Bloomberg. BusinessWeek's national political correspondent Joshua Green went to Nashville, Tennessee recently to report on a power struggle that's happening there. Republicans, who have a super majority in the state legislature are moving to strip authority from Democratic led Nashville and give
it to themselves. And it's not just Tennessee. In Republican led states around the country, politicians are seeking to impose their political will on left leaning cities and remove their power to decide on everything from police violence to street names.
The old courtesies that used to allow both parties to kind of govern in harmony, especially urban cities and red states, have really just vanished. In the age of Donald Trump. Every fight is a battle to the death.
I'm west Kosova today on the big take Red States stage a hostile takeover of blue cities. Josh like a lot of Americans, you went to Nashville this summer, But you didn't go for the hot chicken and good music, did you.
Well, not entirely for the hot chicken good music. I picked Nashville because I was writing a feature story for BusinessWeek's New Cities issue, and I was looking at the fairly recent trend of red state Republican governments imposing their will on blue cities within their border, and Tennessee and Nashville are sort of the leading example of this trend that's really swept the country over the last five ten years, but especially since the Trump years.
It's been happening, like you say, all around the country, but Nashville seems to have a whole lot of different things happening at once.
Yeah, I mean, Tennessee has a long political tradition of minting these kind of moderate Republican figures who became national characters, people like Lamar Alexander or Howard Baker. And the state was known for its bipartisan political consensus, for really managing to function and to function well whether a Republican was
a governor or a Democrat was a governor. And Nationville has always been the economic engine of the state, so it seemed to be where kind of Northern Yankees and Southern Conservatives could all kind of get together and function effectively. But over like the last five or ten years, that really broke down, and it happened mainly because we really don't have any more these kind of pockets of localized politics that can have a different political culture than the
national political culture. What's happened is that all politics has become nationalized, and that has completely upended political life in Tennessee and in particular in Nashville.
So Josh wakas through some of the things that have been happening in Tennessee recently.
So the way I think of it as until fairly recently, Republicans, for whom small government and personal freedom is supposed to be a foundational belief, tended to pretty much let cities run themselves in Tennessee and elsewhere. And yet what happened in Tennessee over the last decade or so is that it's turned deeply deeply read. Republicans first won control of the legislature, then they won a super majority in the legislature, and they really didn't need to cooperate with Democrats anymore.
And at the same time, national politics was polarizing, and
they stopped deferring to city leaders. And the most famous example recently that I think most listeners will know about is that earlier this year, the Republican state legislature expelled two black Tennessee Democrats from the state House for protesting gun violence Reupblicans had accused Jones and Pearson of disorderly behavior after leading protesters onto the House floor, bringing proceedings to a halt, with both men using a bullhorn.
Some Republicans compared the moment to January.
Sixth, didn't expel a third white Democrat who was also protesting, And it became this national issue because it's sort of all at once brought in race, gun violence, political power, personal freedom, all these sorts of things that both parties are sort of fighting about on a national level all the time. But in Nashville that was really just the
tip of the iceberg. I went down and spoke to the woman who was in charge of a citizen led police oversight board that had been brought into being by a ballot referendum to try and curb the number of police shootings, especially white police officers shooting black men, and Nashville had responded to this, the citizens had by creating this oversight board that was working collaboratively with the police.
It seemed to be a positive step toward reform until earlier this year, when the Republican legislature stepped in and passed a bill abolishing all police oversight Boards, which was quickly signed into law by the Republican governors, an interesting change after fifty eight percent of National b voters approved the board to begin within twenty eighteen.
Director of the current board says that the new law will completely and drastically change police accountability in the city. So that added fuel to the fire.
And at the same time, Republicans have done things like seize control of the Nashville Airport Authority.
The takeover scheduled to take effect July first. Metro officials are now asking a judge to block in.
They claim it violates the state Constitution's home rule and equal protection clauses.
They're trying to take control of the football stadium.
The mayor would only be allowed to select three of those boards members. The state would be able to choose the remaining ten.
It's even gotten down to the level of renaming the streets in Nashville. Democrats had named a street after John Lewis, the late Democratic civil rights icon, which a pair of Republican legislators had tried to rename that street President Donald Trump Boulevard. So it just goes to show you the level of pettiness and bickering that has consumed Nashville's politics.
And Josh, one of the people who figures prominently in your reporting is Nashville's Democratic mayor, who's really struggling with this.
Yeah.
