In a new paper from Local Solutions Support Center, Curricular Preemption: The New Front of an Old Culture War, we discuss the growing trend of curricular preemption and its impact on local school districts.
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Preempting Progress: States Take Aim at Local Prosecutors examines how as local communities have called on prosecutors to use their discretion to embrace reform and a less carceral approach to criminal justice, states have intervened in an attempt to force prosecutors to continue tough-on-crime policies.
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Some states have begun to use preemption to force localities to criminalize camping in public, taking local resources away from proven solutions that could address the root causes of homelessness. Rather than solve the crisis, this preemption exacerbates it by punishing people who can find shelter nowhere else.
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As part of the Local Solutions Support Center’s ongoing efforts to help local leaders understand and deploy their authority to address their communities’ needs, we have produced this memo outlining what local election administration involves and how it threatens democracy.
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A new white paper from LSSC explores in more detail how some state legislatures are using preemption to undermine local control of police budgeting, accountability, and management.
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This White Paper considers the consequences of decreasing state aid to cities and offers some suggestions for policies that would allow municipalities to better carry out their important responsibilities as engines of local democracy.
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This white paper captures how defending local democracy now includes a growing focus on recovering lost local authority and summarizes key lessons learned so far in the fight to repeal existing preemption.
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The unfortunate result of this burgeoning legislative movement to adopt statue statutes and other punitive preemption measures has been the erosion of local democracy, the stifling of local political innovation, and the undermining of local faith in the democratic process.
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There is now an active anti-sanctuary movement aimed at eliminating the discretion that local communities have traditionally exercised over their involvement in the federal immigration enforcement efforts.
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It is essential that state legislatures accurately represent the statewide public’s views when legislating with respect to local power. In too many states, highly gerrymandered state legislatures do not accurately represent the public’s views.
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All preemption laws are in tension with local democracy, but punitive preemption is especially threatening. Many state preemption laws are vague around the edges; some may violate the state’s constitution or legal doctrines.
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One of the most troubling recent trends is the rise of “blanket” preemption in the states, described by the New York Times as efforts to “…[wall] off whole new realms where local governments aren’t allowed to govern at all.”
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Federal preemption is the concept that ‘federal law preempts contrary state law.’
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