Sorry Arizona cities, no passing laws your citizens want
Chances are, if you live in an urban area in a big rural state, you might not be represented by your legislature. That's been apparent watching Indiana, where two of the largest cities, Indianapolis and Bloomington, are fairly progressive—one the capital, the other a cool college town. They tend to elect Democrats to the legislature and Congress, and both passed same-sex anti-discrimination measures. But then the state legislature and governor enact a POS like the Religious Freedom Act. Go figure.
It's a similar story here in Arizona. Many people in Tucson, downtown Phoenix, Tempe or Flagstaff don't share the values of the legislature, which passes some of the most hateful and asinine shit in the nation. They've shifted into a fifth gear of insanity with Gov. Ducey in the driver's seat: deeper cuts to education and social programs, more abortion restrictions, a larger role for the Christian right, voter suppression bills, giveaways to the wealthy and corporations, assaults on workers' rights.
In other words, an E-ticket ride at Kochworld. Documented: Dirty Koch money did dirty Ducey deeds, with his knowledge, after he was elected. It wasn't just that their money shaped the election, it's that their crackpot influence remains in the legislature and governor's office.
Money goes after local laws over the fold.
This week the governor signed another abortion bill: Un-fucking-believably, these theocratic nitwits passed a law that requires doctors to tell patients about a procedure that is unproven and highly controversial (diary here). The right wing called it a "good thing for women." They always describe their restrictions of women's rights as a benefit for women. Women and the doctors who care for them rarely agree. These extremists are so concerned about women that they closed almost every clinic in the state's vast rural territories, forcing people to drive long distances and spend money and time they may not have, even for general screenings they used to get at Planned Parenthood. Thanks to the legislature, there are no Planned Parenthood clinics in rural Arizona.
You will find them in Flagstaff and the other three towns, which are of a blueish or at least purplish hue, and their residents would never pass an abortion law like the stinker Gov. Ducey signed last week. My liberal bubble always sends Democrats to the legislature and Congress, often very progressive voices. We're on a street that's often represented by gays and strong women and minority voices at city, state and federal levels. But then we also live in a place where the legislature, thanks to very successful gerrymandering on the wingers' part, is controlled by fundy nutters whose political heroes include Cliven Bundy. Seriously, when the deadbeat nativist was Fox News' No. 1 guest, some Arizona legislators and a congressman went to Bundyville and had their pictures taken with the crotchety old turdball.
In a tweeted pic, Sen. Kelli Ward stood proudly at the Bundy Ranch with Rep. Paul Gosar. Her Facebook page has a lot more photos of Ward, her fellow legislators and other protesters. Ward's talk at the rally made local Nevada TV news. "We don’t need the government to tell us what to eat, what to wear, what to drink [and] how to drive," she said. "We don’t need that. We can do a lot of self-governance."
They went on about guns and Nazis taking their land, then the clown car drove home to Arizona, and they posted the photos on their websites and made stirring speeches about freedumb—that is until the tax cheat told the world
what he knows about the Negro. The website photos vanished, but these fruitcakes' allegiance to the criminal Sagebrush Rebellion BS and white supremacy spewed by the shithead in Nevada remains.
Taking a page outta the Bundy playbook, the tea party pushed through several pieces of legislation that pledge allegiance to us jackasses, not the black man in Washington, DC. One bill nullifies executive orders and DOJ regulations in the Grand Canyon State, another denies compliance with Obamacare, and a third bill blocks enforcement of federal gun laws. And like other states, we're always trying to "take back" federal land that was never ours to begin with. It's like the entire state sticking Jan Brewer's finger in Obama's face.
Theirs is a political philosophy born on Glenn Beck's chalkboard. They're still not sure where Obama was born, many believe the earth is 6,000 years old, they do think homosexuality is a sin and they turn to Brigham Young's magic underwear for guidance. We are governed by a 3,500-year-old collection of stories and another book written by a boob who found some gold plates in New York in 1823. With racist, sexist and cruel fairy tales guiding the legislature, it's no surprise many laws they pursue are homophobic and bigoted; they blur church and state boundaries all the time; they do no favors for women, children and the poor; they dismantle workers' rights and shit all over nature.
