The Hostile Takeover of Blue Cities by Red States

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Red State Governments Are Dominating Democrat-Led Blue Cities

Joshua GreenAugust 30, 2023 at 9:00 AM UTC

Illustration: Sammy Harkham for Bloomberg Businessweek
This story is part of Businessweek’s Cities issue, a collaboration with CityLab. Read more here.
In 2018, after a pair of high-profile, deadly shootings of Black men by police officers in Nashville, the residents of Davidson County, Tennessee, which encompasses the city, voted overwhelmingly in a ballot referendum to create an independent community oversight board that would work with police to curb shootings and review cases of alleged misconduct.
As a reform measure, it hardly seemed excessive. Memphis already has a similar oversight board. Right before the vote, the Nashville District Attorney’s Office released surveillance video of one of the incidents. It showed a White police officer, Andrew Delke, fatally shooting a 25-year-old Black man, Daniel Hambrick, from behind during a foot chase. Delke was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Even so, support for the reform wasn’t universal. The Fraternal Order of Police sued to keep the measure off the ballot. It stayed on and passed, 59% to 41%. A few months later, the new board came into being. Its 11 members included representatives from the Black and Latino communities as well as women and people from distressed economic areas. “What’s important is that it was set up through a community coalition of about 50 or so local organizations, with input from the city council and the mayor,” says Jill Fitcheard, the board’s executive director. “It’s exactly what community oversight should look like.”

Fitcheard at the Witness Walls by artist Walter Hood, which honors Nashville’s role in the Civil Rights Movement.Photographer: Stacy Kranitz for Bloomberg Businessweek
When the board issued its first advisory report earlier this year, it revealed, among other findings, that 96% of youths against whom officers had used force in schools were Black, and 58% were female. (Just over a quarter of Nashville residents are Black.) The report suggested reforms ranging from de-escalation training to recruiting more non-White and female candidates to the Metro Nashville police force.
But what might have been a promising start for Nashville reformers instead met an abrupt end. In May, Tennessee’s heavily Republican legislature passed a bill dissolving community oversight boards, over the objections of critics who argued that it overturned local voters’ wishes and punished minority communities. Elaine Davis, the Knoxville Republican who sponsored the bill, said at a hearing that its purpose was “to ensure a timely, fair and objective review of citizen complaints while protecting the individual rights of individual law enforcement officers.”

Governor Bill Lee swiftly signed the bill into law, and with the stroke of his pen, state Republicans stripped power away from two Democratic cities. “These state legislators want to cut away oversight and police accountability until it’s nothing,” Fitcheard says. “It feels very targeted.”

Tennessee is hardly alone. In red states across the South, Republican legislatures are increasingly interfering in the governance of Democratic cities by blocking liberal reforms and often dictating conservative policies in their place. In Texas, Republicans overrode measures in Austin and Dallas guaranteeing water breaks for construction workers and blocked cities’ ability to mandate paid leave for workers. In Mississippi, Republicans created a separate police force and court system for a majority White part of the heavily Black capital city of Jackson, prompting the US Department of Justice to file a complaint calling the move “racially discriminatory.” In Missouri, Republicans forced Kansas City to increase spending on policing and have been trying to take control of police oversight in St. Louis, which would reverse the outcome of a statewide ballot initiative passed 10 years ago.
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 4, 2023. Subscribe now.Illustration: Jim Stoten for Bloomberg Businessweek
Nowhere is the trend of states superseding cities more pronounced than in Nashville, and nowhere are the racial dynamics more glaring. Earlier this year, Tennessee Republicans made national headlines by expelling two Black Democratic representatives from Nashville and Memphis—Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, respectively—for protesting gun violence on the statehouse floor, three days after a shooter killed three children and three adults at a Nashville school. (A third protesting Democrat, Representative Gloria Johnson, who’s White, wasn’t expelled.) Voters in Nashville and Memphis fought back successfully by reelecting Jones and Pearson to the statehouse in August. But that hasn’t stopped state Republicans from imposing their political priorities on the city—often in ways that appear designed to intimidate or punish residents.
In June, Vanderbilt University Medical Center turned over transgender patients’ medical records at the insistence of Tennessee’s attorney general, who the hospital says had used his legal authority to force administrators’ hand. State Republicans also passed laws allowing them to seize control of the Nashville airport authority and to slash the size of the city’s Metropolitan Council from 40 to 20, a move widely seen as retaliation for the council’s rejection of a bid for Nashville to host the 2024 Republican convention. (The city sued and won a temporary reprieve.)
At one point this year the encroachment even reached the level of street names, when two GOP lawmakers started an effort to rechristen a city street named for the late Democratic civil rights icon Representative John Lewis as “President Donald Trump Boulevard.” The bill was later withdrawn.
Charlane Oliver, a Democratic state senator from Nashville, says that sort of racial provocation is embedded in the Tennessee Republicans’ power play: an overwhelmingly White, conservative party overriding the democratically expressed preference of a multiracial urban community. “The old playbook has never really gone away,” she says. “With the election of Donald Trump, the Southern strategy was reawakened.”

