Protesting Arizona

Check this brief article out

The San Francisco government is banning official visits to Arizona. Is San Francisco crazy? Well, LA and DC might do something similar.

I think this little incident is a great example of leverage and how the game is constantly changing and... innovating.

Here's what I mean. The standard political process is that voters in a state elect representatives. If they don't like a law (in this case, an immigration law), then they vote out their representative. If you don't live in the state, then you go one level up and lobby your federal representative to pass a law negating the state one.

Now in this case, a city is protesting a law in another state, not by lobbying the federal government, but by basically putting up an economic sanction on Arizona. They are applying economic leverage on something quite unrelated.

Furthermore, individuals in other states have found more leverage. Instead of writing letters to their senators, they are boycotting companies based in Arizona in the hopes that Arizona companies (which can't vote) actually hold the political power in Arizona.

Will inter-state economic sanctions work as leverage in a mostly-unrelated political issue? I wonder if we'll see more of this