States Have the Constitutional Right to Regulate Cities

This article in Forbes makes powerful constitutional arguments that the state does indeed have authority over cities.

Local politicians, following the lead of the Texas Municipal League, have voiced concern about the state regulating budget growth, property tax growth, tree ordinances and others.

Austin Mayor, Steve Adler labels Abbott’s call “a war against cities.” 

Another newspaper editorial goes further: “Greg Abbott’s position on local control is way off base—and hypocritical.”
Critics of state intervention in local affairs charge that conservatives protest federal overreach into the affairs of the states, but these same leaders then miss the contradiction when they reach into the affairs of political subdivisions.
But state regulation of cities constitutes neither a change in attitude nor hypocrisy. It represents what the U.S. Constitution enables and requires. 

That’s why this “hypocrisy” charge comes too late—226 years too late, to be exact. It was 226 years ago (1791) that the first ten amendments to the U.S Constitution were adopted. The Tenth Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In short, the argument that a state’s regulation of its political subdivisions hypocritically violates conservatives’ allegiance to local control misses entirely the existence and meaning of the Tenth Amendment. If the Texas Constitution contained a provision that stated—“The powers not delegated to the state by the U.S. and Texas Constitutions, nor prohibited by either to the state’s political subdivisions, are reserved to the political subdivisions respectively, or to the people”—the charge of hypocrisy would stick. 

But, as I have argued previously, no such clause exists in the Texas Constitution. Without it, this criticism amounts to no more than a political sentiment, rather than a constitutional or legal argument. 

Recognition of the primacy of liberty in our constitutional order dispels the notion that a state’s intervention in its political subdivisions is hypocrisy. As Bolick states it, to protect individual liberty, “no government at any level should operate free from scrutiny or constraint.”

Christina Sandefur, of the Goldwater Institute, agrees. According to Sandefur, “We don’t promote local control as an end in itself. We promote it as a means to achieve liberty. When it becomes destructive of those ends, when it’s in fact being oppressive, then absolutely we believe in state control.” 

Read the entire article.