“What’s happening to Nashville now, and to many other cities across the country, is that we’re being colonized by the state legislature”

Sitting in his office at City Hall in early August, Nashville’s Democratic mayor, John Cooper, is doing what he often does these days: keeping abreast of the various legal battles between the city and state. After Republicans passed a law allowing Tennessee to appoint a new board to oversee Nashville International Airport, the city refused to disband the existing board and went to court. To Cooper’s dismay, his side hasn’t prevailed in the latest round of legal maneuvering. “We just found out that they’re not giving us the injunction against the state board that we were seeking,” he says with a sigh. “But our lawyers think we’ll eventually be successful on the merits.”

Not too long ago, Tennessee had a reputation for effective governance and bipartisan consensus. The state produced a succession of moderate Republicans who became national figures, from Howard Baker Jr. to Lamar Alexander. Nashville prided itself on being known as the “Athens of the South.” It’s always been the “massive economic growth machine” that drives the state, Cooper says, waving toward the “siege of cranes” scattered across the skyline. As recently as five years ago, a local historian could refer to Tennessee as “a prosperous and congenial island of civility in a nation of division” without drawing stares of incomprehension.

 

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“That’s kind of inconceivable today,” Cooper concedes.

Mayor Cooper, at City Hall in Nashville, has announced he won’t seek reelection.Photographer: Stacy Kranitz for Bloomberg Businessweek
Cooper was born into this political tradition. His father, Prentice Cooper, was the Democratic governor of Tennessee in the 1940s. In 2019, John, a real estate developer with an MBA from Vanderbilt, ran for mayor as a practical, business-minded Democrat hoping to appeal to voters in both parties with a pitch for fiscal responsibility and economic growth.

By some measures he’s succeeded. In April, in a rare feat of bipartisan cooperation, state and local lawmakers approved funding for a new $2.1 billion stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, which Cooper argues will revitalize Nashville’s 338-acre East Bank neighborhood and become “a platform for the city to thrive for decades.” While other city centers are still reeling from the Covid-19 recession, Nashville’s has come roaring back to exceed its pre-pandemic level of economic activity. “In most cities, a Taylor Swift concert is a big deal,” Cooper says. “We get that kind of tourism practically every night.”
Yet Cooper’s term has also encompassed bitter and often personal fighting over Covid-driven shutdowns, mask mandates and gun violence. Republican Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally called Cooper “incompetent” and “obstinate,” and a few months after the mayor and Metro Council nixed the 2024 Republican convention bid, he supported an effort to eliminate the taxes used to finance Nashville’s Music City Center, the city’s convention center. “If Nashville wants to prioritize political posturing over prosperity for its people,” McNally said, “the state does not have to participate.”

Given the enormous revenue Nashville generates, its spoils are often at the heart of the state’s political battles. “The crowd in Nashville wants you to believe that the city’s economic miracle is all their doing,” says Jimmy Earle, a Republican businessman and activist. “But we’re booming because of the policies enacted by the Republican legislature and the former Republican governor, Bill Haslam, over the objection of Democratic governors and legislators in the past.”

Cooper was considered a shoo-in for reelection.Photographer: Stacy Kranitz for Bloomberg Businessweek
Although Cooper won the backing of the police and firefighters’ unions and was considered a shoo-in for reelection this fall, he announced in January that he won’t seek a second term. He says he first noticed partisan animosity rising after Republicans took control of the legislature in 2008, then skyrocketing when they gained a supermajority shortly thereafter. “We went from a Democratic-controlled state senate to all the Democratic senators being able to squeeze into, if not a sedan, then a minivan,” he says. Freed from needing Democratic support to pass legislation, Republicans felt no pressure to soften it. At the same time, as elsewhere, the growing urban-rural divide drove political polarization, while the decline of local newspapers made it harder for most residents to see the benefits of political consensus.

