The Death Star vs Local Democracy
The 50-state fight few people are talking about
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
We’ve got a big story tonight about an under-appreciated and very pressing topic tonight, so I want to jump right into it. But just before we do that, let me be the 20th person to introduce you to Substack’s new Notes feature.
Notes is essentially like Twitter, but with more depth and far less hate speech. A place for writers to communicate with subscribers in shorter updates, which is perfect for all of us, given the pace of news. I’ve long been wary of sending too many emails, and Notes doesn’t often go to your inbox; instead, it’s a running feed on both the website and the Substack app.
You can find my Notes all in one place, but you’ll likely want to follow along in real-time, so click the below and come along for the ride:
Alright, now let’s get to it — Texans, you’re going to want to read this whole thing.
It took years of organizing for housing activists in Florida to win legal protections for renters in several major cities and counties. It won't take more than another hour or two for the Republican legislature to wipe all of those hard-fought gains right off the map.
The Florida House Judiciary Committee voted on Tuesday to advance HB 1417, a broad new preemption bill that would prevent the passage of any local renter protections that exceed the paltry few offered in state housing law. The subject of heavy lobbying by the real estate industry, the bill also aims to nullify the provisions in the Tenant Bill of Rights laws adopted over the past few years in Orange County, Miami-Dade, Tampa, and St. Petersburg.
Just like that, well over one million people would lose guaranteed legal defense for evictions, the enforced courtesy of advance notice of rent increases, and the legal right to sue landlords for not making essential repairs. There’s just about zero chance that the bill won’t pass, and when it does, it’ll be the second piece in the Florida GOP’s total takeover of housing law.
Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that fully bans local rent control in the Sunshine State, a thumb in the eye of renters in the Orlando area after they cleared all the state-imposed hurdles required to declare a state of emergency and enact a temporary limit on rent increases in November.
“It was overwhelmingly popular and called for by the local community, and the state moved to remove that exemption in retaliation,” says Marissa Roy, the Legal Team Lead at the Local Solutions Support Center. “Not because [state lawmakers] have any insight about what is going on in Orange County or what the needs are in Orange County around housing affordability, but simply because they disagree with the concept at the state level.”
Republican lawmakers all over the country have been flooding the zone with proposals intended to limit basic human and economic rights this year. While there have been waves of preemption bills before, this year’s number continues a trend that began about a decade ago and went into overdrive during the extraordinary tumult of 2020.
Preemption as a principle isn’t always negative; in many cases, states use these laws to create a minimum set of guaranteed rights and regulations that municipalities can then build on. In others, they’re more technocratic guidelines to ensure continuity for residents and businesses. The latter scenario had been the center of GOP talking points for a long time, though they’ve become far less convincing.
“Preemption 10 years ago might have been about legitimate concerns about maintaining consistency, and setting minimums that cities could tailor and exceed and make sure to frame around their local needs and interests,” Roy says. “What we're seeing now is the abuse of preemption to really weigh in on issues where the state is simply disagreeing with local policymaking and trying to score some partisan wins.”
Donald Trump, the migration patterns expedited by Covid, and to a lesser extent a revitalized progressive movement, hastened a fundamental realignment in American politics; suburbs turned solidly blue and cities went dark navy, while rural America has been lit up in crimson red. Trump and conservative media turned everything into politics, and then politics into culture war, which turned state legislatures, gerrymandered to protect radical lawmakers, into readymade battlefields.
Cynics like Florida’s Ron DeSantis began to ban schools and municipalities from instituting mask and vaccine requirements, then seized on the Black Lives Matter protests to make overtly racist lies about crime, embrace cops, and use state preemptive power to stop city police reforms dead in their tracks.
All of this was made possible by legislative maps that rewarded (and continue to reward) dramatic lurches to the right and installed no small number of extremist reactionaries in public office. In 2022, the number of preemption bills filed doubled to more than 1000, and in the first three months of this year, the number has already reached 626.
