, just as federal law supersedes state law. It hasn’t gone well for the city dwellers.
Close observers of these clashes expect them to proliferate in the years to come, with similar results. “We are about to see a shit storm of state and federal preemption orders, of a magnitude greater than anything in history,” says Mark Pertschuk of Grassroots Change, which tracks such laws through an initiative called Preemption Watch. By the group’s count, at least 36 states introduced laws preempting cities in 2016.
Rural voters harbor growing resentment toward cities from Austin to Atlanta.
State legislatures have put their oar in on issues ranging from the expansive to the eccentric. Common examples involve blocking local minimum-wage and sick-leave ordinances, which are opposed by business groups, and bans on plastic grocery bags, which arouse retailers’ ire. Some states have prohibited cities from enacting firearm regulations, frustrating leaders who say cities have different gun problems than do rural areas. Alabama and Arizona both passed bills targeting “sanctuary cities”—those that do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Even though courts threw out much of that legislation, other states have considered their own versions.
Arizona also made sure cities couldn’t ban the gifts in Happy Meals (cities elsewhere had talked about outlawing them, on the theory that they lure kids to McDonald’s), and when some of its cities cracked down on puppy mills, it barred local regulation of pet breeders, too. Cities in Oklahoma can’t regulate e-cigarettes. Mississippi decreed that towns can’t ban sugary drinks, and the beverage industry is expected to press other states to follow suit.
www.azleg.gov/ars/44/01380.htm
www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/09/cities_are_putting_puppy_mills_out_of_business_by_regulating_pet_stores.html
grassrootschange.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Miss-%C2%A7-75-29-901-.pdf
Most of these laws enforce conservative policy preferences. That’s partly because Republicans enjoy unprecedented control in state capitals—they hold 33 governorships and majorities in 32 state legislatures. The trend also reflects a broader shift: Americans are in the midst of what’s been called “the Big Sort,” as they flock together with people who share similar socioeconomic profiles and politics. In general, that means rural areas are becoming more conservative, and cities more liberal. Even the reddest states contain liberal cities: Half of the U.S. metro areas with the biggest recent population gains are in the South, and they are Democratic. Texas alone is home to four such cities; Clinton carried each of them. Increasingly, the most important political and cultural divisions are not between red and blue states but between red states and the blue cities within.
www.ncsl.org/portals/1/documents/elections/Legis_Control_2016_Post12_6_1pm.pdf
Nowhere has this tension been more dramatic than in North Carolina. The state made headlines last March when its GOP-dominated general assembly abruptly overturned a Charlotte ordinance banning discrimination against LGBT people (and stating, among other things, that transgender people could use the bathroom of their choice). Legislators didn’t just reverse Charlotte’s ordinance, though; the state law, HB2, also barred every city in the state from passing nondiscrimination regulations, and banned local minimum-wage laws, too.
North Carolina’s legislature wasn’t new to preemption—previously, it had banned sanctuary cities, prohibited towns from destroying guns confiscated by the police, and blocked local fracking regulations. It had restructured the Greensboro city council so as to dilute Democratic clout. In Wake County, home to Raleigh, it had redrawn the districts for both the school board and county commission, shifting power from urban to suburban voters. The state had seized Asheville’s airport and tried to seize its water system too. Lawmakers had also passed a bill wresting control of Charlotte’s airport from the city and handing it to a new commission.
wncn.com/2015/10/28/gov-mccrory-expected-to-sign-controversial-immigration-bill-wednesday/
HB2 was different, though—it set off a fierce nationwide backlash, including a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit and boycotts by businesses, sports leagues, and musicians. Since corporate expansions, conventions, and concerts tend to take place in cities, North Carolina’s cities have suffered the most. Within two months of HB2’s passage, Charlotte’s Chamber of Commerce estimated that the city had lost nearly $285 million and 1,300 jobs—and that was before the NBA yanked its 2017 All-Star Game from the city. Asheville, a bohemian tourist magnet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lost millions from canceled conferences alone.
www.metroweekly.com/2016/05/charlotte-chamber-commerce-hb-2-cost-mecklenburg-county-285-million/
www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2016/04/27/hb2-loss-nears-2-million-cvb-plans/83587154/
For Asheville residents, the series of preemption bills felt like bullying. “People are furious. They’re confused,” Esther Manheimer, Asheville’s mayor, told me as her city battled to retain control of its water system. “We’re a very desirable city to live in. We’re on all the top-10 lists. How would anyone have an issue with the way Asheville is running its city, or the things that the people of Asheville value?”
