How states are opening the door to fascism

Preempting the rights of their citizens

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

When Chuck Schumer pushed his caucus to vote to fund the government in March, part of his rationale was that Donald Trump’s blatantly illegal executive orders were consistently being blocked by circuit court judges. With another government funding deadline just weeks away, the Supreme Court continues to obliterate that excuse by torching all precedents, ignoring clear constitutional law, and blessing Trump‘s most fascistic whims.

Having stood by for years as Trump stacked the judiciary top to bottom with far-right ideologues, Schumer had to have known that his justification for cooperation wasn’t just lame, but fatally misleading; either he’s a coward or a naif, and I’m betting on the latter. Either way, the Supreme Court’s decision today to bless explicit racial profiling by ICE should be the wakeup call for Democrats who are still deluded enough to think that these institutions are anything other than tools of an autocrat.

(This is exactly why I spent the better part of two years screaming about Dick Durbin’s failures to investigate the egregiously corrupt Supreme Court and bemoaning Joe Biden’s refusal to even consider threatening an expansion. These fanatics in robes are now acting with absolute impunity and extending it to the White House and its secret police.)

Tonight, we’ll look at the bigger picture and how some states are aiding and abetting this takeover, and why they’ll regret it.

Note: CBS News is being taken over by a right-wing ideologue and just hired a racist, non-journalist as its ombudsman as a sop to the Trump administration. ABC also capitulated to the Trump administration. CNN hosts bigots every single night.

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The high court’s decision opened the door for Trump’s military takeover of blue cities across the country, starting with today’s invasion of Chicago. States like Texas have already pledged to send their National Guard troops into these cities and cooperate when the feds breach their own borders. In many ways, states that once fiercely guarded their rights have made themselves subordinate to the federal government in ways that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

“We've been seeing preemption of immigration sanctuary city policies for a very long time, but what we haven't seen is the federal government needing the abuse of state preemption to implement their authoritarian agenda,” Katie Belanger, the executive director of the Local Solutions Support Center, tells me. ”That's really why we're seeing such a dramatic increase in the number of abusive preemption bills and particularly in the issue areas that mirror the Trump administration's policy agenda.”

According to the LSSC’s new report, legislators have put forward more than 800 preemption bills intended to limit the power of local officials, negate citizens initiatives, and steal rights from residents.

There have been more than 100 immigration-related preemption bills filed alone, a 900% increase from last year’s crop of anti-immigrant bills, evidencing a coordination with the Trump administration. Many of them mandate local cooperation with ICE and other federal officials, and in some cases, make it a crime not to comply, backing up the administration’s latest overreaching executive order.

Tennessee, one of the first states to pass such a bill this year, further underscored this dynamic: HB 6002 makes it illegal for local officials in sanctuary cities to refuse to assist federal immigration enforcement officials and would essentially lead to their removal from office. Tennessee also tried to make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to attend public schools; that was only constrained by a 1982 Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court just blessed ICE’s practice of racial profiling during its hunt for undocumented immigrants, a hypocritical and venomous order that suggests the court will stop Tennessee from kicking kids out of school.

Immigration has earned the headlines, but the culture wars are still a big deal, as well. There were more preemption bills concerning education introduced this year than on any other issue, with 187 pieces of legislation intended to tie the hands of local officials. Top state lawmakers also used their executive authority to impose a right-wing agenda on the minds of children, none more than Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters.

His office is now teaming with PragerU on a test that will purportedly prevent “woke” applicants from becoming teachers in the state, whose school system Walters is trying to turn into a proselytizer of Christian nationalism.

Attacks on voting rights have also experienced an uptick: four states — Arkansas, Kansas, West Virginia, and Wyoming — banned ranked choice voting, while Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan, Minnesota, and South Carolina saw bills to do so introduced this session. Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah passed laws that restrict mail-in voting, and Utah eliminated the universal vote-by-mail system that has produced turnout higher than the national average. Just today, the Missouri House moved forward with a constitutional amendment that would make it near-impossible to pass a law via ballot initiative.

Berlanger help understand this shifting dynamic; an edited version of our conversation is below.

