In this report, Undermining Democracy: How Far-Right State Lawmakers & Corporations Are Abusing Preemption to Take Power Away from People, LSSC tracks how abusive preemption has been used by state lawmakers in the 2022 legislative session.

We love to stay in touch with advocates, attorneys, legal scholars, organizers, and more who are actively involved in the work to resist the abuse of preemption.

The Local Solutions Support Center is excited to continue a blog series featuring our 2022 Research Cohort. Each month, a member of our Research Cohort will explore a different topic and its connection to preemption. Here, Noah Kazis explores a case study in New Jersey.

As part of the Local Solutions Support Center’s ongoing efforts to help local leaders understand and deploy their authority to address their communities’ needs, we have produced this memo outlining what local election administration involves and how it threatens democracy.

The guide reflects the latest messaging for how to talk about the abuse of state preemption and how many elected officials use preemption to entrench inequities and take power away from people and communities.

The Local Solutions Support Center has designed a toolkit to help organizers understand what public health authority preemption looks like and how to talk about it in a way that’s both accessible to broader audiences, and effective.

Each month, a member of our Research Cohort will explore a different topic and its connection to preemption. Here, Professor Lori Riverstone-Newell kicks things off by examining three different strategies local leaders have relied upon to resist abusive state preemption: dissent, litigation, and defiance.

State lawmakers who are abusing preemption haven’t slowed their efforts to take power away from local communities this year – LSSC’s new 2022 Mid-Session report looks at how state elected officials are continuing to undermine local authority on topics ranging from educational curriculum to voting rights to labor laws to LGBTQ equality.

This month the Local Solutions Support Center launched new social media platforms so we can more consistently share news, insight, and analysis of the ways that preemption is being abused in state legislatures across the country.

LSSC is are compiling issue-specific preemption guides that serve as a one-stop-shop for the best high-level resources associated with individual issue areas commonly preempted.

This week the Local Solutions Support Center published a new resource that takes a look back at 2021, an unprecedented year for abusive preemption. It examines the landscape for preemption and highlights what the LSSC team accomplished last year.

The second edition of the Local Power & Politics Review is now live and features a series of articles that explore how some states preempted local authority across a host of issues during the pandemic.

Now that the Delta variant’s rapid spread has again sparked showdowns over masking orders, school and business closings and vaccine passports between state and local governments nationwide, LSSC has reprised this once-a-week recap.

Only a handful of states have targeted municipal police reform, but left unchecked, such preemption strategies will likely spread to other states. And without scrutiny, some states will feel emboldened to encroach further on municipal ability to control and reform their police departments.

A new report highlights how state lawmakers in the Midwest have abused preemption to impede progress on a variety of issues that would improve the economic security and well-being of residents.

The Local Solutions Support Center’s (LSSC) report “A Session Like No Other” explores the 2021 legislative session, during which Republican-led state legislatures unleashed a wave of preemption bills blocking, removing, or penalizing local authority – a direct response to the pandemic, the growing movement for racial justice, and the presidential election.

This year, state lawmakers introduced a history making number of preemption laws that limit local lawmaking, weaken local democracy, and block local policies intended to advance economic and racial inequity. Here is a snapshot, a still frame of where legislative activity on some policies stand as of Monday, April 26, 2021.

“Conflict between state and local governments has cost lives, delayed effective responses, and created confusion that continues to undermine public health efforts.”

The Local Solutions Support Center has compiled short memos summarizing the nature and scope of local authority in each state. For city attorneys, advocates, and policymakers, these memos can offer a sense of what local policies might be possible in their state and a jumping off point for additional research. 

This fact sheet summarizes this emerging threat to state and local public health authority and identifies some of the possible outcomes.