National mythology cherishes the New England town-hall meeting as the foundation of American democracy, and once upon a time, it was. But the Constitution doesn’t mention cities at all, and since the late 19th century, courts have accepted that cities are creatures of the state.
Some states delegate certain powers to cities, but states remain the higher authority, even if city dwellers don’t realize it. “Most people think, We have an election here, we elect a mayor and our city council, we organize our democracy—we should have a right to control our own city in our own way,” says Gerald Frug, a Harvard Law professor and an expert on local government. “You go to any place in America and ask, ‘Do you think this city can control its own destiny?’ ‘Of course it can!’ The popular conception of what cities do runs in direct conflict with the legal reality.”
The path to the doctrine of state supremacy was rocky. In 1857, when New York State snatched some of New York City’s powers—including its police force—riots followed. But after the Civil War, the tide of public and legal opinion turned against local government. Following rapid urban growth, fueled in part by immigration, cities came to be seen as dens of licentiousness and subversive politics. Moreover, many municipalities brought trouble on themselves, spending profligately to lure railroads through town. Unable to make good on their debts, some towns and cities dissolved, leaving states holding the bag and inspiring laws that barred cities from independently issuing bonds. In an 1868 decision, the jurist John Forrest Dillon declared that cities were entirely beholden to their state legislature: “It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control.”
Today’s clampdowns on cities echo 19th-century anxieties about urban progressivism, demographics, and insolvency. Many of the southern cities that have been targeted for preemption are seen as magnets for out-of-state interlopers. Republican officeholders have blasted nondiscrimination ordinances like Charlotte’s as contravening nature and Christian morality. They’ve argued that a patchwork of wage and sick-leave laws will drive away businesses, and that fracking bans will stifle the economy.
Yet the economic reality that underpinned rural-urban distrust in the 19th century is now inverted: In most states, agriculture is no longer king. Rural areas are struggling, while densely packed areas with highly educated workforces and socially liberal lifestyles flourish. In turn, rural voters harbor growing resentment toward those in cities, from Austin to Atlanta, from Birmingham to Chicago.
In this context of increasing rural-urban division, people on both sides of the political aisle have warmed to positions typically associated with their adversaries. The GOP has long viewed itself as the party of decentralization, criticizing Democrats for trying to dictate to local communities from Capitol Hill, but now Republicans are the ones preempting local government. Meanwhile, after years of seeing Democratic reforms overturned by preemption, the party of big government finds itself championing decentralized power.
Both sides may find their new positions unexpectedly difficult. As North Carolina’s experience shows, preemption-happy state governments have a tendency to overreach: The state supreme court ruled the attempted takeover of Asheville’s water system unconstitutional. Federal courts struck down the redistricting efforts in Greensboro and Wake County. The takeover of Charlotte’s airport foundered when the FAA pointed out that the state didn’t have the authority to transfer the airport’s certification. In November, voters ousted Governor Pat McCrory, in part because of HB2’s deep unpopularity.
In a particularly odd twist, last summer Republicans in the North Carolina statehouse joined Democrats in rejecting a bill, offered by a powerful outgoing Republican senator, to redistrict Asheville’s city council. In a heated debate, Representative Michael Speciale, a Republican, mocked his colleagues for suddenly acting as if they knew better than the people of Asheville. “We may not agree ideologically with the citizens of Asheville or the city council of Asheville,” he said. “I’m sorry, but we don’t need to agree with them, because we don’t live there.”
By and large, though, cities hold the weaker hand. It makes sense that these areas, finding themselves economically vital, increasingly progressive, and politically disempowered, would want to use local ordinances as a bulwark against conservative state and federal policies. But this gambit is likely to backfire. Insofar as states have sometimes granted cities leeway to enact policy in the past, that forbearance has been the result of political norms, not legal structures. Once those norms crumble, and state legislatures decide to assert their authority, cities will have very little recourse.