So I spent the day in Nashville with John Cooper, who's the Democratic mayor of the city and was elected in twenty nineteen as a former real estate developer with an NBA from Vanderbilt who ran as a kind of practical business minded Democrat who was really focused on fiscal responsibility and economic growth and was trying to appeal to voters in both parties. By some measures, he's succeeded. The
city's economy is absolutely booming. It's one of the few city economies that's recovered from COVID fully and gone on to grow from there. When I was in town, Taylor Swift had just come through, and kind of Cooper pointed out to me, you know, in most cities, a Taylor Swift concert is this huge economic stimulus, but Nashville is now getting so much tourism that they get that sort
of thing practically every night. And there were literally, you know, cranes rising all over the city and tourists in for music concerts. And party buses driving around everywhere. I mean, it was really a fun, exciting place to be. And yet Cooper's term has been marked by this kind of partisan fighting over everything from COVID mask mandates and shutdowns to the gun violence that's really become a problem in
Nashville over the last couple of years. And even though Cooper's a popular mayor and probably would have had a cake walk to a second term, he announced earlier this year that he's not going to run.
Again, and that was just because he didn't want to deal with this endless bickering.
You know.
His public line was that he kind of accomplished what he'd set out to accomplish.
He helped pass with.
A Republican support, a new two billion dollars stadium for the Tennessee Titans football team, which is going to revitalize Nashville's East Bank neighborhood.
So that's the kind of crown jewel of his mayoral term.
But yeah, it was clear that this kind of partisan fighting had just completely worn him down. He comes from a family with a long democratic lineage. His father, Prentice Cooper, was actually the governor of Tennessee back in the nineteen forties, and so Cooper himself comes from this tradition of kind of bipartisan cooperation that essentially vanished during the four years that he was mayor, and.
In fact, his older brother kind of fell victim to similar partisan politics.
Part of the trend that I'm writing about isn't just coming and kind of fighting over laws or trying to impose political culture red political culture on blue cities. It's really gotten the level of Republicans trying to destroy democratic political power wherever and however they can. The greatest example of this in Nashville is actually John Cooper's brother, Jim Cooper,
who is the longtime Democratic congressional representative for Tennessee. And Jim Cooper was a blue dog Democrat, which is sort of a term that's faded a little bit, but what it meant was that they were a kind of a centrist, pro business, culturally conservative Democrat, you know, exactly the Democrat that used to be able to get elected in the South but has pretty much been replaced by Republicans. At this point, Jim Cooper told me, you know, he'd had
a deal with the state Republicans. Basically they thought that he was a productive guy a guy they could work with. And so for twenty years, when Republicans drew the congressional lines, they always drew a congressional district for Nashville, and Cooper was the guy who represented Nashville. Earlier this year, Republicans decided, we're not going to do that anymore.
We're not going to.
Allow that, and they broke up his district and spread its populous among three Republican districts, and essentially Jerry mannered him out of a seat. So Cooper is now forcibly retired by Republicans. And so what you have now is Nashville, which is a multicultural, multi racial city, heavily democratic. I think it voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump about sixty five percent to thirty five percent the twenty twenty election,
is now represented by three different conservative Republicans in Congress. Yes, as Jim Cooper put it to me, these Republicans want to impose their alien culture on the city. And I think that's pretty much what's happening in Nashville and other places.
After the break other democratic cities feel the wrath of Republican lawmakers. Josh, why did Republicans break up? What you call this gentleman's agreement to have a democratic city have a democratic congressional district.
I think the shortage is that they broke it up because they could.
And one of the by products of this kind of nationalization of politics is that the old courtesies that used to allow both parties to kind of govern in harmony, especially urban cities and red states, have really just vanished. In the age of Donald Trump, every fight is a battle to the death. And so Republicans realized they have
a super majority in the state legislature. If they wanted to, they could gerrymander out this democratic district, even if it meant ejecting a long time centrist congressmen who had very good reputation, who they worked with for decades.
And so they went ahead and did that.
And it's the kind of political power play that we're seeing in states across the country where you have these red state legislatures, and in fairness, in some states where you have blue legislatures, they're breaking up Republican districts, and so everything has become this power struggle. Who can seize the most political power for themselves and prevent their opponents
from having it. That's been the focus rather than the kind of harmonious governance that you would have seen a decade ago, two decades ago, that sort of thing, not that the party has always agreed on everything, but that there was a certain amount of deference to allow Democrats to govern democratic areas and Republicans to govern Republican areas.
You mentioned that this isn't only a Republican thing where Democrats have all the power. They seem to be doing the same sort of thing, there just aren't as many of them.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, I live in Maryland.
There's a democratic legislature and they have famously jerrymannered the state of Maryland to produce as many Democratic seats and as few Republican seats.
As they can.
