By reducing the right of localities to make their own decisions, Texas has joined dozens of other states that have asserted their dominance over cities in recent years through a practice known as state pre-emption. One watchdog group has counted more than 650 pre-emption bills in state legislatures this year; the large majority have been introduced by Republican lawmakers to curb policymaking in cities run by Democrats.
It’s not a new phenomenon — city halls and state capitols have always jockeyed for authority, and in a legal showdown, the state usually wins, as the more supreme power. But conservatives used to champion ideas like local autonomy, devolution and even block grants as a way of weakening centralized control. The 20th-century movement toward “home rule,” letting localities handle most of their own affairs, was once supported by both Republicans and Democrats. What’s now become clear is that Republicans dislike local control if they are not in charge of it. The home rule movement has steadily faded in the last few decades as state lawmakers on the right have become more aggressive in invalidating the priorities of elected officials in cities, which have moved leftward in their voting patterns in recent years.
“We are seeing a real increase in the pre-emption of local authority,” said Clarence Anthony, chief executive of the National League of Cities, and former mayor of South Bay, Fla. “Local officials are elected by citizens to represent them, and they’re the ones who know what their citizens need the most. But we’ve been seeing state legislators trying to have control over local communities, and that’s not good governance at all.”
Many of the recent bills are particularly brazen in their disdain for local decision-making. The Florida Legislature passed a bill in early May allowing businesses to challenge municipal ordinances in court simply for being “unreasonable.” If they win, the businesses can collect $50,000 in attorney fees from the taxpayers if the ordinance is not withdrawn, but cities can’t collect attorney fees if they win. In Tennessee, Republicans were angry that leaders in Nashville blocked a bid to host the 2024 G.O.P. convention, so they passed a bill to shrink the size of the Nashville Metro Council and upend its voting district maps, which many residents say will dilute the political strength of minority groups. A local court put that law on hold for now, but the final outcome has not been determined.
Most of these legislative power plays follow the ideological patterns of the hard-right MAGA core within the Republican Party, which is often more visible at the state than the national level. The efforts tend to fall into the following categories:
Democracy and voting. Several states are trying to make it harder for citizens to enact laws or constitutional changes through the referendum process, after abortion-rights supporters won several ballot initiatives in 2022. In Ohio, Republican lawmakers put a measure on the August ballot that would raise the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment to 60 percent from a simple majority, where it has been since 1912, hoping to head off organized efforts to permit abortion in the state, as well as to raise the minimum wage and undo Republican gerrymandering. (They put the measure on a low-turnout election day, rather than the better-known day in November.) Arkansas now requires signatures from 50 counties (of 75) to get an initiative on the ballot, up from 15. Anyone can propose a ballot initiative, regardless of their ideology — recent measures in Kansas and Kentucky, for example, were proposed by anti-abortion groups. (Both were ultimately rejected by voters.) Restricting these ballot measures is fundamentally about depriving voters of a way to put a check on legislators, regardless of ideology.