Evidently, The GOP War On Cities Isn’t Limited To Indiana

When the Indiana legislature is in session, residents of urban areas don’t feel safe–and there is ample reason for our angst, as this blog has repeatedly documented.  A sad side effect is currently playing out in the Indianapolis City County Council, where the Democratic majority is trying to quiet one Counselor’s expressions of anger over the arrogance of a legislator who says he knows best what sort of transit city folks are entitled to. The Democratic caucus is evidently worried that open resistance will make the legislature even harder to deal with.

The bottom line, of course, is that Hoosiers–both city dwellers and rural folks–are absolutely helpless to influence our legislative overlords. Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, legislators in Indiana choose their voters, not the other way around, and Indiana lacks the ability to mount referenda or initiatives. We are truly subjects, not citizens.

There’s no mystery about why.

Our Red state legislature makes war on the cities that provide virtually all of the tax dollars they spend–the cities that are demonstrably the economic engine of the state–because cities are where Democrats live and vote.

It turns out that Indiana is not the only retrograde Red state engaging in these tactics. According to a recent article in The American Prospect, Republican-led states have now taken to blocking liberal cities from even thinking about legislating on behalf of their residents.

There’s nothing historically novel about America’s politics dividing along urban vs. rural or cosmopolitan vs. parochial lines. One has to go back a full century, however, to find a time when the nation’s political fault lines ran so clearly along the city/country divide as they do today.

“Those people” tend to live in cities, and they tend to vote Democratic.

 In the 1920s, cities were too Catholic and Jewish and freethinking for the countryside’s Protestant traditionalists, and new urban-based media (radio, movies) brought the taint of the new to rural communities whose susceptible young people were lighting out for the cities. Today, culture wars and economic conflicts also play out largely along urban/rural lines. Of the top 35 cities in America by population, only four have Republican mayors, and one of those, Eric Johnson of Dallas, Texas, was elected as a Democrat and switched parties in 2023.

State level lawmakers may not be the brainiest of people, but a number of them have figured out that–as the saying goes–there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Since Republican legislatures and governors can’t stop city residents from electing Democrats, however, they’ve devised a whopper of a Plan B: negating majority rule in those areas by denying those cities the right to enact any laws or promote any policies that run counter to the preferences of the governor and the legislature.

The article lists a number of examples. North Carolina’s legislature nullified a Charlotte ordinance protecting LGBTQ rights. When the city of Birmingham passed a municipal minimum-wage statute, the Republican state legislature outlawed municipal minimum-wage laws.

More recently, majority-Black and majority-Democratic Jackson, Mississippi, has had a crime problem, so the Republican Mississippi state legislature responded by enacting a law that stripped criminal trials from the jurisdiction of Jackson courts and established a new group of courts, with judges to be appointed by the state’s Republican chief justice. When Democratic Nashville established a civilian review board for its police, the Republican legislature and governor passed a law that banned civilian review boards. The underlying racism in such preemptions is never very far from the surface. The Republican neo-Dixiecrats who dominate Southern legislatures can no longer keep Blacks from voting, but they’ve found a way to keep Blacks, in the cities where they constitute clear majorities, from governing.

And of course, there’s always Texas.

In the past, the state had enacted laws to stop municipalities from creating local ordinances that protect tenants facing eviction and to stop cities and counties from regulating fracking within their boundaries. Last summer, however, the Texas legislature passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law HB 2127, which its sponsors gloatingly called the “Death Star” bill for local governments. The law prohibits municipalities from enacting local ordinances that go beyond any state laws that deal with agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, occupations, and property.

The sweeping law negated local statutes like those that Dallas and Austin had enacted to require employers to give water breaks to construction workers in torrid summers. It further forbade cities from enacting any such ordinances that climate change or conscience might require. It’s so broad that it’s not clear just what kind and how many local laws and regulations it would negate.

Knowing that Indiana isn’t alone really doesn’t give me any comfort.

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Send In the Clowns….

Don’t bother. They’re here. In fact, they’re apparently everywhere.

Yesterday, a student sent me a link to a story about a Montana lawmaker who is proposing to give people convicted of a crime a choice between prison time and “infliction of pain.” According to the report, Republican Rep. Jerry O’Neil is drafting a bill that would allow those convicted of misdemeanors or felonies to negotiate corporal punishment rather than a more conventional sentence, because he thinks long prison sentences are inhumane, and thinks many offenders would prefer something like “20 lashes.”

This is the same lawmaker who made headlines earlier in the legislative session when he asked to get paid in gold and silver coins because he is skeptical about the future of the dollar.

Not to be outdone, however, our Hoosier legislators are weighing in with some pretty impressive entries in the OMG sweepstakes. Some pending bills are just terrible policy, of course. We’re used to those here in Indiana. Others are head-scratchers. For example, Senate Bill 0462 designates the fourth Saturday of July as the National Day of the Cowboy and Cowgirl in Indiana, and designates the third weekend of May as the First People’s Celebration Weekend in Indiana in observance of the Corn Planting Moon Ceremony.

The Corn Planting Moon Ceremony? SB 0462 is definitely a contender. But my current favorite is Senate Bill o230, which proposes to “nullify” federal laws our Indiana policymakers don’t like.

SB 0230 provides that “any federal act, order, law, rule, regulation, or statute found by the general assembly to be inconsistent with the power granted to the federal government in the Constitution of the United States is void in Indiana. Provides that a resident of Indiana has a cause of action to enjoin the enforcement or implementation or the attempted enforcement or implementation of a federal act, order, law, rule, regulation, or statute declared void by the general assembly. Provides that a plaintiff who prevails in such an action is entitled to reasonable attorney’s fees and costs. Provides that a person who knowingly or intentionally implements or enforces, or attempts to implement or enforce, a federal law that is declared void by the general assembly commits a Class D felony. Finds that the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the federal Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 are inconsistent with the power granted to the federal government in the Constitution of the United States.”

Presumably, the genius who sponsored this one missed that pesky little provision in the U.S. Constitution known as the Supremacy Clause. (Didn’t some of this guy’s forebears try that “states rights” gambit during the civil rights movement? Didn’t work then, either.)

It’s pretty clear what’s pissed off the sponsor of SB 0230, and pretty obvious what his bill–however embarrassing–is all about.   SB 0163, on the other hand, is mystifying.

The digest begins “Provides that an individual may not be registered as a lobbyist for more than ten years.” The bill also provides that “an individual may not be a candidate for election to the general assembly if, at the expiration of the term to which the individual would be elected, the individual would have served more than 16 years as a member of the general assembly” and “provides that an individual may not be employed by or provide personal services under contract to any Indiana government body for more than ten years during the individual’s lifetime.” It also prohibits anyone from receiving more than $1,000,000 in compensation from government during his lifetime.

I understand trying to term limit legislators (although it really isn’t a very good idea, no matter how tempting it may seem)–but lobbyists and government employees?

Maybe we could just give those guys a choice between term limits and 25 lashes?

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