By Harold Meyerson

Copyright prospect

Last Thursday, nine hours into a marathon session of the House Oversight Committee in which committee Republicans advanced 16 bills to strip Washington, D.C., of home rule, MAGA zealot Scott Perry (R-PA) realized his colleagues hadn’t gone far enough. Accordingly, he presented an amendment to one of those bills that would repeal D.C.’s ban on right turns on red lights.

I’m not making this up.

This stellar example of your tax dollars at work then passed on a party-line vote and will be sent to the House floor. Sadly, no committee Democrats introduced amendments of their own that would have required Perry to stand on various D.C. street corners to monitor compliance with his motion.

Perry’s amendment may be the reductio ad absurdum of the Republicans’ war on cities, but it is part of a far broader party offensive, waged at the level of state government as well as federal, that is both accelerating and intensifying. Its most visible manifestation, of course, is President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, which he expanded to Memphis last Friday. But red states have been stripping their blue cities of their right to enact ordinances and laws of their own for years.

As I reported in February of last year, the current wave began in 2016 when North Carolina nullified a Charlotte ordinance that penalized violations of LGBTQ rights. Later that year, Alabama responded to Birmingham’s enactment of a minimum-wage ordinance (the state has no minimum-wage law of its own) by banning cities from adopting one. More recently, Mississippi stripped criminal trials from the jurisdiction of Jackson courts and substituted for them state courts whose judges would be appointed by the (Republican) chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court. A Nashville ordinance establishing a civilian review board for local policing was nullified by a state ban on civilian review boards. The common thread in all these preemptions is that they consist of heavily white Republican state legislatures and governors overturning the laws of heavily Black Democratic local officials.

In 2023, the two states that anchor the national Republican Party—Texas and Florida—went in for pre-preemption: banning ordinances that their blue cities might contemplate enacting, though they hadn’t enacted them yet. Texas’s “Death Star” law prohibited cities and counties from enacting any local ordinances or regulations that went beyond state laws dealing with agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, occupations, and property. Swept away in this Republican assault were regulations in Austin and Dallas that required water breaks for construction workers when the temperatures soar. (Five of the state’s six largest cities—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso—are reliably Democratic.) This summer, a state appellate court upheld the Death Star.

In Florida in 2023, the legislature passed and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that permitted businesses (only businesses, not employees or individuals who’ve not established themselves as businesses) to sue local governments for ordinances or regulations they deem to be “arbitrary or unreasonable.” After receiving notice, the local government must immediately suspend that ordinance or regulation, simply by virtue of the suit having been filed.

This year, we’ve also seen Trump’s Guard deployments set a template for red-state governors. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott deployed the Guard and state troopers to Houston in case there were protests of ICE’s deportation sweeps, and in Louisiana, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry sent state police into New Orleans to conduct sweeps of their own of the city’s homeless encampments.

The Republican war against cities continues to grow. Last month, the Local Solutions Support Center reported that more than 800 bills had been introduced in state legislatures this year stripping municipalities of the right to enact their own ordinances and regulations. Missouri Republican lawmakers voted to have the state take over St. Louis’s police department, while Indiana’s Republican lawmakers created a state board to oversee and discipline local prosecutors not aligned with their priorities—such as the elected Indianapolis district attorney who has refused to enforce the state’s abortion ban.

And in just the past couple of months, Republican state governments have embarked on a new way to disempower cities: mid-decade redistricting. The new congressional district lines that Texas has adopted at Trump’s behest have consolidated Austin’s two districts into one, so that two liberal Democratic stalwarts (Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar) must either run against each other or have one of them seek other employment. Missouri Republicans have recently broken up the district that encompassed Kansas City, long represented by Black Democrats, into fragments appended to majority-white Republican suburbs.

Of the 38 American cities with populations in excess of 500,000, 31 have Democratic mayors. (There are two independents and five Republicans, one of whom changed his affiliation from D to R after he was elected.) As Republicans see it, cities’ cosmopolitanism, social and economic liberalism, and demographic makeup make them the locus of everything Republicans oppose.

Lately, however, some self-proclaimed mainstream Democrats have also been attacking the leftward movement of cities. A New York Times/Siena poll from earlier this month found not only that democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has a commanding lead in New York’s upcoming mayoral election, but that 37 percent of likely voters—not just Democratic likely voters, all likely voters—said that having a democratic socialist as mayor would be a good thing, while only 32 percent said it wouldn’t. A Gallup poll from last week showed that 66 percent of Democrats nationally held a positive view of socialism, while just 42 percent had a positive view of capitalism. If he’s elected, Mamdani would be far from the only certifiable leftist running a major city; as I noted last week, the mayors of America’s second- and third-largest cities—L.A.’s Karen Bass and Chicago’s Brandon Johnson—are also lifelong lefties, though it’s Mamdani, the open socialist, who’s also the much more skilled politician.

Despite that, a number of Democratic establishment leaders, beginning with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, have declined to endorse Mamdani (UPDATE: Hochul endorsed Mamdani on Sunday night), while others have specifically repudiated the kind of effectively social democratic politics that Mamdani—and Bernie Sanders and AOC—espouse. At a time when city life has become barely or not at all affordable for millions of city dwellers, who are overwhelmingly Democratic and who are despairing of the markets ever addressing this problem, it shouldn’t surprise Democratic honchos that their political base is moving toward the left.

I don’t mean to lump the Hochuls in with the Abbotts and DeSantises. In cities, Abbott and company see all that they despise. That’s not what Hochul and company see, of course; they see their own base. The question for them is whether they understand what their base now wants and needs.