I Voted Against the War in Iraq on Tuesday

We had a ballot question in Philadelphia “urg[ing] the United States to make year 2007 the time to redeploy U.S. troops out of harm’s way in Iraq,” through the unusual mechanism of an amendment to the city’s Home Rule Charter. The measure passed overwhelmingly (122,710 to 49,938). According to the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long promoted municipal foreign policy, back to the days of nuclear free-zones), some 280 cities have passed such resolutions. Together with the 400+ jurisdictions with similar measures relating to the Patriot Act, this activity is clearly on the rise. These measures may not be of much consequence by themselves, but they keep the pressure up on yet another front.

In other subnational activity this week, 40 mayors of major cities have gathered in New York to grapple with climate change issues (the “C40 Large Cities Climate Summit,” with a gaggle of corporate behemoths as sponsors). It’s pretty amazing how this stuff has snowballed, even over the last couple of months, though see this LA Times editorial criticizing the summit as greenwash (as well as this piece recently posted to SSRN by Duke Law’s Jonathan Wiener skeptical of such subnational activity generally).