Laboratories of Chaos: State Legislative Extremism and the Need for Electoral Action

The Tennessee State Legislature has emerged as a center of a political firestorm after it expelled two of its members for protesting on the floor of the state House of Representatives. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Interest in state legislative politics has waned for decades, with most national media agencies and voters focusing instead on the national scene. State legislators were seen as the boring maintainers of the status quo who focus on minute local issues and day-to-day concerns of citizens rather than architects of sweeping legislation. However, the image of sleepy statehouse politics has been shattered by an increasing rise in social and political polarization across the country. With legislators taking broad action on a variety of issues from educational curriculum to abortion to transgender rights, social issues have placed state legislatures at the forefront of culture wars. In the last few months especially, state legislatures have gained renewed attention with brazenly political moves such as the decision by the Tennessee House of Representatives to expel two Democratic members for protesting in favor of gun control on the state house floor and the silencing of a transgender Montana legislator for voicing her opposition to a ban on gender-affirming care. These watershed moments in American politics have been prompted by both the fall of critical accountability measures, such as local news organizations, and a rise in partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts, which has opened the door for ambitious legislators to delve into legislative extremism. As state legislatures continue to flex their uniquely powerful capacity to pass legislation, it is key that voters filling out their ballots for the 2024 campaign look beyond presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden and take the time to understand who or what they are voting for at the bottom of the ticket.

The United States is organized under a federal structure with each of the individual states afforded significant freedom in setting policy and developing unique programs. This model was praised by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as an opportunity for a single state to “serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Brandeis’s praise would evolve into the idea of the states serving as “laboratories of democracy,” an idealistic view of the federal system that afforded the central government the opportunity to learn and adapt state-wide programs onto the national scale. One of the most prominent examples of state-wide “experiments” evolving onto the national scale would of course be the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which was modeled after a similar program developed first in Massachusetts in the early 2000s. Though many of these programs and initiatives took on monikers based on the names of the executives in office at the time such as Romneycare for the Massachusetts health care reform law (and of course Obamacare for the ACA), legislative leaders had immense influence in actually guiding the final passage of this legislation.

Legislative leaders have long used their authority to leave a mark on the national scale—James K. Polk and Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, leveraged their state-level leadership positions to achieve the presidency. Other federal legislative leaders such as Sam Rayburn and of course, Nancy Pelosi, chose to stay in legislative politics and construct multi-presidential, term-spanning agendas that had significant national imprints, for instance passing massive legislation like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Inflation Reduction Act. This has similarly played out on a smaller scale in states, where legislative leaders have not only constructed policy but leveraged their positions to make bids for higher office. However, for the past several decades, there has been growing voter apathy for local and state elections as national issues have begun to take increasing precedence. Falling turnout rates and a rise in uncontested state legislative elections have become a norm across the country. This has been accompanied by a raft of failures across local news agencies which play a critical role in covering local politics and maintaining local accountability.

In today’s highly polarized political environment, this has provided an opening for extreme politics to take hold and conduct dangerous political experiments across the country. In 2012, Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas partnered with state legislative leaders to enact a massive tax cut experiment in the hopes of jumpstarting economic growth. The legislation, however, resulted in a series of budget cuts that caused significant public uproar. Voters quickly reacted, challenging legislators that supported the cuts in primary and general elections to force a repeal of the cuts. The repeal of the experiment stemmed the state’s bleeding, but significant damage was inflicted by the tax cuts to infrastructure and education spending. Despite voters’ reaction to extreme experimentation by the Kansas Legislature, other states have also begun to pass increasingly partisan legislation on not just economic issues but social ones as well. Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act which has been cited as a serious threat to First Amendment protections for state employees, Texas has pushed legislation to place the Ten Commandments in every public classroom, and many other states have joined in a vast anti-transgender legislative agenda. 

Voter attempts to react to these new extreme measures have consistently failed due to entrenched state governments stifling competition in state elections. Gerrymandering of state district lines has provided political cover for legislators in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina to maintain legislative majorities even after losing the popular vote. Even seemingly secure measures for citizens to circumvent legislatures such as public referenda have been rendered ineffective by some state legislatures. South Dakota, for example, passed an anti-corruption law in 2016 through a voter referendum only for it to be repealed by the state legislature. More recently state legislatures have used their authority to change referendum voter thresholds and limit the scope of topics to prevent measures such as the legalization of abortion from being put on the ballot.

The events in Tennessee over the past few months constituted another major escalation in legislative experimentation. Three Democratic state legislators took to the state house floor in support of gun-control protests after a mass shooting in the state’s capital, an act that infuriated the Republican majority. This led Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, Cameron Sexton, to spearhead a charge to expel those legislators, professing their actions as equivalent to an “insurrection.” Two of the three legislators would eventually be expelled, shocking the nation and opening the door for a barrage of national criticism. Though both of the legislators have been reappointed to office and were recently reelected, many in the state saw this initiative as part of an effort by Speaker Sexton to attain prominence as he considers a gubernatorial bid in 2026. Speaker Sexton’s actions indicate an erosion of legislative standards in favor of political power and present a dangerous authoritarian turn in one of the nation’s laboratories of democracy. 

Earlier this summer, a similar situation occurred in Montana, where Democratic State Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender lawmaker, was not only stripped of her speaking rights but has been barred from entering the state capitol for speaking out against the ban on gender-affirming care. The Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives, Matt Regier, similarly led the charge for Zephyr’s silencing and has played a large role in pushing a Christian-conservative view of governance.

Despite the controversies caused by their respective actions, both Sexton and Regier will continue to have political futures and their parties will retain uncontested control of their respective states. What’s more, states will continue to look at their early experiments in authoritarianism as models for future action. The North Carolina legislature recently pursued a legal case at the Supreme Court in support of the “independent legislature theory” which would have opened the door for states to ignore popular votes when casting electoral votes for the presidency. Though the argument was rejected by the Court, it left open the possibility for further legislative interference in electoral practices. As the 2024 campaign ramps up and candidates like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis spark concerns regarding democratic backsliding and extremist politics, the brutal reality is that democratic backsliding and extremism have already taken hold in many local governments. Democracy is being silenced and the window for action is closing. Voters must look at the next cycle of elections as essential and cast votes strategically to reinvigorate political competition across the country and corral the laboratories of chaos that state legislatures have become. 

Voter action will not be easy. Voters cannot just cast ballots on Election Day but must do so in party primaries as well. They must not only react to legislative extremism but be proactive in nipping authoritarian politics in the bud. Voters across the country will have to make unconventional decisions and commit to actions like casting ballots in other party’s primaries. Last year, voters in Wyoming did just that when thousands of Democrats switched their party affiliation to cast ballots in the U.S. House of Representatives primary in support of anti-Trump Congresswoman Liz Cheney, and though that effort failed it showcased the power voters can have in pushing candidates across the finish line on both sides of the aisle. Even then, however, this might still result in legislators who backflip on their views and switch parties (which is how new abortion restrictions passed in North Carolina early this year). Despite this, voters must continue to come out and hold local officials to account for their failed experiments, undeterred by losses and lies. Whether that means running as candidates themselves or recruiting new ones, it is imperative for citizens in 2024 to preserve the fabric of democracy and return states to more positive political experiments rather than delve further into authoritarian politics. 

Karun Parek (CC’24) is a Junior Editor for CPR. He is a senior studying political science, economics, and history. You can find him wandering across New York looking for the best coffee and talking about the need for better public transit in America. He is from Crossville, Tennessee.