While the Powers That Be constantly warn us about foreign threats to our democracy from Russian trolls, TikTok, etc. – there is scant coverage of an actual assault on our people’s democratic liberties by forces on our own soil.

It’s coming from extremist, right-wing Republican lawmakers who have autocratic control over more than a score of America’s state governments. Their obscure anti-democracy weapon is called “preemption” – the dangerous power of state officials to nullify laws passed by local people.

It’s supposed to be used rarely, carefully, and only in emergency situations, but today’s radical Big Government Republicans have weaponized it, routinely overturning local actions that the GOP’s corporate funders don’t like. Local decisions to protect worker safety, outlaw loan sharking, shut down puppy mills, prevent workplace discrimination, stop pollution, control political corruption… and so many more popular democratic reforms are being abolished by Republican autocrats in service to plutocrats. Some 500 more of those usurpations are moving through state legislatures across the country now – with practically no public notice.

Embarrassingly, GOP leaders in my state of Texas have been leading this charge against the people’s democratic will, and they’re now enacting a nuclearized escalation of their attack. Their new weapon has been dubbed “Death Star” – a state law that will preemptively ban cities and counties from passing corporate regulations stronger than state regulation (which is infamously feeble). The ban – gleefully pushed by a horde of lobbyist for brand-name corporate elites – includes letting corporations overturn existing local protections for workers, consumers, small business, the environment, and others. “We hate cities and counties,” grumped the sponsor of the Death Star law.

This is a wholesale usurpation of your and my liberty to govern ourselves. In exchange for political funding, GOP officials are literally outsourcing the people’s democratic authority to private profiteers. Learn more at www.supportdemocracy.org.

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