Local Opinion: Arizona lawmakers keep punching down

For decades, conservatives in the West had a reliable enemy. It was Washington, deeply resented for its sometimes aloof and distant management of the region’s public lands and natural resources. Washington, they said, did not listen to locally elected representatives, or heed the voice of those closest to the ground.

Now, some Republicans in Phoenix have a new foe. To paraphrase the old cartoon strip, Pogo, they have met the enemy and it is us — the citizens of the state’s cities and towns and the local officials we elect to represent our needs. Instead of punching up, lawmakers are punching down.

Last week, Republicans in the state Senate moved to take away the ability of Arizona’s biggest cities to make their own rules regarding local elections and governance. That effort — stoked by Republican ire over how Tucson chooses its city council — is aimed at repealing a territorial-era provision in the state’s Constitution assuring charter cities of home rule.

It is not the first time Republicans have used their majority in the state capital to push back against local rules and policies they see as left-leaning. As our politics have become more polarized, the Legislature has routinely “weaponized” — to borrow a term so popular these days in Washington — its authority to squash anything that doesn’t align with their orthodoxies or disadvantages their politics.

An early episode was in Bisbee, after the local government passed an ordinance in 2017 restricting the use of plastic bags by merchants. State lawmakers faraway from Bisbee quickly declared the law an affront to the rights of consumers and businesses. Relying on a legislative maneuver called preemption, the Legislature forced Bisbee to withdraw the law — or risk losing its share of state revenues, about $2 million a year.

Since then, lawmakers have routinely challenged efforts by towns and councils to take on issues as disparate as housing, minimum wages, gun controls and short-term vacation rentals. Earlier this month, when Maricopa County officials said they were exploring light rail as part of a transportation plan, Republicans threatened to cut off state aid because, they said, their plan would mean taking money away from cars and highway construction.

Even puppies are not beyond their reach. Arizona is one of a few states that denies local government the ability to regulate local pet shops that sell dogs imported from out-of-state puppy mills, despite warnings from national animal welfare groups.

What seems especially odd about this sort of meddling in local democracy is that it runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy among so many conservative Republicans in the West, who for years argued that the government that serves people best is the government that is closest to the people.

No one spoke more loudly on that point than Ronald Reagan — a Westerner himself — when he championed something he called “the new federalism.”

Washington was too unaccountable, too far away to understand what people need. Let those who live in the communities — and their elected officials — figure out what they want. As one Western governor said at the time, we don’t need Washington to fix our potholes.

But in the corridors in Phoenix — and a lot of other state legislatures — lawmakers seem determined to row in the other direction, preferring imperial fiats from the state government in favor of leaving it up to the people who live in the state’s far-flung places.

Given the raw acrimony of our tribal politics these days, it is no surprise that lawmakers are ready to use a blunt club to beat back any local government that offends their populist sensibilities.

But the discussion also suggests an interesting spin on Reagan’s own words from his inaugural address in 1981, when he declared that “government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”