When it comes to voter suppression and gerrymandering, Republican-controlled state legislatures have long been a critical front in the Right’s war on democracy. In the wake of the last presidential election, Republican state lawmakers moved swiftly to pass a raft of new measures designed to rewrite election rules and restrict access to the ballot box, the most dystopian of which aspire to enshrine conservative minority rule in perpetuity.

The Right’s various legislative onslaughts in statehouses throughout the country have often been rhetorically justified as principled attempts to push back against undue federal overreach — the implication being that Republican lawmakers are merely standing up for regional democracy and championing a localist alternative to the heavy hand of centralized government. Scratch the surface of a chimera like “states’ rights,” of course, and you’ll quickly find that Republican-controlled legislatures are perfectly happy to strong-arm municipalities in pursuit of their overriding ideological objectives.

Thus, in 2017, when the City of St. Louis passed an ordinance raising its minimum wage to the princely sum of $10 an hour, Missouri’s GOP legislature passed its own law reimposing the state’s Dickensian minimum of $7.70. Examples abound of similar Republican interference in local government, notably in Florida, where the self-described party of America’s working class quickly tried to crush the minimum wage increase approved by over 61 percent of...

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