Why, hello there.

I’d like to welcome you to a safe, chill zone where the Iowa caucus debacle murmurs softly in the distance, like a kindly old wizard up in a tower casting a spell that will definitely end the world as we know it and bring about the rule of nameless horrors from beyond the stars …

Ahem.

Though we’re still waiting for Iowa caucus results, we need not wait for statehouse action, for statehouse action will not wait for us.

Scott Allen—Reconsiderer: In Wisconsin, white Republicans tried to hijack Black History Month … again.

Campaign Action

Last year, Republican lawmakers removed Colin Kaepernick, a Milwaukee native, from a Black History Month resolution drafted by Wisconsin’s Legislative Black Caucus that named specific honorees—ignoring the vocal objections of black lawmakers.

This year, GOP Rep. Scott Allen planned to introduce his own Black History Month resolution. Allen, who you’ll be just shocked to learn is white, didn’t see fit to consult his black colleagues before including several white people on his list. This quite understandably righteously outraged his colleagues of color. But would you believe that … Allen had a change of heart? He met and talked with members of the Legislative Black Caucus, and “as a result of those conversations,” he decided to scrap his crappy Black History Month proposal and asked black lawmakers for permission to sign onto their resolution, which is expected to pass the full legislature.

The Terrible Old Man: Virginia’s legislative session continues at full speed (they adjourn in early March, so yeah, they’re kind of in a rush), and the new Democratic majorities in the legislature keep doing pretty cool stuff.

This week, the General Assembly paved the way to become the first southern state with broad protections against LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

And Democrats continue to advance legislation that will allow localities to decide for themselves whether to remove Confederate monuments.

A 116-year-old law currently prevents local governments from actions that would “disturb or interfere with any monuments or memorials” erected to honor war veterans—even if that war was fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy. So cities and towns all over Virginia right now are totally stuck with their hate statuary. Democrats are trying to change that this year—to the dismay of many Republicans. So GOP Del. Wendell Walker came up with a truly brilliant troll. I mean, legendary. Why he’s not leading the Republican caucus, I’ll never understand. Total genius. Walker decided to make a point by introducing legislation to remove remove the statue of Democrat Harry Flood Byrd that stands sternly in Richmond’s Capitol Square. Byrd served as a Democratic state senator, U.S. senator, and Virginia governor over the course of his life, and for over 40 years, he led infamous Byrd Machine that maintained the dominance of white supremacy in the commonwealth’s politics. Byrd is most notorious for being the architect of Massive Resistance, the racist opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that shut down schools across Virginia rather than integrate them and otherwise maintained segregation in the state’s schools for years. So yeah, Byrd was a monster. But because he was a Democrat, Walker thought that his colleagues across the aisle would both want to keep the statue and would think twice about empowering localities to remove Confederate statues.

Whoops

When Democrats began asking him if they could co-sponsor his bill, Walker began to realize his mistake. It turns out that a lot of Democrats are pretty jazzed about the legislation and very much would like to vote to remove the Byrd statue. So Walker tried to withdraw his bill. Democrats, so far, are having none of it. They’ve denied his initial request to strike the bill are forcing him to justify the move at a hearing.

The Lurking Fear: Last week in this space, I discussed new legislative district data that reveals a challenging but extremely viable path to a Democratic majority in the Michigan House.

Democrats, by the by, are four seats down (52 D/58 R).

Thanks to the work of the Daily Kos Elections squad, we know that Democrat Gretchen Whitmer carried 56 of the 110 seats in the state House—that magic number Democrats need to take the majority.

Democrats aren’t the only ones aware of this, though. Republicans have relied on their extremely effective partisan gerrymander to cling to their Michigan House majority since the 2010 wave—despite Democrats winning more votes in three of the last four elections. But now they’re buttressing that baked-in advantage with a whole lot of cash money. Michigan Republicans are entering the election cycle with a whopping $3 million in the bank, thanks in part to the late-year largesse of the DeVos clan (of which our awful Secretary of Education is a scion). In December, the DeVos fam gave over half a million dollars to legislative Republicans. Democrats are … behind. … by about $2.3 million. But having Republicans scared and flush is better than having them happy and flush, and progressives still have plenty of time to jump into these elections and invest in flipping this chamber.

The Nameless City: The GOP-controlled legislature in Florida is stripping control over local policy away from cities and towns all across the state, and these localities are starting to get pretty damn sick of it.

I’ve written a lot about these Republican preemption laws over the years—especially in the wake of one especially notorious measure in North Carolina that overturned a Charlotte city ordinance allowing folks to use the bathroom corresponding with the gender with which they identify.

You remember 2016’s Bathroom Bill, right?

One of the less-noticed phenomena of the GOP’s dominance in state legislatures over the past decade is the glut of preemption laws Republican lawmakers have been routinely using to undermine the local authority of (often more liberal) city and municipal governments. Theoretically, preemption measures are used establish a sort of hierarchy to prevent conflicts between state laws and local ordinances and ensure that statewide policies are generally applied uniformly. They’ve also been used to set a “floor” below which municipalities are not permitted to fall with regard to things like civil rights protections and employment and wage standards. Over the past nine years (read: since Republicans came into ginormous power in state legislatures after the 2010 elections), however, many state-level preemption efforts have been used to bar localities from addressing local problems and issues—and to expressly punish jurisdictions that suddenly find themselves in violation of these new laws. This tendency has been especially pronounced in the Sunshine State, which one advocacy group identifies as one of the four most aggressively preemptive states in the country. (The others are Texas, Arizona, and Tennessee.)

(And what do these four states have in common? All together, y’all: Republican-controlled state governments!)

Many of the preemption bills that pass in Florida are backed by corporate interests or eliminate civil rights protections. Among the things preempted in Florida are local control over providing paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage, gun safety measures, and banning environmental hazards like styrofoam. In Key West, local officials banned a specific type of sunscreen made with chemicals that damage coral reefs—which are part of the foundation of the heavily tourism-dependent area. But now Johnson & Johnson, a major manufacturer of sunblock, is backing a state-level preemption law that could overrule the ban. Residents of Orange County went to the ballot box and approved a measure requiring local employers to offer paid sick leave. But then Disney World and Universal Studios, both major employers in the area, worked through a lobbying firm to block it through a new state law. A band of Democratic lawmakers, activists, environmental groups, labor organizations, and more have come together to fight back. The coalition is filing a raft of bills that would undo many of the preemption measures hog-tying localities and getting in the way of what’s known in Florida as “home rule.” Do any of these bills have a shot of passing the GOP-dominated legislature? Nope, not even a little. But the group is going to use these bills to raise awareness of just how much power Republicans in Tallahassee have stripped from local governments all across the state in recent years and to begin a long-term campaign to return power to the people of Florida.

Welp, that’s all for this week. And what a week it’s been, huh? Caucus debacle, impeachment acquittal, Trump lickspittles, novel coronavirus transmittals, I’m all out of Skittles …

Anyway, you should maybe knock off early, get a jump on the weekend. Maybe you’ve got wood to whittle. Just print this out and show it to your boss, I bet she’ll give you that workday remittal.