An important lesson of last year’s presidential election is that American political norms are much weaker than they had appeared, allowing a scandal-plagued, unpopular candidate to triumph—in part because voters outside of cities objected to the pace of cultural change. Another lesson is that the United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban.
Only one of them, at present, appears entitled to self-determination.
David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 8:34:25 GMT
Cities Need a National Movement Against Conservative Meddling
slate.com/business/2017/01/campaign-to-defend-local-solutions-is-a-necessary-movement-to-protect-progressive-cities.html
Good news! The mayor of Tallahassee just started it.
BY HENRY GRABAR
JAN 10, 20171:02 PM
Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum speaks at a press conference for the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions on Tuesday in Tallahassee, Florida.
Campaign to Defend Local Solutions
Faraway legislators, manipulated by shadowy special interests, are coming for your rights. “They’re threatened by the local control you earn with your tax dollars—your right to have local problems addressed with local solutions,” a new campaign warns. “And they’re threatening to take your local voice away with fines and other punishment.”
It sounds like a late-’70s tax revolt pamphlet, a Reagan-era protest against egghead planners and meddling bureaucrats—or even the Tea Party. But it’s actually a call to arms from a Democrat: Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, who is currently weathering a nutty standoff with the National Rifle Association.
Gillum, like officials in Birmingham, Alabama; Madison, Wisconsin; and other red-state cities, has been going to court over a “pre-emption” dispute between his city and the state of Florida. The issue is not whether a gun-owner can fire off a round in one of the city’s public parks—that, Gillum concedes, was settled by Florida’s 1987 law that vanquished hundreds of municipal gun control measures. The question is to what extent Gillum and his colleagues in city government can be held personally responsible for leaving the city’s obsolete, unenforced gun prohibition on the books—a symbolic gesture of resistance. A 2011 Florida law exposes local politicians to thousands in fines, legal expenses, and damages for the content of administrative codes in “knowing and willful” contravention of state law.
Which brings us to the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions, the initiative Gillum launched last week to build a coalition against heavy-handed state governments. As a rebellion against “pre-emption,” the statehouse method of stripping powers from cities and counties, his movement is nonpartisan. “There’s a will to expand the power of the state over local governments,” Gillum said in a phone call on Monday. “It’s a total trampling over local control.”
States have long used pre-emption bills to overrule local bans on smoking and firearms. In the past 10 years, with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, this has expanded to encompass sanctuary cities, puppies, paid sick leave, and more. Since Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011, Florida has passed dozens of laws restricting local lawmakers. State by state, these laws have helped build a nationwide wall against progressive policy both existing and imagined.
Defend Local, which has quickly garnered support in Florida and a signal boost from Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, offers a glimpse of a way forward for beleaguered progressives—a political framework to mobilize the American left around its heartening victories and infuriating defeats. With the GOP in control of Washington and most statehouses, the fight for local control has shifted from reactionary dogma to left-wing rallying point. Gillum has framed Defend Local as too “inside baseball” to form a platform for his suspected run for governor and, we may infer, for broader political action. But in that he may be selling the concept short. For progressives, the fight against pre-emption is not about legal minutiae or political scorekeeping. It’s the whole game.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 8:40:12 GMT
The Political Outlook Isn't Good for Blue Cities in Red States
www.newamerica.org/weekly/blue-cities-red-states-preemption/
WEEKLY ARTICLE
CrackerClips Stock Media / Shutterstock.com
By Maresa Strano
April 11, 2019
Two refrains reverberate throughout the political discourse on America’s cities in this era of peak polarization. The first is that “cities are rising.” Citing frustration with federal gridlock, progressive city leaders are taking initiative on all manner of issues, including income inequality, climate change, voting reform, and public health. In so doing, cities across the United States—from Seattle to Pittsburgh to Indianapolis—are earning the label laboratories of progressive innovation.
