Dems at state, local level plot resistance to Trump

Democratic state legislators and city council members are planning widespread resistance to efforts by President-elect Donald Trump to crack down on undocumented immigrants and reform labor laws.

Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants with criminal records, and labor leaders are worried that the new administration will be an impediment to efforts to boost the minimum wage and implement paid family leave policies. While Democrats control less than a third of the nation’s partisan legislative chambers, the party hopes cities and states can serve as a bulwark.

{mosads}“We are centers of organizing and protest,” said Elizabeth Glidden, a member of the Minneapolis city council. “We have to be loud with our voice and our values.”

Already, city attorneys in the country’s largest metropolises have held conference calls to organize a legal response should the Trump administration cut or hold their federal funding. Mayors, police chiefs and city council members have promised to defend their immigrant communities, and many have said they do not intend to comply with federal orders to detain undocumented people on the basis of their immigration status.

“We’re going to have a lot of fights in the days ahead of us,” said Brad Lander, a member of the New York City Council. “The work to protect immigrants in our cities is coming quickly.”

New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D) said Democrats can play what he called “aggressive defense” on implementing paid family leave and predictive scheduling for fast food workers, especially in states and cities, even if the Trump administration works to roll back some of the rules and regulations implemented by the Obama administration.

Even with so few state legislative chambers under Democratic control, labor groups have had success in large cities, where they have pushed through minimum wage increases and family leave proposals. 

Cities like Seattle and Washington, D.C., and states like California and New York have approved plans to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in recent years. Massachusetts and New Jersey are considering similar hikes. Lander said the New York City Council would take up a package of bills aimed at guaranteeing schedules for low-wage workers next week.

“The laboratories of democracy, the laboratories of policy innovation really are cities right now,” said Minnesota state Sen. Scott Dibble (D).

Democrats also said they would continue to highlight Trump’s more objectionable comments and his association with prominent members of the alt-right.

“Under normal circumstance, you do not have a white supremacist sitting 10 feet away from the president,” Rivera said, referring to Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News who will serve as Trump’s senior counselor. “We can and we will resist, but we have to do it together.”

Bannon has rejected such criticism and denies being a white nationalist.