Republican-run states see opportunity to push extreme policies under Trump

Republican state lawmakers and conservative leaders around the United States see Donald Trump’s re-election as a mandate that will help them enact rightwing policies in Republican-run states across the US.

The policies include steep tax cuts, environmental legislation, religion in schools and legislation concerning transgender medical care and education, among other hot-button social issues.

Republicans will have trifecta control – meaning both legislative bodies and the governorship in a state – in 23 states next year, while Democrats will only control the three entities in 15 states. The other states have divided government.

“Arkansans went very favorably for President Trump, and I think Arkansans feel very similarly about President Trump as they do” Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said Ryan Rose, a Republican state representative in Arkansas, where his party has the trifecta.

“That will only empower our state to continue forward with more conservative policies, putting more money back in the pockets of hard-working Arkansans with tax cuts and supporting Arkansas conservative family values.”

While that federal and state control could allow Republicans to advance their top priorities, leaders of progressive groups point to other election outcomes – such as some red states supporting abortion rights – as evidence that even if people voted for Trump, that does not necessarily mean they support what opponents describe as extreme proposals.

And they remain optimistic that they will prevail against such measures in court.

“We are in a moment right now where the incoming administration” won “by distancing themselves from these very policies that it now seems that they are seeking to accelerate”, said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group that includes more than 800 lawyers and has filed legal challenges to Republican regulations and administrative actions.

Perryman added: “We are laser-focused on protecting the American people and on ensuring that people in this country have the tools to make their voices heard.”

Top priorities among Republican state lawmakers appear to concern curriculum and school choice, meaning allowing parents to use public money to send their children to private schools, which can be religious or more socially conservative than public schools.

Twenty-eighty states have at least one school choice program, such as education savings accounts, which provide public per-pupil funds to families with children who don’t attend public schools, according to Education Week.

Trump’s platform stated that he wanted “to protect the God-given right of every parent to be the steward of their children’s education” and when nominating Linda McMahon to serve as education secretary, he stated that she would “fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every state in America”.

In Arkansas, Sanders recently released a proposal that would increase funding for such “education freedom accounts” by $90m to $187m and set aside $90m in surplus funding as a reserve for the program.

Since Trump’s election, Republicans in states such as Ohio have also introduced legislation labeled as a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that would mandate that public school officials notify parents of a student’s mental, emotional or physical health, including “any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex”.

Critics of such legislation have described it as “an endangerment to all LGBTQ+ youth”.

Earlier this month, there were 129 pending anti-LGBTQ+ state bills, including proposals to prohibit doctors from prescribing to minors puberty-blocking drugs or gender reassignment surgery, according to the ACLU.

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a rightwing advocacy group, said that the Department of Education under Trump would help states “stop gender ideology being taught in our nation’s schools”.

Trump has also promised to eliminate the Biden administration’s efforts to address the climate crisis. The Montana state senator Tom McGillvray said he hoped Trump would mitigate or rescind recent federal environmental regulations.

“We don’t need Washington to tell us how to manage our environment,” said McGillvray.

Still, the courts could provide a way for people to combat Trump administration policies.

The Montana supreme court upheld a ruling this week that stated that 16 young plaintiffs had a “constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment” and invalidated a law that barred regulators from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions when permitting fossil fuel projects.

Democracy Forward plans to use the courts to “challenge policies that are harmful and in instances where the incoming administration may be inclined to ignore the law”, said Perryman.

And even though Trump captured the popular vote and electoral college, voters in three states, including Montana, supported the Republican-passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights.

A majority of people also oppose Project 2025, a policy playbook from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, according to polls.

During the election, Trump distanced himself from the plan, which calls for withholding federal funding from states that share data on abortion that occurred within their borders and for dismantling the Department of Education, among a long list of other ideas. But Trump has since appointed people connected to Project 2025, including Tom Homan to serve as “border czar” and Brendan Carr to serve as chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

“Some of the same architects behind the extreme federal policies also work at the state level,” said Perryman. “We are obviously monitoring the bills that are being filed in various sessions and ensuring that people at the state and local level can make their voices heard, including through using the courts.”