“Gerrymandering has created state legislatures that are less representative of urban constituencies, that really dilutes people of color and their voices in the state legislative process,” Roy says. “And so, whereas local governments might be more representative and more diverse, you're seeing legislatures that are less diverse and increasingly partisan.”
In many states, those issues have involved education, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, gun control, basic health, and reproductive rights. Some are cruel; others idiotic. In Oklahoma, for example, a recent law just prohibited schools from sending kids home if they’re found to have head lice, and in Montana, the legislature banned mandatory quarantine for people who have had direct contact with people found to have Ebola.
Today’s brand of outrage conservative works best when there’s a liberal (or logical) policy to fuel its backlash or new avenue of bigotry to pursue. In many states, that’s meant moving to stifle the progressive initiatives that were developed to preserve civil liberties or catch up with the rest of the developed world.
There is no state more bent on weaponizing preemption than Texas, where regulation and civil liberties have rarely taken legal priority at the statehouse in Austin. Between the growth in first-generation Americans and waves of young and liberal professionals, Texas has seen its biggest cities and suburbs move further to the left in recent years, while Republicans have flocked to more conservative parts of the state. The shifts have turned a natural one-party state into a gerrymandered one-party state with patches of fervent progressivism.
A progressive activist class has led successful local ballot initiatives to decriminalize marijuana and elect prosecutors that promise to deprioritize the enforcement of abortion bans, which in turn has been met by rebukes and legislation intended to prevent anything other than strict adherence to right-wing orthodoxy.
Unsatisfied by sniping down progressive local laws individually, Republicans in the Texas legislature are now moving forward with a new omnibus preemption bill that represents such a massive and unprecedented attack on local democracy.
House Bill 2127, which passed through committee last week, is so vast and dangerous that it’s been nicknamed the Death Star by local political observers. Local governments would be rendered impotent and irrelevant by its passage, banned from doing everything from responding to public health crises and creating labor protections to tweaking restaurant health codes and standards for pet groomers.
The purview really is that wide, as its passage would prevent local governments from regulating agriculture, finance, insurance, labor rights, natural resources, and occupational codes — in essence, each and every one of a government’s functions other than paving roads, collecting taxes, giving money to police (defunding has already been outlawed in Texas, and operating schools (that’s next).
It would also overturn any existing local laws and regulations that exceed the barebones laws set by the state government, wiping out recent gains in liberal cities and growing suburbs — not that Texas Republicans have had much trouble achieving that in the past.
In the summer of 2018, San Antonio’s city council approved an ordinance requiring employers to give employees between six and eight days of paid time off per year. Having originated as a citywide petition, the law marked a major win for both workers and direct democracy — at least while it lasted, anyway.
Shortly after it passed, conservative activists and lobbyists sued to have the paid leave requirement blocked and nullified. The following November, a judge issued a temporary injunction that prevented it from taking effect, and after a series of subsequent legal setbacks, the city council admitted defeat the following year.
Though disheartening, some city councilors had always anticipated state nullification; Austin’s paid leave law, passed earlier in 2018, was already on its way to being blocked by a judge by the time San Antonio passed its ordinance. Dallas fared no better, as its paid leave requirement was rendered defunct in 2020.
If nothing else, nipping these efforts in the bud ahead of time will be greatly appreciated by the corporate lawyers that have been dragged into so many fights against working people.
“It's easier to work at the state level, as opposed to trying to lobby every single municipality within a state to make sure that they don't pass legislation that's against the interest group’s interest,” says Megan E. Hatch, an associate professor at Cleveland State’s School of Urban Affairs. “It's easier to just go at the state level when you're focusing your effort at one place.”
The trade-off for convenience will likely be chilling. Local governments, reduced to mere administrators, many millions of people denied say over their day-to-day lives, and civic engagement rendered obsolete.
In short, the bill is a recipe for everyday right-wing tyranny.
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The right wing is emboldened because of the far right scotus. Appeal, appeal, appeal until you get to the top of the judicial trash pile, where you are guaranteed a win. State governments have more money to spend on lawsuits than cities and counties.
Wonderful coverage of a dangerously important new tool: horrorfying for people living in states using this new trick! We must vote them out.