You might remember a post from earlier this year of an e-mail I sent to Senator Jamie Pedersen. The Senator said publicly that he thought rent control is a bad idea and acknowledged it doesn’t work to help people struggling with housing costs. But then he said he would support HB 2583, a bill that would, if it passed, removed the state level preemption on local jurisdictions enacting rent control policies. At the time, I pointed out that it wasn’t a question of if Seattle would enact rent control but when. The Council has already said that it supports the removal of preemption and Mayor Jenny Durkan has been unclear on her stand on the issue. Another Democratic Senator is sending signals that should worry opponents of rent control; Senator Reuven Carlyle is supporting the tax on sugar in sodas by heavily touting local control, and calling out all the bad motives behind preemption. Like Pedersen, he’s playing a dangerous game.

Carlyle has taken to Twitter making it clear he supports the ability of Seattle to slap a tax on sugar in soft drinks. But he’s putting a lot of weight on the issue being about preemption.

The paper he points to is a good one in the sense that it puts in one place the narratives of many efforts by state governments to limit what locals can do. This is just a fact. It happens all the time. Here’s a good paragraph, sort of the punchline of the article.

When state and federal leaders fail to act on important social and economic issues, local governments often step into the breach, passing legislation that reflects local conditions, needs, and desires. This has certainly been the case over the last two decades, with progressive local governments adopting living-wage requirements, smoke-free ordinances, local gun regulations, LGBT rights and protections, undocumented immigrant sanctuary policies, local healthcare requirements, and much more.

That first line is critical. But let’s turn it around for a minute.

When local leaders fail to act on important social and economic issues, state governments often step into the breach, passing legislation that reflects broader conditions, needs, and desires.

You see, it all depends on where you stand on various issues. I was the target of a saber rattling letter by RJ Reynolds over the issue of our local law banning the sampling of tobacco products. I opposed preemption by the state of this law because we were keeping addictive product out of the use of young people who would end up suffering the health consequences. It was a good law.

The tobacco lobby had the upper hand in Olympia. Again and again we made the case that the legislature should overturn the state’s preemption on banning smoking in public places. In the end we failed, but an overwhelming vote of the people meant we got the ban. That was just half the headache. Then came enforcing it, when I was called the “Poster Child of the Nanny State.” Remember that? Probably not.

I’ve been doing this stuff a long time. Long enough to know that a rigid support of local control is a bad idea. Yes, the concept of allowing locals to make policies that reflect their values makes sense. But it all comes down to whether we look at those values and whether they pencil out. In the case of smoking bans and sampling bans, mass produced tobacco is a highly engineered product designed to addict people for money. There is no safe level of use of mass produced corporate tobacco. None. Tobacco companies should be forced purchased by the federal government, and the product only sold in plan brown wrappers with a prescription from a doctor. Still think I’m a libertarian?

But rent control is an almost equally horrible thing to foist on to a community. While it does not kill people, it creates human suffering, devastating local housing markets by disincentivizing new housing, creating rationing for existing housing, and contributing to a general break down of maintenance and housing supply. Yet the Seattle City Council would enact it in a heartbeat if they could. The issue of preemption simply must be argued issue by issue, not as a blanket ideological one. Yes, sometimes good local laws are stymied by really bad legislative action at the state level. But sometimes, coherent and thoughtful legislative bodies are the only thing standing between ideologically deranged local governments from enacting really bad ideas, like rent control. It will be up to moderate Democrats like Carlyle to balance local control and preemption to save Seattle from itself.