Progress Report: How important are states to what the federal government is doing, in terms of immigration enforcement and invading cities?

Kate Berlanger: Where there are still gaps in power consolidation, they're using abusive preemption to further their agenda. The federal government doesn't have authority to do many of the things that they have been doing, particularly in immigration spaces.

And so even though they've been trying it and things have been getting struck down, it's the states who actually are the ones who are implementing their criminalizing sanctuary city policies. They’re the ones passing the preemptions that are militarizing local police forces, they're the ones who are forcing police to collaborate with ICE in deportation raids.

These states are setting themselves up for a lot of hardship down the line, right? They’re giving into the federal government, allowing the feds to pull funding back and forcing cooperation with the military. It leaves them very vulnerable to further escalation. The tanks could roll into conservative towns, too.

These efforts are absolutely short-sighted, and the state governments that are collaborating with the federal government to consolidate power and advance authoritarian agendas are absolutely going to feel the pain. Maybe not immediately, but they absolutely will.

So often the story about abusive preemption is written as these conservative state legislatures are attacking progressive cities. But in reality, when one city loses authority, all cities lose authority. And so they have a shared stake in protecting and preserving local democracy.

What’s remarkable is how quickly all of these policies spread. You saw one state propose a ban on trans care or discussion of LGBTQ+ people in the classroom, then it happened in five other states, then 25. It’s clearly coordinated.

Absolutely, we have seen this at the American Legislative Exchange Council, there are institutions that have been drafting and proliferating incredibly harmful policies that both advance a corporate deregulatory agenda and also target and harm historically excluded communities.

We see this in our work all the time, where a piece of legislation will pop up in one state, one session, and then it will be in four or five more states the next session. And we see this particularly in states like Texas and Florida and Arizona, where they have been the testing grounds for some of the most challenging preemptive policies that we then see pop up in other states.

How do these places fight back, right? Have you seen cities try to figure out ways to resist this?

A good example actually of fighting back against preemption is the HB 1 case in Florida.

In 2021, after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020, there was a large push from state legislatures to criminalize protests. HB 1 was Governor Ron DeSantis' top legislative priority; it criminalized protests and it preempted local budget control because it said no municipality shall change their police budgets, and if they do, the state can take over the local budget.

We worked with a cross-movement coalition of organizations and advocates to fight back against that bill. It passed, but then we transitioned that campaign into a municipal effort and eight cities voted to sign on to litigation that effectively challenged that bill to the point that in the next legislative session, the legislature actually watered it down to the point that the court case was moot.

So they’ve given control of cities to the federal government. What’s next?

As we go into 2026, an election year, we're going to see more efforts to erode elections, local election administration, and voting rights. I think we're going to see more. effort to prevent folks from exercising their right to vote. I think that's going to be a big fight next year. Because we have to work to preserve our elections. That is the bedrock of our democracy.

Trump recently said he wants to ban mail-in voting. That seems like the sort of thing they can help him with.

He thinks he can, but I think most people don't realize that when we have a federal election, there's not 50 election, there's actually 20,000+ elections because every municipality runs their own election. Within states there can be different rules and regulations. Those are the folks who decide how accessible voting actually is.

The more that we see that authority taken away specifically by folks who do not want everyone to have equal access to voting, it's going to be harder and harder for people to participate.

It seems to me like that that's one of the things where it could be a misstep, because conservatives also vote by mail.

I think the contradictions that you're pointing out are absolutely spot on, and they really speak to the real impetus. It is about consolidating power in the hands of corporate special interests and the elite few, not a broader political base. It's not about maximizing their electoral victories; it's more about maximizing their power on the backs of working people.

Another thing that’s been happening is this attack on what private businesses can do, whether it’s DEI or socially conscious investing. Has there been pushback among businesses for things like that?

I think that the corporate special interests who have who really begun this trend of abusive preemption have found common cause with social conservatives, and they're working in tandem on the consolidation of power. They all benefit from the consolidation of power in the hands of the wealthiest few.

Target is a prime example of a company that was willing to completely change course on how they view and interact with DEI efforts based on who was in political power, because at the end of the day, their analysis was that benefited them more.

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