Meaghan Winter - All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States

ON FEBRUARY 20, 2018, SIX DAYS AFTER SEVENTEEN people were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Representative Kionne McGhee, a Democrat from Miami, stood on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives. Looking on from the gallery above were Parkland students who had traveled over four hundred miles by bus to Tallahassee with the hope of persuading their state lawmakers to pass gun reforms.

McGhee asked the assembly to vote on a bill that would have banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Representative Carlos Guillermo Smithof Orlando, where a gunman had killed forty-nine and wounded another fifty-three people in the Pulse nightclub in 2016had sponsored the bill, whose chances would expire unless the House bent its usual protocol and acted right at that moment.

The shooting at Parkland demands extraordinary action, McGhee told the assembly.

He was trying a technical procedural maneuver, one that might have worked in an alternate reality without partisan politics. But everyone who understood what it meant that Republicans held a supermajority in the Florida assembly knew what would come next.

Richard Corcoran, the Republican Speaker of the House, interrupted McGhee. A few minutes later, the House voted on party lines, 71 to 36, not to consider the assault weapons ban.

In the gallery, students began to cry. On Twitter, student leader Emma Gonzles wrote, The anger that I feel right now is indescribable.

Something unusual was happening. With their eloquence, temerity, and rage, the Parkland students had seized national attention. Major news networks and papers dispatched reporters to cover their calls for change. That week in February, even before knowing that hundreds of thousands of students nationwide would soon walk out of their schools and through the streets, the American public paid attention to what was happening in Tallahassee.

And yet from another vantage, the scene in the Florida capitol that day was not all that unusual. In statehouses, it is not uncommon to watch someone sit before a panel of elected officials, hold up a placard of a dead childkilled by opioids or lack of insurance or a gunand plead for the passage of a bill that will inevitably not move out of committee because it does not fit within the political calculus of the assemblys leadership. In those hearing rooms, ordinary people often share in breathtaking impotence. Three weeks before the Parkland students arrived in Tallahassee, for example, the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee discussed the Rule of Law Adherence Act, which would have required all local government officialsexplicitly including employees of the state university systemto turn over information about immigrants to federal immigration officials. The bill was similar to those shopped around the country by the American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC), an organization that since the 1970s has written experimental conservative state legislation. ALECs corporate members include Geo Group, the largest provider of detention services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a major donor to Florida Republicans and Donald Trumps presidential campaign. In 2016, the federal government decided to stop

On January 30, 2018, the day that the Florida immigration bill was considered in Tallahassee, so many people showed up that the hearing room reached capacity. Muslim students and Latino farmworkers and their teenage children who had traveled hours to testify against the bill werent allowed in the packed room. Expressionless, they watched the proceedings on a television mounted in a hallway as Florida senator Aaron Bean stood at a podium and said his bill means criminals will be kept off the streets. The bill did not advance, in what counts as a victory, in part because in 2011 immigrant rights groups staged weeks-long protests in Tallahassee to oppose a bill modeled after Arizonas 2010 law that allowed police officers to ask for immigration papers if they suspected someone was undocumented. The Florida legislature didnt pass a new aggressive anti-immigrant law until 2019, when it gave the state the power to sue local law enforcement that refused to detain people according to orders from federal immigration agencies.

The next day, January 31, Floridians concerned about sea level rise arrived in Tallahassee by the busload to ask their legislators to pass a raft of proactive climate-related reforms. Many were college students or recent graduates who had grown up along the coast and understood that the window of opportunity for stalling climate change was closing; during their lifetimes, they told me, their hometowns would be radically altered, if not sunken. By the end of the legislative session that March, none of the bills they wanted were passed, even though just ten years ago it was all but mandatory for both Democrats and Republicans in Florida to at least make overtures about the need for proactive environmental laws.

Similar scenes play out in hearing rooms across the country, usually unrecognized by the American public. Beneath the tumult of the Trump presidency, state lawmakers have largely kept to their course. As ALECs own website explained in 2017, State legislatures around the country have made significant progress passing

For years, it has been an open secret in political circles that Democrats and progressive interest groups have prioritized federal candidates and policy at the expense of the states. The liberal political establishmentsparty officials, interest group and union leaders, donors and consultantshave for the most part underresourced state-based efforts since at least the 1970s, with repercussions that have only recently been obvious to the general public. Conservatives have traditionally had this view that they want to build and invest and focus at the state level where progressives and Democrats have really centralized and tried to build their power in Washington, DC. And I think that that theory has had negative implications for and negative consequences for Democrats and progressives across the country, said Nick Rathod, then director of the progressive organization State Innovation Exchange.