Similar dynamics in other states have also led to a flurry of laws and executive actions preempting local ordinances. Sometimes it’s been over economic matters, but increasingly it’s been over cultural priorities that didn’t used to be quite so prominent in city politics. In July, Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a sweeping law invalidating so many local rules that opponents dubbed it “the Death Star bill.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has built his presidential profile on overriding local Democratic laws (most famously, by preempting Covid mask and vaccine mandates) and even firing Democratic prosecutors. DeSantis also signed a bill in May banning transgender care for minors and restricting discussion of personal pronouns in schools.
Jacob Grumbach, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, says aggression by state lawmakers isn’t a new trend as much as an old one that’s come storming back. “For most of American history, states were where the important policymaking happened, with the result being that where you lived had a huge effect on the laws and economy you lived under—think of the slavery period and Jim Crow,” he says. “But as the US came to face new challenges that required coordination—war, industrial growth, technological change and of course the Civil Rights Movement—policymaking shifted to the national level, which led to states becoming much more similar.”
Today that policymaking power is devolving back to the states. “With gridlock at the national level,” Grumbach says, “both parties are setting their sights to where they can take action—at the state level. That’s fundamentally changed the playing field of American politics.”

In Tennessee and other states with aggressively partisan legislatures, assertions of dominance aren’t limited to overriding local laws. They often extend to trying to destroy the opposing party’s political power altogether.

 

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Part 3:


John Cooper’s older brother Jim, who represented the Nashville area in Congress for 16 terms starting in 1982, has felt this acutely. In January he was effectively forced into retirement after a Republican gerrymander eliminated his Democratic district and divided it up among three surrounding Republican ones. “Our country was set up so that cities have no legal rights under the Constitution,” he says. “The state is by far the most powerful political institution the founders established, and cities can be made to disappear. What’s happening to Nashville now, and to many other cities across the country, is that we’re being colonized by the state legislature.”
The older Cooper, a low-key, centrist Blue Dog Democrat who had a reputation in Congress for working across the aisle, says that until two years ago, Republicans observed a gentleman’s agreement to maintain a Democratic congressional district for Nashville. But as the state GOP came under the thrall of Trump, the old courtesies vanished. “You see it here every day, the way Trump has unleashed a sort of in-your-face style,” he says. “My plumber, who knows exactly who I am, wears a ‘F--- Joe Biden’ hat when he comes to fix the sink.” Today, Davidson County, which voted for Biden over Trump 65% to 35% in 2020, is represented by a trio of conservative Republicans who have no interest in advocating for the political preferences of their urban constituents. “They want to impose their alien culture on this city,” Jim Cooper says.

Nashville City Hall.Photographer: Stacy Kranitz for Bloomberg Businessweek
In mid-August, the latest political clash erupted in Nashville: a special legislative session that was supposed to address the rash of gun violence. The Southern Christian Coalition held a prayer session outside the Capitol, while members of the far-right Proud Boys lurked on the periphery. A coalition of reform groups that included the Equity Alliance, which was co-founded by Senator Oliver, led a march from the First Baptist Church to the Capitol.
Oliver had planned to reintroduce a gun reform bill. But House Republicans swiftly passed rules allowing them to silence disruptive lawmakers and barred the families of shooting victims from the hearing room, and she concluded that gun reform wouldn’t get a hearing. “Nothing meaningful is going to come from this,” Oliver says. “We’re being subjected to a hostile takeover.”

John Cooper worries, as his mayoralty winds down, that the conservative political encroachment on the life of the city could eventually destroy its unique appeal. “Many people find a blue city in a red state to be a pretty good match for them,” he says. “Nashville is cool. But if that’s being threatened, then it threatens our status as a creative economy. Does a software engineer from California come to a Nashville that seems hostile to diversity and creative expression? Or dangerous?”

For decades, Nashville relied on a careful political balance that helped it thrive. Now, as with cities across the country, that balance is becoming more difficult to maintain. About all Tennessee Republicans and Democrats still agree on is that Nashville is a great place for people and corporations to move to, whether the attraction is the music scene, the creative class or the proximity to the airport and the lack of a state income tax.

Cooper fears that Tennessee Republicans have become more interested in “catching up to the worst impulses of Florida and Texas” than in bridging the cultures of the North and South. “I hope we don’t give up that aspiration,” he says.

 

[Voice of Reason]

Again this is why Black folks need to at least control a few states.