It’s old hat to say everything is bigger in Texas. True connoisseurs know that things in the Lone Star State are also often wilder and weirder than what you see on the evening news. Every two weeks, Steven Monacelli will explore the dystopic, desperate, and despicable realities of contemporary Texas and channel the sense of absurdity, anger, and anguish that is felt by so many Texans. State politics mirror our already overheated summers, while floods and hard freezes overwhelm our infrastructure, and disinformation erodes our social discourse. But not all is lost. Together, we can navigate this Hell & High Water to get to more stable ground.
Last month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing the decriminalization of the possession of cannabis in the city of Dallas, where 67% voters approved Proposition R, a city charter amendment that prohibits the city’s police department from making arrests or issuing citations for cannabis possession of four ounces or less. It’s the sixth city Paxton has sued over decriminalization measures, including Austin, Denton, Elgin, Killeen, and San Marcos. His office argues that such local measures conflict with state laws that criminalize cannabis. It’s also the latest example of a budding trend in Texas, where Republicans are using state power to crack down on local government, or the will of voters, in an ironic reversal for the body long known as the “party of local control.”
Currently, the non-medical use of cannabis is legalized in 24 states and decriminalized in seven states across the nation. Dallas is seeking to join those states in the decriminalization of a plant that a May study found more Americans smoke daily than drink alcohol. Advocates for cannabis decriminalization argue it’s a safer substance than booze, and the American Civil Liberties Union says the enforcement of criminalization disproportionately impacts the poor and people of color. Studies also show that legalization does not result in increased use among minors, and while there are some public health risks around mental health and addiction, evidence of significant harm is either inconsistent or inconclusive. Aside from the typical appeals to law and order, the arguments against decriminalization are hazy at best.
Two of Paxton’s buzzkill lawsuits against cities that have decriminalized cannabis have already been dismissed for lack of standing, namely Austin and San Marcos, and he has agreed to temporarily halt a lawsuit against Killeen. But high on state power, Paxton is appealing those dismissals. If Paxton’s latest effort succeeds in blazing up local control, Dallas police will again be required to arrest and cite individuals for cannabis possession, and daily smokers in Dallas will continue to have a reason to be paranoid. But even if Paxton’s latest lawsuit goes up in smoke, there is another potential avenue for rolling back cannabis decriminalization in Dallas: Proposition S, a recently passed Republican-backed ballot measure that gives “standing to any resident of Dallas to bring a lawsuit against the city to require the city to comply with provisions of the city charter, city ordinances, and state law.” This means Proposition S could be used to force Dallas to comply with state laws that criminalize cannabis — an outcome that may disappoint voters who jointly voted yes on Propositions R and S.
It’s not just pot that has made state Republican lawmakers eager to preempt Democrat home rule. Examples are constant, and they grow like weeds: Education is also an issue where Republican lawmakers have flexed state power to roll back local district policies, such as mask mandates at schools during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the state engaged in a controversial takeover of Houston ISD that replaced the locally elected board of trustees and superintendent with a new superintendent and board of managers hand-picked by the Texas Education Agency. Critics have decried the move as an attack on the district orchestrated by Republicans — and said it has driven away teachers and failed students. But supporters have touted it as a success, and state lawmakers are looking at newly established policies in the district as inspiration for statewide legislation. The results of the recent election indicate local voters are unhappy, with the failure of a recent Houston ISD bond measure serving as an unofficial referendum of the state takeover.
Then there’s the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, dubbed by critics as the “Death Star” bill, which was passed in 2023 by the Republican-dominated state Legislature along partisan lines. The bill scrapped a wide variety of local laws that go above and beyond those passed at the state level — such as ones requiring construction companies to provide 10-minute water breaks for every four hours of work. At the end of last August, the District Court for Travis County ruled that the bill was unconstitutional, but its fate is not yet sealed: The Texas Attorney General’s Office filed an appeal that is still making its way through the courts. Meanwhile, a lesser discussed preemption bill that bans local governments from regulating greenhouse emissions has gone unchallenged.
Republicans have dominated all three branches of government in Texas for decades. But they’ve failed to establish control in major cities and urban counties, except for Fort Worth in Tarrant County. Local government is the level of governance people tend to interact with the most, meaning that the majority of Texans are most often interfacing with Democrats. In recent years, Republicans have puffed their chests, seeking to force these local entities to hew toward Republican policies and values — while simultaneously using the power of the state government to resist some federal laws and regulations.
There are certainly arguments to be made regarding the proper distribution of powers under the Constitution, but we’re long overdue to dispose of all pretense that the Republican Party of Texas is somehow the champion of “local control” or “small government,” at least in its current incarnation.
Correlative with the rise of Trump’s idiosyncratic style and neo-fusionist politics that “abandons old conservative reliance on ‘intermediary institutions’ like local government, congress, and the courts in favor of an embrace of executive power” and eschews ideological consistency, Texas Republicans have made it clear they are keen to wield state power to run roughshod over local government whenever their policies are at odds with certain material or political interests. And in Texas, the oil and real estate industries are reliably the largest donors to Texas Republicans. As detailed in a Fort Worth Report article from this past September, “gas drilling boom sparked a movement to limit local control in Texas” after Denton banned fracking in 2014 over environmental concerns. That same year, the city of Austin passed an ordinance banning discrimination against renters who seek to use housing vouchers, only for the Republican state legislature to pass a law the next year preempting such bans.
The last decade has shown us that the Republican Party has sacrificed their commitment to the general conservative philosophy of local and limited government in favor of a more muscular approach to politics that aims to wield power as a means to an end. But perhaps that’s a more honest approach. After all, conservative calls for local control and “states rights” were at their peak during the battle over education desegregation, and in retrospect, it is quite clear that the argument was a mere fig leaf for their real goals.