www.thenation.com/admin-taxonomy/cities-rising/
The second is that “cities are sinking.” A proxy for the accelerating threat that climate change poses to U.S. cities, this narrative underscores the literal prospect of coastal cities becoming submerged, and the nationwide ripple effects that may come about as a result. It also shines a light on how President Donald Trump’s climate change denial and his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement exacerbate the difficulties cities already face in grappling with and preparing for climate disaster.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/climate-change-damaging-american-democracy/573769/
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/he-gets-to-decide-trump-escalates-his-fight-against-climate-science-ahead-of-2020/2019/02/28/6e12dbbc-3aa3-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html?utm_term=.1dff58a5d28e
www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jun/12/climate-change-trump-new-york-city-san-francisco-houston-miami
Both versions of the story are worthy of coverage. But this fixation on national-level politics, and the respective appeal to the optimist or worry-wart in each of us, has given them an unfair advantage over a third, equally important framing: Cities are weakening.
The reason is preemption, a legal doctrine that holds that any local ordinance can be overridden by state law, just as any state law can be preempted by a federal one. More specifically, the reason is Republican-controlled states’ misuse of preemption to block progressive policies from being enacted under their roof.
ballotpedia.org/Preemption_conflicts_between_state_and_local_governments
Indeed, while preemption has always been available to state lawmakers, the rate of preemption bills has spiked dramatically with the rise of state-level conservative power. “Six out of ten Americans now live in a state where a city can’t pass a minimum wage that’s higher than the state minimum wage,” according to Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor of political affairs at Columbia University and the author of the new book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation. Given the tremendous success of the Fight for $15 movement, this statistic serves as a stark reminder that “success is necessarily limited to these blue states,” owing to state preemption.
global.oup.com/academic/product/state-capture-9780190870799?cc=us&lang=en&
global.oup.com/academic/product/state-capture-9780190870799?cc=us&lang=en&
This unprecedented flexing of preemption power was part and parcel of a greater cross-state conservative mobilization strategy, one that was over three decades in the making. As Hertel-Fernandez writes in State Capture, the strategy was coordinated and executed by three conservative organizations—the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network (SPN), and Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—which he dubs the “right-wing troika.”
State Capture traces the troika’s history through conservatives’ phenomenal takeover of the states in 2010 and Trump’s ascent to the presidency following the 2016 election. The book also asks a number of questions: What did conservatives do right? Why have liberals struggled to build cross-state organizing clout? How can the left recover from the incursion of red statehouses into blue cities?
It was these questions that took center stage at an event last week, “State Capture: How Conservatives Claimed Power and How to Restore Balance,” hosted by New America’s Political Reform program. The event brought together Hertel-Fernandez, program fellow Lydia Bean, and program director Mark Schmitt, who each shared their expertise on and experience with state power-building. They paid special attention to the ways in which progressives can build the infrastructure necessary to reverse conservative efforts to demobilize big-D and small-d democratic state-level organizing in recent years.
www.newamerica.org/political-reform/events/state-capture/
Hertel-Fernandez discussed his findings on what facilitated the rise and reign of conservative organizing, policy, and social networks. In particular, he credits continuous cross-state funding and operations, decentralized organizational structures, perseverance, and the promotion of specific bills that pave the way for future victories.
To push back against this, he recommends that left-wing groups take to heart the lessons of the troika’s successes as they chart their own state power-building strategy, rather than simply re-appropriate items from the right-wing toolkit, which, as he notes, has only generated poor results. This “secret sauce” fallacy, as Hertel-Fernandez and Schmitt put it during the event, has contributed to the demise of multiple progressive state policy networks. Among them, the cheekily named American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE), threw all of its resources behind creating a library of model bills—model bills being one of ALEC’s specialties—and expected state power to follow. It didn’t.
But cafeteria-style picking from the tradition of conservative organizing isn’t always a specific choice. Often, it’s the best these groups can do with insufficient and inconsistent funding. Hertel-Fernandez criticized the left-wing funding apparatus for failing to provide necessary and sustained support for promising counterweights to the troika (a manifestation of what he calls “national elitism” among high-octane funders). He also referenced the “myth of conservative diabolical competence and big money,” an excuse he says liberals, and not only funders, fall back on again and again.