You can also look to a state like California, where you have Democrats have the governorship and a supermajority and the legislature, and so they can do things like set clean air standards or set standards for cars, you know, car emissions, that sort of thing that Republicans don't have a choice, they have to submit to, and so that can have an effect not just on the state but nationally where car makers don't want to make one set of cars for forty nine states and a separate state
for Democrats. So again you can see the states, whether the Democrat or Republicans, becoming the battleground for national politics.
So if, as you say, democrats when they have power also kind of push their agenda, why are you focusing this on Republicans and MAGA and saying that this is particularly a big deal when Republicans do it.
Well, I think it's because the situation that I write about with Republicans is that they're going in and stripping political power from blue cities in a way that we just don't see, you know, when democrats control a state.
Republicans are just being much more aggressive about stripping democratic political power than Democrats are about stripping Republican political power, just because of the dynamic you see especially across the South, where you have these aggressive culture war oriented Republican legislatures that see these urban, liberal democratic cities within their midst and just say, you know what, we're not going to
let this happen. We have the power to strip this away, and so we're going to reach in and take away political power from cities like Nashville. There just really isn't an equivalent on the other side, where democratic legislatures are trying to strip power from big conservative cities, because they really aren't big conservative cities in America. Cities tend to be urban, liberal and democratic, even in the South.
Do we see anything similar where democrats are imposing their will on rural or suburban areas where there are more Republicans.
Yeah, we can definitely see.
Blue states can set their own laws that rural states have to abide with, whether it's omissions, or it could be a state minimum wage law, it could be mandatory paid leave for workers. Really anything a state legislature wants to pass and impose. Cities, whether they're big urban ones or small rural ones, really don't have the ability to resist if they want to.
And in your piece, you actually write about a lot of the other places around the country where we're seeing battles that are similar to the ones you describe in Nashville.
Yeah, this is happening everywhere across the country, especially though in conservative Deep South states where you have a combination of a republican legislature, often with a super majority status. So you have states like Texas where they have a very conservative governor and legislature. They recently passed a built overriding city measures in Austin and Dallas that had guaranteed water breaks.
For construction workers.
And remember this is Texas searingly hot climate. But because this was a local ordinance and state Republicans wanted to override it, they did away with that and many other ones.
All of this part of a new bill which empowers the state to override local governments in certain circumstances. Critics call this an overach, but supporter say this will make it easier to do business in that state.
The bill was all encompassing that it's referred to as the death Star Bill because state Republicans kind of zapped out these local democratic ordinances just about everywhere, whether the issue is water breaks for construction workers or a minimum wage law or whatever it is. It was this sort of aggressive assertion of states rights to control cities.
You also read about what's happening in Kansas City and Missouri.
Often there is like a racial and a policing vector. I mean, if you think about the issues that they kind of most animate the political culture wars. This is where these laws tend to fe So you know in Kansas City, where there have been problems with police shootings. In Missouri, Republicans forced Kansas City to increase spending on policing and have also been trying to take over control of police oversight in Saint Louis, which voters a decade
ago actually handed to Saint Louis City leaders. Now Republicans are trying to take that back. And Mississippi Republicans created a separate police force and court system from a majority white part of the heavily black capital city of Jackson, which prompted the US Justice Department to file a civil rights complaint saying that the move was racially discriminatory because in effect, heavily white Conservative Party had superseded the political
authority of a largely black city. And we're seeing these sorts of confrontations on race, on gun violence really all across the country.
Josh, you mentioned earlier that this trend was kind of magnified in the era of Trump, and yet early on in the country, state power really was exercised in this way a lot more.
Yeah.
I mean, in speaking to Jim Cooper, the now deposed Nashville congressman, you know, point he made was that our country was set up so that cities don't actually have legal rights under the Constitution, Like the founders didn't envision that cities would be important political entities, and so as a result, the state is by far the most powerful political institution when it comes to the Constitution. If states
want to, they can literally make cities disappear. So what's happening now is that Republicans do have the power, maybe not to make cities disappear, but to take control of them politically in a way that they hadn't before.
And how much of this as a product of the government in Washington Congress just being completely paralyzed.
That's a big part of it.
I mean, talking to Republicans and Democrats, they point out that with gridlock at the national level, with there being these very small windows where all three branches of government are control by one party, nothing is really happening at the national level. It's hard to see how it could
happen at the national level. And so as a result, the kind of focal point of the battlefield in democratic politics has moved down to the state level, where Republicans and Democrats in different areas do have enough control to pass national policies and so we're seeing this happen more and more, and in a sense, it's a return to the way politics used to work in an earlier period of American history, where states pretty much governed themselves on
their own. That only began to change after the nineteen thirties, when the country was facing different challenges with war, industrial growth, the civil rights movement, the kind of necessitated policy making at a national level.
