Increasing polarization between so-called red states and blue states

Shawn Hubler and.Jill Cowan reported yesterday for the New York Times under the headline, "Flurry of New Laws Move Blue and Red States Further Apart."  While I often remind folks that "red" is not synonymous with "rural state" and "blue" is not necessarily synonymous with "urban state," I'm doing to indulge the shorthand here, making it my justification for blogging about the story here on Legal Ruralism.  A brief excerpt from the Hubler-Cowan story follows:   

After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out-of-state.

As Republican activists aggressively pursue conservative social policies in state legislatures across the country, liberal states are taking defensive actions. Spurred by a U.S. Supreme Court that is expected to soon upend an array of longstanding rights, including the constitutional right to abortion, left-leaning lawmakers from Washington to Vermont have begun to expand access to abortion, bolster voting rights and denounce laws in conservative states targeting L.G.B.T.Q. minors.

Other culture wars issues playing out in state legislatures:  abortion and voting rights.  The NYT piece continues:

Some legal analysts also say the anticipated rollback of abortion rights could throw a host of other privacy rights into state-level turmoil, from contraception to health care. Meanwhile, entrenched partisanship, which has already hobbled federal decision making, could block attempts to impose strong national standards in Congress.

“We’re potentially entering a new era of state-centered policymaking,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside. “We may be heading into a future where you could have conservative states and progressive states deciding they are better off pushing their own visions of what government should be.”

The story notes that control of the state legislature is split between parties in only two states:  Minnesota and Virginia.  Contrast that with 15 states with divided legislatures just three decades ago.  Hubler and Cowan note a lot of legislative activity in the American West, in particular.  

As a related matter, my colleague recently noted on Twitter that California is now banning business travel to 20 states based on their regressive laws on LGBTQ issues.   

And that reminds me of this January 2017 column, by Roger Cohen for the New York Times, published soon after Trump's election:   

Getting America out of its mess begins with the acknowledgment that New York and California do not have a stranglehold on truth, any more than Kansas and Missouri do. Out there in God-fearing gun country there are plenty of smart, upstanding Americans who, as Mark Lilla of Columbia University put it, paraphrasing Bernie Sanders, are “sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.”

Oh, and after this Hubler-Cowan New York Times story on red-blue divide was published, Oklahoma passed a draconian abortion law, providing yet another piece of evidence of this red-blue divergence.