Leaders in Obama’s party are starting to stir up trouble of their own. Local, state Democrats go rogue

In scattered state capitals and city halls around the country, a new group of elected officials is telling the federal government to take a hike: Up-and-coming Democrats.

Challenging federal power in sometimes-theatrical ways has been a hallmark of Republican politicians — particularly among the GOP’s more colorful governors — since President Barack Obama took office. But now, with Washington, D.C., in a state of permanent chaos and a host of liberal policy priorities frozen in place, leaders in Obama’s party are starting to stir up trouble of their own.


They’re defying the feds chiefly on social policy, with immigration and drug enforcement the key flash points of 2014.

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Democratic mayors in cities such as Los Angeles and Philadelphia, as well as governors, including Maryland’s Martin O’Malley, have recently announced they will no longer cooperate with certain detainment requests from immigration authorities in Washington. Other heavily blue states and cities, including Chicago and New York state, endorsed similar policies in previous years.

In Colorado and Washington state, voters and local officials have proudly flouted federal drug law by decriminalizing marijuana possession, going beyond the sentencing and enforcement tweaks enacted in other locales and giving legal sanction to the sale and possession of pot.

O’Malley, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, announced in April that Maryland would not automatically comply with so-called “ICE detainers” — federal requests to hold prisoners arrested for other reasons for possible deportation. Immigration reform advocates have criticized such requests as an indiscriminate enforcement method, targeting well-established, if undocumented, civilians as readily as hardened criminals.

In an interview, O’Malley cast the decision to defy the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as a reaction to gridlock in Washington and the failure of a “particularly obstructionist House of Representatives” to enact a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

“There are some issues that demand action, and you can’t use inaction at the federal level as a cop-out for doing what you believe is best for the people that you serve,” O’Malley said.

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“On putting in place a better criteria when it comes to ICE detainers, I see us as leading a movement towards better policy, smarter policy and a more just policy,” he said. “I don’t see that as necessarily running against the federal government. I think we’re running ahead of the federal government.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, widely viewed as a future candidate for statewide office and perhaps beyond, struck a similar chord in his immigration rhetoric. He explained at a recent POLITICO event that he was unwilling to keep deploying the resources of his city to prop up a dysfunctional federal enforcement regime. Many of the ICE requests were a “waste of time,” Garcetti said, “taking valuable hours away from the core of policing.”

“There’s no monopoly on power at any level — local, state or federal. And I always say you don’t see the power you have before you exercise it,” he said. “We hope to inspire immigration reform in Washington.”

The rhetoric of local dynamism, highlighting state and municipal innovation in contrast to federal gridlock, has proliferated in both parties for years: Republicans, the opposition party in the Obama era, have hailed state-level efforts to cut taxes, limit the influence of organized labor and resist the Affordable Care Act. Democrats trumpet state and local measures hiking the minimum wage, regulating the sale and ownership of firearms, and legalizing same-sex marriage.

But the defiance of federal power on immigration and drug law goes a step further, crossing the line from implementing policies that the federal government has not endorsed to rejecting enforcement of standing federal policy.

In some respects, it follows more in the tradition of ultra-liberal states that have provocatively challenged the limits of federal regulation on social policy, as Oregon did with a 1997 assisted suicide law that was upheld by the Supreme Court. In the same vein, several municipalities, led by San Francisco, challenged the feds by issuing legally unsanctioned same-sex marriage licenses during Republican President George W. Bush’s administration.

If many Democrats applaud local leaders for racing ahead of their federal counterparts, even some champions of rebellious state policy say it’s only a poor substitute for national action.

“It’s certainly a sign of system failure,” said California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor who is leading a pot decriminalization referendum push in the Golden State. “Unless D.C. gets its act together, we’re going to see more of this patchwork, localized reform. One can applaud that. One should. But on another level, is that the best approach to governance?”

Newsom, who became a national political figure by issuing legally unsanctioned gay marriage licenses, said local improvisation can at least stand a chance of shifting public opinion.

“Obviously, gay marriage was a much hotter issue a few years back. There wasn’t a statewide Democrat supporting decriminalizing marijuana,” he said. During the 2010 election, he recalled, now-Gov. Jerry Brown was “nowhere on driver’s licenses [for undocumented immigrants] and the DREAM Act [for undocumented students] and now he’s touting driver’s licenses and the DREAM Act. … It’s been a monumental shift.”

So far, the pushback from Washington has been negligible: The Justice Department has signaled it will not seek to wield federal drug law to halt state-level pot decriminalization. O’Malley said he experienced no pushback from ICE or other federal agencies on the announcement of pared-back cooperation with the immigration program dubbed Secure Communities.

All of that could conceivably change under a more socially conservative president, with an executive branch less tolerant of such local improvisation.

To some liberal policy advocates, the current president has set an example for their defiant actions: The White House has picked spots to scale back its support for more restrictive federal laws, most famously with its deferred deportation program for certain undocumented immigrants, as well as with the 2011 decision to stop defending the now-defunct Defense of Marriage Act in court.

Even under Obama, progressive activists say they recognize the dangers of courting friction with federal power. Jean Robinson, the Seattle construction executive who chaired the state’s pot decriminalization referendum campaign, said that was “always a risk” — but one the campaign was willing to take.

“We didn’t know exactly, and we still don’t know at this point, exactly what the feds will do. But I didn’t have any reservations,” Robinson said. “It’s very difficult to get anything done on the national level, as President Obama has seen all these years, and this was something that couldn’t wait.”

On his immigration shift, O’Malley said the only reaction he’d gotten from federal agencies was an assurance that they’re “looking at it and studying” the current enforcement system — not, he said, a particularly satisfying response.

“After about a year and a half of that, one’s patience runs out. You have a responsibility to make decisions for the people that you serve in your time of service,” O’Malley said. “This is not a time to wait on the federal government to figure things out.”