Eric Gay/AP Photo
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, left, listens as Gov. Greg Abbott, right, gives his State of the State address in the House chamber, February 5, 2019, in Austin, Texas.
As the dividing lines in the Civil War of 1861 separated North from South, so the dividing lines in our current civil war—the ones where the conflicts are fiercest—separate red states from their blue cities. You have Tennessee against Nashville; Alabama against Birmingham; Kentucky against Louisville; Florida against Tampa; Indiana against Indianapolis; Texas against Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, and San Antonio. Rural against urban, states against cities.
More precisely, red states are not simply opposing, but enforcing, their rule over blue cities. In Tennessee, the Republican legislature strips Nashville of its congressional representative, rejects its push for gun controls, and expels Nashville’s delegate (Memphis’s, too) from their assembly seats, although the cities swiftly returned them. In Alabama, Birmingham creates a municipal minimum wage until the legislature enacts a law forbidding cities from setting a minimum wage. In Florida, the elected district attorney of Hillsborough County (Tampa) says he won’t enforce the state’s new law criminalizing abortions; the governor (and imminent presidential candidate) removes him from office. In Texas, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio enact paid sick leave ordinances; the Republican state courts (and one federal court) strike them down. And for good measure, the Washington, D.C., city council passes and the mayor signs a police reform law, but D.C. is still overseen by Congress, which, at the behest of Republicans and a handful of Democrats, just repealed that law (though President Biden has said he’ll veto that repeal).
It’s clear what’s going on here. As cities and their metro areas keep growing, they pose a threat to Republican rule. Republican fears—and repression—are most evident in Texas, where the big cities just keep getting bigger and, worse, more liberal. Stripping the cities’ power and taking control of their elections has become Republicans’ primary means of ensuring the party’s untrammeled dominance.
Over the past decade, Democrats have won elections for nearly all offices in the state’s major metro areas. Of the state’s large cities, only Fort Worth has a Republican mayor, which makes Fort Worth the only one of the nation’s 20 largest cities with a Republican chief executive, a position that got even lonelier after last week’s losses for GOP mayors in Jacksonville and Colorado Springs.
To allay their fears, Republicans in Texas’s state legislature are now advancing a bill that would enable the state to order a new election when it suspects there have been problems with voting or vote-counting in any county with at least 2.7 million residents. Texas only has one county with at least 2.7 million residents: Harris County, home of metro Houston, the biggest Texas city of all.
That’s not the only disempower-city bill now working its way to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. The omnibus HB 2127, which passed the state Senate last week, is better known as the “Death Star bill” for what it will bring down upon Texas’s cities. With a gloating anti-urbanism not seen since the Visigoths sacked Rome, it’s the bill’s sponsors who have given the bill its Death Star sobriquet. As the newsletter of one right-wing Texas “think” tank puts it, the legislation:
employs field preemption to say that city regulations can’t exceed state law regarding agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, local government, natural resources, occupations, and property. It reins in what local governments can and cannot do, and forces them to get back to the basics.
The question the bill thus raises is, why have cities at all? If local government can’t pass laws, what, exactly, is its purpose? After all, if its ordinances can’t “exceed” state law, neither can they violate state law by undercutting it, unless the law specifically gives them that option. All power, apparently, to the state.
City residents can, of course, fight back by voting for Democrats, or even nonpartisan champions of local government, in state elections. But in light of that election bill referenced above, Texas Republicans are simultaneously moving to attain the power to overturn elections in the state’s biggest city—with bills likely to come that will extend that power to all the state’s big cities if this Houston-only bill passes muster with the state’s Republican-controlled courts. And once local governments can’t actually do anything, the habit of voting will surely diminish among those Democratic city-dwellers.
Republicans are fond of citing the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But I know of no state constitutions that say that the powers not delegated to the state by its constitution are reserved to municipalities. Indeed, cities are chartered by and are creatures of their states.
That said, the sharing of powers between states, cities, and counties has been a fairly constant feature of American life. It’s only recently, as cities have become home to a more liberal populace (heavy on the young, minorities, immigrants, and the “creative class,” as Richard Florida has termed it) and the driving force behind states’ economies, that Republicans—representing older, whiter, embittered residents of rural areas that capital has largely abandoned—have moved, with Texas in the lead, to strip them of all power.
So no longer will cities in these states have the power to raise the local minimum wage, or require safety checks on construction sites, or keep teenagers from buying and carrying assault weapons, or establish a limit on how close oil drilling can come to a school, or not prosecute women or their doctors for terminating an unwanted pregnancy. The policies of Republican America will be enforced in Democratic America, just as, in the run-up to our earlier Civil War, the Southern majorities in Congress passed a federal law requiring citizens in the free Northern states to help slave hunters capture escaped slaves and return them to their Southern owners. Some Northern states objected, but that put them in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Just as the Southern slaveowners never believed in states’ rights so long as they controlled the national government, today’s Republicans don’t believe in local power so long as Democrats cluster in cities. They believe in state preemption to the point of local extinction.
So, what’s a city to do if it’s in a red state run by the likes of a Ron DeSantis or the autocrats of Texas? Ultimately, there’s not much they can do, inasmuch as they’re constitutionally subservient to states that preempt them at every turn. They can’t secede, and it will be some time until their numbers swell to the point that no voter suppression can keep them from running their states.
For a long time, then, the solution for the Austins and the Houstons, the Tampas and the Birminghams, will only be found in Washington, D.C. It’s only there that the lords of preemption who govern Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and kindred red states can themselves be preempted by federal laws that set the standards and create the freedoms that Republican state governments now repress and that local governments would enact if they had the power.
Until it’s again unambiguously legal to act locally, the way to win this civil war is to act nationally.
