On Sept. 1, a bill with the pithy title “An Act Relating to State Preemption of and the Effect of Certain State or Federal Law on Certain Municipal and County Regulation” will take effect in Texas. The bill —signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in June—was given a much zippier name by its opponents: “Death Star,” because it could obliterate whole swaths of city and county laws and regulations.

“Basically, it’s the greatest transfer of power away from the public and into the hands of a few people in Austin that we’ve ever seen,” said Texas state Rep. John Bryant. “This handful of people that want to control our state do not want cities acting in their own interests. They do not want any city making policies that get in the way of their ideological and financial objectives.” Maybe Bryant and other Death Star critics are right—but we’ll know how big the transfer of power truly is only after everyone figures out what the bill actually says and does, and only if it survives the legal challenges several of Texas’ biggest cities have already filed against it.

The goal of Death Star is simple. The deeply conservative Texas Legislature wants to effectively deny cities—the state’s large Democratic-leaning cities, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin in particular—the ability to pass local laws and regulations in eight major policy areas: agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resource law, occupational law, and property law. And it does all this in a bill that is 10 single-spaced pages long, nearly one page of which is legislative findings, not actual law. Which is where the problems begin.

Death Star does not aim to affirmatively lay out regulations at the state level; it simply attempts to thwart local regulations. Thus, the entirely of the provision that denies local governments the ability to regulate the insurance industry is just this: “Unless expressly authorized by another statute, a municipality or county may not adopt, enforce, or maintain an ordinance, order, or rule regulating conduct in a field of regulation that is occupied by a provision of this code. An ordinance, order, or rule that violates this section is void, unenforceable, and inconsistent with this code.” That’s it. It then repeats this language across all the various other fields, although in a few cases it adds an extra clause or two to identify specific subfields it really wants to make sure are preempted.

Problematically, as the city of Houston points out in the lawsuit it filed last month challenging Death Star as violating the Texas Constitution, these provisions lack any clarity. The new law, for example, never defines what it means for state law to “occup[y] a provision of this code” outside of the few explicit provisions noted above, making it very hard for cities to know what regulations are at risk. Houston has argued that it is unconstitutionally vague and that the Texas Constitution and state Supreme Court decisions have made this sort of “field preemption”—in which the state does not replace local law with a state alternative but simply declares whole areas ineligible for local rule making—unconstitutional under Texas law. San Antonio joined the lawsuit late last month.

The sweeping language of Death Star is likely seen more as a feature than a bug by the bill’s drafter, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, who all but brags that it is going to fall to the courts to decide what regulations are actually preempted. Importantly, the bill contains a provision that allows any individual or trade association to challenge any local regulation in court—and, if they prevail, requires the county or city to pay all the challenger’s costs and “reasonable” legal fees. Those who challenge a regulation and lose have to pay those costs only if the court finds the challenge “frivolous,” leaving the city to pay its own costs (though not those of the challenger) if it wins cases the courts see as non-frivolous. So, county and city governments assume financial risk if they attempt to defend a regulation and clarify Death Star’s reach.

e; added bolding (which wasn’t in the original) and italicization (which was)

  • @orclev
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    571 year ago

    That’s because they don’t care about the long-term. Most of the ones passing this kind of legislation are over 50 and know they probably won’t live more than 50 more years. As long as whatever they do doesn’t negatively impact them anytime in the next 50 years and they get any benefit from it now they don’t care. The executives pushing for these kinds of policies also don’t care for the same reason, they’re just trying to strip-mine whatever corporation they’re currently infesting before they move on to the next one.

    As for the rural voters that support these politicians they’re so deeply in denial about everything and so massively ignorant of how their own states economies function they don’t realize how badly these policies will hurt them.

    • Raven FellBlade
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      241 year ago

      They’re dismantling everything that stands in their way now because the writing is on the wall for them in the long term politically and ideologically. They are losing, they only maintain power through gerrymandering and even that can’t last forever.

      • @orclev
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        211 year ago

        Gerrymandering already isn’t enough. It’s why they’ve also been doing everything they can to disenfranchise voters as well as engaging in voter suppression tactics. Then there’s the most recent twist which is all the voter fraud, election fraud, and the attempts to subvert the electoral college that all the current trials are about (most prominently in Georgia). They do know the writing is on the wall because their core platform, the thing that has remained constant ever since Nixon is racism, and as the baby boomers who grew up during desegregation die off that’s just not a winning platform anymore. Sure there’s still racism and racists, but they’re just a bitter angry minority, they don’t have the numbers to support a major political party anymore. It’s why the GOP is frantically trying to pivot to an anti-LGBT platform, they figure that’s a minority group they can get traction with oppressing.

        • Raven FellBlade
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          81 year ago

          Yeah, it is truly terrifying how they’ve managed to hold onto as much power in government as they have considering that statistically they should have been rendered a nearly irrelevant minority 30 years ago. And yet, here we are.