The law, dubbed “the law that kills,” was so broad it prevented local ordinances that mandated things such as water breaks for construction workers.
The law, dubbed “the law that kills,” was so broad it prevented local ordinances that mandated things such as water breaks for construction workers.
“States’ rights” was supposed to mean “small government” and “local control”. The recent shift toward preemption of local ordinances pulls back the veil and proves that the argument only held sway because there were disproportionately more conservative states than conservative voters at the national scale. Now they’re shifting power back upwards and away from citizens because there are disproportionately more conservative states than conservative cities. States are their last holdout where institutional power hasn’t yet been sufficiently and consistently diluted by their decline in numbers. They don’t give a single, solitary shit about “small government”. They give a shit about conservative government. Everything else, to them, is illegitimate.
States rights meant preserving slavery. Any other meaning is a retcon.
And even then it wasn’t really States’ Rights. The Fugitive Slave Act forced northern free states to treat escaped slaves as though they were “self-stolen property” rather than people who escaped from being slaves.
Conservatives are all about states’ rights only if it absences their goals. If a large federal government would advance their goals better (for example, continuing slavery or banning abortion), then they’ll ditch states’ rights quickly.
They care about power, nothing else.