Truthout: State GOP Officials Seize Trump’s ‘War on Crime’ to Disempower Blue Cities

A calculated pattern is emerging in Donald Trump’s planned National Guard deployments: After wobbling on sending the military into Chicago earlier this month, his administration has pivoted toward targeting blue cities in deep red states.

Democratic cities’ efforts to raise local minimum wages, to protect access to abortions, to set in place local climate change policies and regulation, and to protect LGBTQ rights are all increasingly being challenged by red state governments.

[T]he leadership of the cities impacted are less than enthused: Memphis Mayor Paul Young has expressed his displeasure with this development, and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has maintained a studied silence on the topic. Both mayors know that their political wiggle room is limited in states where solid majorities of voters go Republican and where state legislators have long looked for ways to rein in the power of blue cities to go their own way on economic, social, climate change, and other policy areas.

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This GOP effort to neutralize Democratic city control in GOP states predates Trump 2.0, but it has accelerated under the current administration. Democratic cities’ efforts to raise local minimum wages, to protect access to abortions, to set in place local climate change policies and regulation, and to protect LGBTQ rights are all increasingly being challenged by red state governments. So, too, GOP state politicians are leaning into the idea that any city regulation that can be deemed to be preempted by state laws is illegitimate.

The effects of this campaign against local powers are myriad. The National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit advocacy organization, has detailed examples of cities enacting higher minimum wages and better paid sick leave provisions, only to have their states block these reforms. The law project estimates that, in total, 25 states, most of them Republican-led, have passed cookie-cutter legislation, crafted for the most part by the American Legislative Exchange Council, to preempt local minimum wages. And the law project has also found that Republican state officials and legislators back up their preemption policies with threats to defund cities or to prosecute local officials who plow ahead with their reform efforts.

Six years ago, the National Employment Law Project reported that 12 cities and counties (in Alabama, Iowa, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, and Wisconsin) had passed minimum wage increases only to see them shot down by the state. These actions have real-world consequences for hundreds of thousands of low-income workers. Most of the states with preemption laws hew to the federal minimum wage, which has stayed at $7.25 per hour for more than a decade; in those states, low-income workers, especially in cities with a higher cost of living, face daunting odds of leaving poverty.

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Read the full story at truthout.org.