Lately I worry that our political system is threatened. One of the basic ideas of our democracy, pushed especially by conservatives, has been that Americans at the local level should be able to control local issues. Of course this idea has limits. Local school districts should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, because the Constitution says that is illegal. State laws should not discriminate against women, because that is also illegal. But what about trying to deal with plastic shopping bags? Are communities allowed to require that local construction contracts include local workers?
Republican-dominated state
legislatures have passed laws preventing
communities from controlling these and many other issues as a way of
preventing many policies they don’t like: adding gender identity to
non-discrimination laws, setting higher minimum wages, restricting the height
of cellphone towers. Later this month, a special session of the Texas
legislature will consider proposals to block cities from regulating trees on
private land and restricting cellphone use while driving. Iowa
Republicans want to take away control from local water boards. Many states
with Republican majorities are forbidding local control: Michigan,
South
Dakota, Ohio,
New
Hampshire, Idaho,
and Arizona.
The non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau counted 128 measures recently passed
by the Republican legislature in Wisconsin
that restricted local control. Twenty-five states have passed laws preventing
localities from raising their minimum wages.
Republican legislatures have
backed up these so-called “preemption laws” with a big stick. If a local
government in Arizona is found to have acted against the wishes of the
legislature, it could lose all of its state aid. Many states now have laws
which personally
punish local legislators for not obeying preemption rules.
Both parties have long
traditions of abusing our political system for partisan ends. Gerrymandering
election districts by creative redrawing of boundaries is a key example of
parties subverting democracy. Republicans have gone further than ever before in
abusing their power to redraw boundaries based on their dominance in state
legislatures. In Pennsylvania
in 2012, Republicans lost the popular vote, but won 13 of 18 House seats. Wisconsin’s
gerrymandered districts will be reviewed by the Supreme Court, which threw out North
Carolina Republicans’ efforts to concentrate minority voters in the fewest
number of districts.
The Senate filibuster is
another undemocratic method by which a minority tries to rule. Again, both
parties have used the filibuster to stifle the majority, but Republicans took
this tactic to unprecedented
extremes to try to prevent President Obama from nominating judges. Eventually
Republicans threatened to filibuster every judicial nomination made by Obama.
In recent years, Republicans
have so distorted our government structures that our democracy is threatened.
Republican Senators refused to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016.
North Carolina Republicans are trying to remove
normal powers of their Governor, a Democrat. And now Republican legislatures
are forbidding voters in Democratic cities from controlling their local
politics.
When Senator Joe McCarthy
tried to use hysterical fears of communism to attack all liberals, he was
following a playbook used by both Democrats and Republicans. When Richard Nixon
tried to corrupt our governmental structures to elect and then protect himself,
I didn’t think his dishonesty was especially Republican. But the current “anything
we can get away with” method of governing appears to have become standard
Republican practice.
Our political system is not
perfect. Changes in its structure are certainly worth discussing, such as doing
something about the Electoral College. But structural changes should come out
of debates about principles of good governance.
For all my life,
conservatives have argued for local control, for example when they wanted to
preserve segregated schools, as opposed to “big government”. Republicans
constantly quote Thomas Jefferson: “Government closest to the people governs
best.” Reagan did it in 1967. The Oklahoma Republican Party has those words on
its website. Chapters of College Republicans use it as part of a “Republican
Oath”. But when local government does something that Republicans don’t
like, they forbid it.
Such principles appear to be
merely window-dressing, designed to distract us from Republican partisan
efforts to invalidate legitimate election results which favored Democrats.
Republicans are twisting our Constitution to create the “permanent majority”
that they can’t win at the ballot box.
What will Republicans do
next? And will enough Americans care as our institutions are subverted from
within?
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, July 18, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment