“Next year, if a liberal town … imposes a mask mandate again on businesses throughout the community because of a bad flu virus or the sniffles, everybody would have to abide,” said state Rep. Joseph Chaplik, a freshman lawmaker who is skeptical of the science showing masks help reduce transmission of disease. “If we’re going to give up our freedom and liberties for temporary safety, we’re going to have neither safety nor freedom.”
The strategy used in Arizona has been employed with new intensity by Republicans in states like Texas, Florida and Georgia, where legislators over the past year passed legislation preempting the ability of city — and state — leaders to enforce their own regulations. The bigfooting of local officials accelerated as the pandemic turned public health decisions into political minefields, but it also also touched on other wedge issues, like police funding, gun control and climate change.
An usher holds a sign to remind fans to wear masks during a spring training baseball game between the Oakland Athletics and the Arizona Diamondbacks in Scottdale, Ariz. | Ashley Landis/AP Photo
The move by GOP legislators represents a sharp ideological shift for a party that has long championed states rights and local control. Republicans, their influence growing in statehouses and shrinking in cities, see an opening to extend their reach into urban centers. And Democrats, typically the targets of these preemption laws, fear they could be left powerless.
“At the end of the day, we want to give community members the voice to have the policies and laws that they’re voting for local officials to make,” said Brooks Rainwater, senior executive and director for the Center for City Solutions at the National League of Cities, a nonpartisan advocacy group generally opposed to preemption legislation.
“Giving local officials the space is that goal,” he said. “There shouldn’t be these big dichotomies in how policies are being made between state and local.”
As Republicans have maintained a tight hold on the majority of state legislatures, much of today’s preemption battles feature GOP-led assemblies handicapping Democratic-run cities. That dynamic is drawn from the stark partisan divide between statewide and local power: Republicans control 30 state legislatures while Democrats control 64 of the 100 biggest cities in the U.S.
Preemption fights are nothing new. State and local officials have been pitted against each other on what seems like every policy, from soda taxes to minimum wage increases to transgender rights. But in recent years, deep red states have latched onto preemption legislation more and more as a strategy to snatch away power from Democratic city leadership and rally their base.
Take Florida, where the Legislature this session pushed through several major preemption bills, starting with a high-profile “anti-protest” measure as part of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement. Buried within the law is a provision checking the ability of counties to redirect funding from police departments and giving the state’s governor the authority to review and reject those budget decisions. Legislators also enacted a proposal tightening an existing law forbidding local governments from approving any policies on guns.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, capitalizing on the conservative resistance to Covid-19 protocols, also issued an executive order waiving fines issued to businesses by local governments for violating Covid-related mandates and signed legislation allowing a governor to preempt local emergency rules.