The counterplan builds momentum for federal action that solves any deficits

Toward this end, GND reforms seek to link investments in clean energy to the creation of high-quality domestic jobs and opportunities for business ownership in disadvantaged low-income communities and communities of color. This theory of change leverages clean energy sector growth to promote [*296] economic equity and racial inclusion. Since at least 2017, clean energy jobs have significantly outnumbered those in the traditional fuel sector, 18and these jobs are geographically dispersed. In nearly every state, there are significantly more jobs in "clean energy" - such as building renewable solar farms and wind power, and creating clean coal and zero-emission electricity - and "energy efficiency" - such as creating LEED certified buildings and LED lightbulbs, electric plug-in vehicles, and grid modernization - than in the fossil fuel sector. 19 The projected trends suggests further growth. 20Independent observers have found that these "green" jobs pay on average 25% higher than the national median and have higher unionization rates. 21This linkage between the "green" of private sector clean energy job growth and the "blue" of high-road labor standards formed the foundation for Biden's "big bet" on infrastructure - codified in the Build Back Better plan - which rested on the fundamental argument that fighting climate change would add "good paying jobs for American workers," 22and that those jobs could be targeted to people historically excluded from high-road employment opportunities. From this perspective, the administration could achieve a "just transition" to equitable clean energy by making strategic national investments to nudge existing trends forward to advance a "triple bottom line" - with significant environmental, economic, and racial equity returns - responding directly to the "triple crises." The political failure of this plan underscores the dearth of moral leadership and the profoundly broken state of American politics, while also drawing attention to the potential of alternative pathways of political change that do not hinge on the immediate promise of good-faith bipartisan policymaking at the national level.

B. Catalytic Localism

An alternative starting point is to consider how the conditions for systemic change build over time through dynamic engagement between national and local policymaking - in a process I call catalytic localism. There has been a recent growth of scholarship exploring the role of social movements [*297] in shaping new norms outside of law, which are then channeled into policy reform projects through adjudication and legislative change. 23Catalytic localism adds a new theoretical dimension to this framework by conceptualizing the development of reformist legal consciousness supporting large-scale policy change developing through mutually constitutive engagement between interest groups outside and officials inside the political process in policy dialogue across the different scales of multi-level policymaking - federal, state, and local - which interact in complex ways to shift attitudes and build political support. Departing from the standard account of federalism, this concept of catalytic localism rests on the notion that there is no hard boundary between federal, state, and local lawmaking - there are no determinate autonomous spheres of lawmaking that can be defined ex ante - but rather that new legal norms germinate, develop, are revised, and ultimately take root at different levels of government based on dynamic engagement and struggle among norm entrepreneurs (embedded in social movements and interest groups), their opponents, and political officials. In these political contests, the legal opportunity structure allocating lawmaking authority under established formal rules on federal supremacy, states' rights, and local home rule impose real constraints, but is more fluid and contested than conventionally imagined. In this view, the domains of "local" versus "federal" lawmaking are defined and reshaped through political struggle that continuously revises the scope of federalism - which level of government gets to do what and why - thereby transforming the meaning of important legal concepts like preemption. As an empirical matter, this means that we would expect to see policy innovations like the GND promoted and challenged at different levels of government through scale-shifting: touted by norm entrepreneurs on the national political stage, introduced by sympathetic state and local legislatures, challenged in court by industry opponents, revised and reintroduced based on legal outcomes - initiating a new round of policy contention in which the possibility for federal action is sharpened and new efforts are mobilized. Over time, instead of a singular federal law decisively addressing a problem like climate change, we would expect to see a patchwork of interrelated policies, some complementary and some in conflict, develop at different levels and locations - the outcome of which would constitute the "law" at a particular moment in time. In this conception, there are no value-neutral methods in a federalist system for defining which levels of [*298] government are appropriate for deciding specific types of political questions: there are no quintessentially "local" versus "nonlocal" issues, only distinct arenas of political conflict for advancing normative priorities. I contend that this concept of catalytic localism more accurately captures the dynamic of contemporary policy innovation in a context of intractable political conflict and deep polarization, providing a framework that helps to better explain why scale-shifting and fragmented policy development are defining features of contemporary legal and political mobilization to transform policy regimes.

In centering political conflict and scale-shifting as essential elements of policy innovation, catalytic localism also provides a different perspective on the potential and limits of "localism" itself 24: reframing the local-federal relationship not as a top-down system, or even one of mutual collaboration, but rather as series of contentious events, where local, state, and federal policymaking play off of each other cyclically. In this sense, it builds upon influential conceptions of federal-local relations to spotlight the role of movement and countermovement dynamics in shaping the meaning of federalism through forum-shopping policy innovations in multi-level systems. By understanding federalism through the lens of strategic policy development that seeks to push the boundaries - and ultimately redefine - the allocation of authority, catalytic localism draws attention to how dynamics of "uncooperative" 25or "cooperative" 26federal-local relations are shaped in part by how interest groups exploit the legal opportunity structures available at the federal, state, and local levels at a particular point in time. Sometimes, this dynamic points toward building state and local law and protecting it from federal preemption. Other times, as Nestor Davidson observes, it points toward leveraging federal authority to protect local law from state preemption. 27While catalytic localism recognizes that, in some situations, local governments may be centers of innovation that need to be less restrained by higher level authorities, 28it is less a normative theory of federalism than a descriptive framework for explaining and evaluating the results of substantive policy conflicts across lawmaking scales. It thus incorporates strategic [*299] behavior as a critical ingredient in the "policy churn" that occurs through local, state, and federal conflict. 29