The goal of Death Star is simple. The deeply conservative Texas Legislature wants to effectively deny cities—the state’s large Democratic-leaning cities, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin in particular—the ability to pass local laws and regulations in eight major policy areas: agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resource law, occupational law, and property law. And it does all this in a bill that is 10 single-spaced pages long, nearly one page of which is legislative findings, not actual law. Which is where the problems begin.
Death Star does not aim to affirmatively lay out regulations at the state level; it simply attempts to thwart local regulations. Thus, the entirely of the provision that denies local governments the ability to regulate the insurance industry is just this: “Unless expressly authorized by another statute, a municipality or county may not adopt, enforce, or maintain an ordinance, order, or rule regulating conduct in a field of regulation that is occupied by a provision of this code. An ordinance, order, or rule that violates this section is void, unenforceable, and inconsistent with this code.” That’s it. It then repeats this language across all the various other fields, although in a few cases it adds an extra clause or two to identify specific subfields it really wants to make sure are preempted.
The party of small government strikes again!
The article says that the Federal government provides no protection between State and County or City. Texas specifically may have law prohibiting this new law, but that’s only because the new law is too broad and too vague. That might not stop other states from implementing the law successfully, however.
It won’t go to SCOTUS, it’s all at the state level. Unless someone comes up with a US constitutional angle, or something.
to add to this: state lawmakers (especially texas) goes out of their way to make sure that there’s nothing in these proposals that could service as excuse for the federal gov’t to get involved because the state courts usually do what the state legislature wants.