And so we had a.
Big period where the two parties were able to kind of govern at the national level. But what's happened over the last ten twenty years is that that power has been reduced and we're kind of devolving back to states being the petri dishes, the focal points for the big fights in American politics.
When we come back. Is there a way to end this standoff? Josh? So, what do people in these cities, in cities like Nashville, who see their own power of being eroded by politics say about this.
There's a lot of anger and frustration.
I mean, the woman in the lead of my piece, her name is Jill Fitchard, an African American woman who ran the police oversight board that Nashville created, was understandably frustrated that the city had put together this oversight reform, it seemed to be working. They just issued their first report with all sorts of suggestions about how the police and the city could work better together to reduce these police shootings, and in one fell swoop, the Republican Legislature
came in and sort of abolished it. So there's an understandable frustration for people living in these cities that they're not being represented in government, that they're essentially powerless, that they're kind of vassals of the Republican legislature, and it's especially frustrating, I think for John Cooper, the mayor. I mean, Nashville is absolutely the economic engine of Tennessee. It's a
very attractive place for people to live. You know, there's low taxes, there's lots of tourism, a million exciting things
to do, a great food scene. It's attracting transplants from all over the country who think this is a neat place to live, a lot of creative types, highly educated, and Cooper and other people worry that what makes Nashville cool is its freedom, it's creative economy, and if it instead becomes the site of conservative culture wars where things like gun violence go unaddressed, or trans people don't feel
safe or comfortable. Does a software engineer from California come to a Nashville that seems hostile to diversity and creative expression?
Are dangerous?
Josha's trend seems to be picking up steam. Where do you see it heading? Do you think there's a way that these kind of political tensions can be lowered?
You know, that's the.
Tricky thing, because there's really no breaking mechanism that I can see. Right This isn't a product of what's happening in Nashville or Tennessee. It's a product of what's happening in our politics nationally. So as it becomes you know, increasingly contentious and fighty and everybody is mad and everything is a fight to the death, that's just simply bleeding
down to every level of US politics. So until that fever starts to break, until the tensions at the national level start to diminish a little bit, it's really hard to see what would slow this trend or reverse it. Ultimately, it's up to political parties, political leaders, and it's up
to voters. But the tricky thing that locks this trend in is that Tennessee is such a republican state that it's really hard to envision a democratic renaissance that would balance political power a little more evenly in Tennessee or other states, that would kind of reawaken the bipartisan governing consensus that existed at an earlier age before the state became so deeply read.
So we have a big presidential campaign already underway. Do you think these sorts of simmery intensions are going to be seen in that race? You have a lot of these cities that have high populations and a lot of voters.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean you're seeing it already, just in the way that the candidates are talking about some of these issues. Whether it's Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, firing Democratic prosecutors, whether it is Republican presidential candidates responding to shootings like the one in Nashville by saying they don't think there needs to be gun reform.
Whatever the issue, the political.
Race in twenty twenty four only seems to be kind of turning up the heat and the stove. It's already, in fact intersected with Nashville because Tennessee Republicans had wanted the twenty twenty four Republican National Convention to be in Nashville, and the Democratic Mayor John Cooper and the city council said no. John Cooper and the Metro Council said it
wasn't workable. Both it would be too costly, there were security concerns, and so they turned it down, which immediately generated an angry backlash for Republicans who had wanted to kind of show off their city, their state, and their political power by having the Republican Convention be in Nashville.
Hard to imagine that a national.
Political race where all of these cultural issues come to ahead is going to do anything but exacerbate the trends that we're seeing in Nashville and across the country.
Did you talk to anybody who saw something positive coming into this?
No? You know that was the real downer about this piece.
Mean, usually when you go out and write one of these trend pieces, what you do is try and find out at the end, well, you know, how could this turn around?
Like what green shoots? Do we see? What positive signs?
What reforms could be made to bring about a sort of more positive climate, And whether it was Democrats or Republicans, nobody I talked to in Tennessee. Really saw this turning around, because it's not, in the end, a product of how Nashville is governor who governs it. It's really a product of our national political climate, and that's become more polarized
and more intense and angrier. That's just led down to places like Nashville, which are now kind of the front lines of the culture war that we're seeing happen across the country.
Josh, despite always being the bearer of bad news, I was good talking to you. You too, Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergolina. Our
senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Falero and Mobarrow. Raphael mciely is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big take
And