By Tom Baxter
While the Georgia House of Representatives passed legislation creating disciplinary committees for local prosecutors last week, the Florida State Senate passed a bill banning local governments from imposing rent controls.
Shortly after its passage in the Tennessee Senate, Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill that would halve the size of the Nashville Metro Council, from 40 to 20.
These are the latest examples of the growing trend of Republican governors and state legislatures using pre-emption legislation to override the authority of mostly Democratic local governments on a range of issues from elections to abortion to housing laws.
Analysts attribute the rise in pre-emption legislation to the election of Barack Obama and the subsequent rise of Republicans in state governments across the country. The 2020 election and the fall of the Roe vs. Wade litigation are among the factors that have fueled the trend in recent years.
The Local Solutions Support Center, which opposes preemption, reports that it is prosecuting around 400 preemption bills in parliaments this year. It’s about a range of current societal issues, but it’s also about tinkering with the mechanics of local government, as in the case of the Nashville Metro Council.
The escalating efforts by legislators to exercise their authority over local officials underscores an important point. Despite all the talk in Washington, the most thorny conflicts are not between the red and blue states, but the conflicts within each state between rural and urban areas. The same lines of conflict exist in blue states like Illinois and New York, but mostly we’re talking about red states with big blue cities, like Georgia.
Proponents of Senate Bill 92, which establishes the District Attorney Oversight Commission, cited statements by district attorneys that they had no intention of prosecuting petty marijuana violations or abortions as the reason their bill was necessary. Democrats raised fears it was dealing with the investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis into whether former President Donald Trump attempted to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, and Willis himself accused supporters of the bill of racial motives.
In Texas, local opposition to the state’s new abortion law passed legislation in this year’s session that would impose fines and possible impeachment on local prosecutors who refuse to enforce the abortion law or a law restricting transgender medical care.
Florida, like Georgia, has a shortage of affordable housing. The Ban on local rental price controls was churned into a much larger bill that would give developers tax breaks and provide $711 million for affordable housing programs. It met with little resistance from either party.
The Florida ban, however, highlights a potential policy flaw in this wave of preemption legislation. While muscle flexing may be popular with their base, it can put Republican lawmakers on the wrong side on issues that don’t always succumb to partisan lines. A local Orange County, Fla., initiative that would have imposed a one-year cap on rent increases received 60 percent of the vote in last year’s election, more votes in the county than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In a nationwide survey, 80 percent expressed more general support for rent controls.
By far the most preemptive legislation under consideration this year involves bans on critical race theory in schools and books in school libraries. Again, these measures tend to be more popular with the conservative base, but much less so with the general public.
We can expect there to be more legislation in the future banning local governments from restricting the use of gas stoves, which is a heavily publicized issue in conservative circles. Also, there is a bill in Texas that would prohibit local governments from regulating greenhouse gas emissions in any way, and a bill in South Carolina that would prohibit local governments from using environmental, social, and governance standards when evaluating contractors . You must be asking yourself: What are other standards?
Bills like this, if passed, will conflict with state environmental regulations. More importantly, politically, such legislation closely resembles the oppressive big government approach that Conservatives are said to abhor.