The left indeed has more than enough money to mount a legitimate challenge to conservative dominance at the state level—if only it could direct funds there in a consistent and sufficient manner, as Bean emphasized in her opening remarks.
A Harvard-trained sociologist and movement strategist, as well as Political Reform’s newest program fellow, Bean drew on her first-hand experience trying to build state power as a leader and consultant for faith-based organizations in Texas for her analysis of progressives’ struggle to compete at the state level—to “unscrew themselves”—under the cloud of preemption.
She stressed how preemption renders progressive organizations in Texas’ biggest, wealthiest, and bluest cities effectively powerless, and reflected on her work—done together with a core set of progressive organizations—to persuade others in the tent to prioritize a broad regional strategy that places the preemption issue front and center. In Texas, she said, the Republican-controlled legislature has gone to great lengths to disempower the state’s blue cities via preemption on issues like raising property taxes (to fund public education) and paid sick leave.
“We’re also seeing the growth of these ‘Deathstar preemption bills,’” Bean said, which would prohibit any and all local action related to, say, economic issues, in one fell swoop.
Acting as both moderator and presenter, Schmitt, a former foundation program officer and policy director on Capitol Hill, reminded the audience that preemption isn’t just a Texas thing—or a thing that only flows in one direction. “You can think of it as control at the state level allowing conservatives to exercise power down and restrict democracy down, as well as express power upwards in the way they control, for example, congressional districting and so forth,” Schmitt said. “It’s one of those issues that, when you think about it at first, is a bit of an eye-roll … but it’s actually profoundly significant.”
While all three presenters agreed that the left shouldn’t, as Hertel-Fernandez put it, “blindly carbon-copy” whatever the right does, one tactic it ought to borrow if it hopes to counter the troika is investing in legislative advocacy centered on bills that produce positive feedback effects for Democrats.
In other words, it should play the long game.
To illustrate this point, Hertel-Fernandez spoke about a bill passed by the Iowa state legislature in 2017 to restrict collective-bargaining rights—an anti-union bill. “Politicians did not campaign on it, and the voters did not ask for it,” he said. Yet it was the first item on the agenda for the newly sworn-in Republican-controlled legislature. Why? Because any laws that undercut or incapacitate Democratic power centers like public-sector unions hurt Democrats’ chances in subsequent elections. Or put another way, these laws can act as an insurance policy for Republicans to hold onto state power. The previous November, Republicans gained trifecta control of the state government in Iowa—and they wanted to keep it that way.
State Capture asks a number of questions. Some—like “what did the right do right?” and “what did the left do wrong?”—we can answer to a satisfactory degree. As to what the long-term policy consequences of unchallenged conservative state hegemony will be, however, we can only speculate. Likely, Republicans will continue to capture states with the help of policy feedback bills like the one in Iowa. And if this is true, they’ll continue to invoke their preemption authority to override measures designed to improve the lives of ordinary workers, curtail the effects of climate change, and promote economic growth in some of America’s most populous and bluest urban centers. Unless progressive politicians, funders, and organizers can shape up and formulate a strategy to rival conservative power at the state level, the outlook for blue cities in red states isn’t so good.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 11, 2022 10:44:05 GMT
 ‘Breaking point’: Why the red state/blue city conflict is peaking over masks
edition.cnn.com/2021/08/17/politics/2020-census-red-states-blue-cities
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein
Updated 3:51 PM EDT, Tue August 17, 2021CNN — Political and population trends are colliding as the steadily escalating tension between red states and their blue cities across the Sun Belt is reaching a breaking point over the volatile issue of school masking. For more than a decade, GOP governors and Republican-controlled legislatures in states from Florida and Georgia to Texas and Arizona, reflecting the priorities and preferences of their primarily White and non-urban coalition, have moved with increasing boldness to override decisions made by Democratic-controlled city and county governments in their states’ racially diverse largest population centers on issues from environmental standards to workplace protections and even police funding. These tensions are reaching a crisis stage in the Sun Belt because they pit the claims of the nation’s core metropolitan economic engines against a GOP management based in the rural-small-town hinterland that still controls the redistricting process and is pulling out all the stops in limiting the urban vote.Mark Muro, policy director, Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program |
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