While companies like Trader Joe’s continue to try to reduce their disposable plastic waste, Tennessee’s Republican Party is trying to figure out a big problem—how to stop their most populous, and liberal, cities from passing plastic bag bans or taxes. For most people, saying you believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people means that those people get to decide what they want. Republicans have always said that government should not legislate people into doing what they don’t want … except when that government is controlled by a Republican legislature that is beholden to big business and its anti-environment, anti-science interests.
After Memphis and Nashville began discussing creating a tax on commercial plastic bag use, state Republicans seem to have woke up. Memphis’ and Nashville’s metropolitan areas comprise almost half the state’s population. The Republican-majority state House has put together a bill that would pre-empt those municipalities from creating any kind of environmentally conscious ban on disposable plastics. The Tennessean reported last week that newly elected Republican Gov. Bill Lee is set to sign the bill into law, and that, according to a spokesperson, the Islamophobic governor was only “deferring to the Legislature's will on the bill.”
The bill was announced, and Bill Lee said he would sign it, just in time for stories about whales with hundreds of pounds of plastics in their stomachs washing up dead all over the world. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 11 states have enacted “pre-emptive” laws to stop their municipalities and citizens from enacting more environmentally sound laws on plastics. Those states are Florida, Missouri, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Mississippi, and Indiana.