Left to themselves, Arizona's urban centers would not pass or even consider some of the boneheaded bullcrap our legislature circlejerks to. Predictably, Tempe, Flagstaff and the others enact policies that are more progressive than anything at the legislature, where Democratic bills go to die. Minority and women's rights, transit, LGBT protection, housing, culture and environmental policy are more liberal in the urban cores, as is government itself.
True, Arizona's national image is of a desert full of hateful backwater troglodytes like Arpaio, but historically it's a Democratic state and some towns have been out front on progressive politics. Four years before Brown vs. Board of Education Phoenix integrated its schools; in 1977, Tucson passed one of the nation's first LGBT-rights ordinances; for a long time Flagstaff's been into green and sustainable; Tempe has free mass transit in many areas. All are college towns, defined by their education communities in different but meaningful ways.
The toadstools who run the legislature, being toadstools who've been increasingly hostile to education, do not want blue communities to pass fair and commonsense policies that violate their religious principles, like Bisbee's same-sex marriage law. Arizona's legislature will happily tell the feds to fuck off: "States rights!" We actually have a legislative committee called Federalism and States Rights. But then the very same peckerheads turn around and deny cities and counties their autonomy. When a town's citizens want to pass a gun law that's tougher than the state's, the legislature clamps down. They've toyed with the idea of not just overturning local law but fining elected officials if they enact a more restrictive weapons measure.
They're doing the same to environmental policy, like recycling and whatnot. The blue towns I mentioned all run sustainability programs; ASU in Tempe is home to one of the largest sustainability centers in the world; the other cities practice it proudly, and most citizens support the green policies. Not surprisingly, though, at the legislative level Arizona is one of the ALEC-fueled idiot states that's been trying to ban the word sustainability as well as the concept's practice—because it's a UN commie plot.
This lunacy played out in practice today. Wonderful Bisbee was the first Arizona town to pass a ban on plastic bags, and now Tempe and Flagstaff are considering one, similar to hundreds of laws nationwide. When Arizona's grocery stores and other commercial juggernauts realized that larger cities were considering the ban, they instructed their tools at the legislature to stop this madness, regardless of what residents want. The industry's bill passed this week:
Senate Bill 1241 by Republican Rep. Warren Petersen of Gilbert would ban counties, cities and towns from banning or charging fees for returning containers such as plastic bags or Styrofoam boxes. It also blocks cities and towns from requiring business owners from measuring or reporting energy usage.
That last sentence targets an energy savings program in Phoenix, and the bill awaits Gov. Ducey's signature. The outlook is grim, given his business upbringing. So, cities operate the landfills but the legislature wants to regulate what goes
in them. And
it's more than just banning plastic bags:
The bill, Senate Bill 1241 ... prevents cities from making any regulations on the use of "reusable bags, disposable bags, boxes, beverage cans, bottles, cups and containers that are made out of cloth, plastic, extruded polystyrene, glass, aluminum, cardboard or other materials that are used for transporting merchandise to or from a business or multifamily housing property."
In effect, these nullification bills require all cities and counties in Arizona to be as crazy as the pinheads at the Capitol—the crowd that brought us SB 1070, birther investigations, some of the nation's most extreme abortion restrictions, a religious freedom bill that legalized discrimination (Gov. Brewer vetoed it), a plan to build the
border fence with a state-sponsored fundraiser, a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriages and, last week, a
suggestion that church attendance should be mandatory. That's just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
Soon, rather than continue to overturn city bills one by one, we can probably expect a blanket measure that'll prohibit towns from passing anything that might help someone, unless they first clear it with Cliven's pals, Koch's money and ALEC's tentacles at the legislature. Just don't tell us what to do, Washington!