Draining the swamp should start in state capitals

Draining the swamp should start in state capitals

Opinion by 

Catherine Rampell

Columnist

March 30, 2021 at 7:26 a.m. GMT+9

The Colorado state legislature enacted a law blocking cities from regulating firearms. (David Zalubowski/AP)

The “swamp” that desperately needs draining isn’t in Washington, D.C. It’s in state capitals around the country, where undemocratic, anti-majoritarian officials are seizing rights from voters and flagrantly thwarting the will of the people.

The past week alone is replete with examples of state lawmakers, typically Republicans, ignoring or suppressing the views of constituents they’re supposed to represent.

In Missouri, Republican legislators announced their refusal to enact and fund an expansion of the state’s Medicaid program — despite the successful ballot initiative last summer adding a Medicaid expansion to the state constitution. One Republican lawmaker argued that the ballot measure, despite receiving a majority of the votes cast, cannot possibly represent the “will of the people.”

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This follows similar GOP attempts in recent years to undermine popular ballot measures in other states, including one in Utah also expanding Medicaid, one in Florida restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions and one in Maine raising the minimum wage.

Last week also brought greater visibility to Colorado’s law blocking cities from regulating firearms, despite voter support there for gun-control measures. The state law led a judge to strike down the city of Boulder’s ban on assault-style firearms just days before a gunman murdered 10 people at a local supermarket.

Today, thanks to widespread lobbying from gun groups, more than 40 states similarly preempt some or all local regulation of firearms. And gun groups aren’t the only special interests investing in this kind of lobbying. Such laws are part of a broader trend of state legislatures blocking municipal officials from passing a host of popular ordinances related to minimum wages, paid sick leave, environmental rules, campaign finance disclosures, public health measures and others. In Florida alone, state legislators are pushing dozens of bills that would tie the hands of local officials.

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Many of these preemption laws have been enacted by GOP-controlled statehouses that want to prevent Democrat-controlled cities from executing local policy wishes. This “new preemption” or “hyper-preemption” trend, as some scholars have dubbed it, has also gotten punitive, with state officials imposing civil and criminal penalties or even removing from office municipal officials who dare to defy preemption laws.

Yet another escalation of this decades-long, anti-democratic, anti-local-rule trend arrived last week in Georgia.

There, the state legislature enacted a raft of voter-suppression measures. Most attention has focused on those that ban giving water to people waiting in line to vote and that limit access to absentee voting. But perhaps the most nefarious provision is one that allows state lawmakers and their political appointees to seize control of elections from local officials when legislators see fit.

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As a result, GOP lawmakers and their appointees will be able to make decisions about polling locations (and closures) in heavily Black or Democratic neighborhoods; likewise, these officials will be able to make critical decisions about vote-counting. That’s a particularly troubling prospect given the experience in 2020, when some Republican state lawmakers tried to help Donald Trump overturn the presidential results in Georgia.

Georgia, in other words, has not only made it harder for eligible voters to cast their ballots. State lawmakers have also made it easier for political operatives to ignore votes successfully cast if tallies happen to produce inconvenient results. The law may prove to be a template for other red states, too, given that dozens of states are considering their own bills to restrict voting access.

“State legislatures are typically a state’s least majoritarian branch,” University of Wisconsin Law School professor Miriam Seifter argues in a forthcoming law review article. “Often they are outright counter-majoritarian” or “minoritarian” institutions, she notes. Both houses of Michigan’s legislature, for example, have been controlled by Republicans every year since the state’s 2010 redistricting — even though Democrats have won a majority of the popular vote for these seats in multiple elections.

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You might wonder how state officials manage to stay in office if they fail to reflect the partisan or policy preferences of their constituents.

One answer, of course, is gerrymandering, which has become more sophisticated in recent years, thanks to better data and computer modeling. Geographic clustering of liberal voters in cities doesn’t help either. Neither does the fact that local news organizations have collapsed, leaving fewer watchdogs in state capitals to ferret out bad behavior and report it back to voters. There’s plenty of coverage of general swampiness, democratic backsliding and big-money lobbying in media hubs such as Washington and New York — and much less consistent attention paid to states’ equally consequential actions.

The traditional sources of accountability that nudged or forced elected officials to be responsive to their constituents have weakened. The result is greater job security for state officials practicing minority rule — and worse outcomes for voters.

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