Republicans Escalate Their War on America's Cities

While some establishment Democrats attack their leftward drift

by Harold Meyerson September 15, 2025


Last Thursday, nine hours into a marathon session of the House Oversight Committee in which committee Republicans advanced 16 bills to strip Washington, D.C., of home rule, MAGA zealot Scott Perry (R-PA) realized his colleagues hadn’t gone far enough. Accordingly, he presented an amendment to one of those bills that would repeal D.C.’s ban on right turns on red lights.

I’m not making this up.

This stellar example of your tax dollars at work then passed on a party-line vote and will be sent to the House floor. Sadly, no committee Democrats introduced amendments of their own that would have required Perry to stand on various D.C. street corners to monitor compliance with his motion.

Perry’s amendment may be the reductio ad absurdum of the Republicans’ war on cities, but it is part of a far broader party offensive, waged at the level of state government as well as federal, that is both accelerating and intensifying. Its most visible manifestation, of course, is President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, which he expanded to Memphis last Friday. But red states have been stripping their blue cities of their right to enact ordinances and laws of their own for years.

As I reported in February of last year, the current wave began in 2016 when North Carolina nullified a Charlotte ordinance that penalized violations of LGBTQ rights. Later that year, Alabama responded to Birmingham’s enactment of a minimum-wage ordinance (the state has no minimum-wage law of its own) by banning cities from adopting one. More recently, Mississippi stripped criminal trials from the jurisdiction of Jackson courts and substituted for them state courts whose judges would be appointed by the (Republican) chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court. A Nashville ordinance establishing a civilian review board for local policing was nullified by a state ban on civilian review boards. The common thread in all these preemptions is that they consist of heavily white Republican state legislatures and governors overturning the laws of heavily Black Democratic local officials.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-15-republicans-escalate-war-on-americas-cities/