Don’t Trust The Voters.

The Republicans don’t care about the voter, they cannot be trusted to vote the “right way.” Cities are liberal and the towns conservatives so the Republicans overturn the voters.

Antagonisms flare as red states try to dictate how blue cities are run

The Washington Post

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

November 27, 2023 

Despite long advocating small government and local control, Republican governors and legislators across a significant swath of the country are increasingly overriding the actions of Democratic cities — removing elected district attorneys or threatening to strip them of power, taking over election offices and otherwise limiting local independence.

State lawmakers proposed nearly 700 bills this year to circumscribe what cities and counties can do, according to Katie Belanger, lead consultant for the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization focused in part on ending the overreach it calls “abusive state preemption.”

The group’s tracking mostly found “conservative state legislatures responding to or anticipating actions of progressive cities,” she said, with many bills designed to bolster state restrictions on police defunding, abortion, and LGBTQ and voting rights. As of mid-October, at least 92 had passed.

We just can’t trust those darn voters, to vote the right way.

More clashes are expected. Louisiana Gov.-elect Jeff Landry takes office in January and has promised to confront the state’s largest city, New Orleans. He already has created a committee led by a local GOP political donor and businessman to address public safety and other issues there. He has threatened to withhold state funding for the city’s water infrastructure until the DA agrees to prosecute women who violate the state’s abortion ban by seeking the procedure.

[…]

The antagonisms between red states and blue cities are all the more notable because the urban areas in the crosshairs are mostly majority-minority, with many mayors and district attorneys of color.

It is our way or the highway!

These actions go “squarely against the Republican philosophy of small government and more freedom,” said Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, a Black Democrat who has struggled to pass local tobacco and gun control ordinances because of constraints enacted by Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature. “This is about common-sense democracy.”

[…]

“The governor’s and legislature’s ongoing war on such home-rule cities hurts the state and its economy, discourages new transplants from other states, and thwarts the will of Texas voters,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, another Black Democrat, said in a statement after the initial ruling. “This self-defeating war on cities needs to end.”

This is all about power and control… authoritarianism. 

‘Authoritarian’ or ‘brave?’ DeSantis aggressively uses power to suspend elected Democrats from office

South Florida Sun Sentinel

By Anthony Man 

August 9, 2023

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ suspension of the prosecutor in Orlando is drawing attention to his repeated use of his executive authority to remove local officials whose policies he disagrees with, but who have not been charged with crimes.

Unlike previous Florida governors of both parties, who used their power under the Florida Constitution to suspend elected officials when they were charged with breaking the law, DeSantis has repeatedly removed elected officials for political and policy reasons.

Wednesday’s move — suspending Monique Worrell, the state attorney in Orange and Osceola counties — comes as DeSantis is looking to change the subject away from the turmoil that has engulfed his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

[…]

In his four years and seven months in office, DeSantis has removed nine county elected officials who weren’t charged with crimes, a South Florida Sun Sentinel review of state suspension orders shows. From his first days in office, DeSantis used the suspension power far more expansively than his Republican predecessor, former Gov. Rick Scott, now the state’s junior senator.

He overturns the will of the people, the people wanted them in office, voted them into office and the governor overturned the will of the people. Nullify the elections and placed a political crony in their place.

DeSantis’ suspensions of elected officials who weren’t charged with crimes affected eight Democrats and one Republican. The one such Scott suspension was of a Democrat.

“All governors have suspended, but one of the key differences for DeSantis is he seems to suspend local officials when he has political and policy disagreements, as opposed to indictments or other clear evidence of illegality or wrongdoing,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida.

This is what dictators do. This is what political despots do.

“Ron DeSantis’ autocratic removal of yet another elected official, purely because he disagrees with her decisions, is the epitome of the weaponization of government.  The authoritarian tactic of removing duly-elected officials without legal cause is a direct affront to voters and Gov. DeSantis’ removal of the Orlando State Attorney is a brazen and petulant act of a flailing presidential candidate whose disregard for democracy and the rule of law is deeply troubling,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, the senior Democrat in the Florida congressional delegation, said in a statement.

What is scary is that around 50 percent of the voters like what he is doing! They want laws against us, they want to make it illegal for us to exist.

A Republican gubernatorial primary candidate in Arizona last year called for us to be forced into relocation of LGBTQ people to camps in an effort to stop the spread of the monkeypox virus.