> The urgency is quite irrelevant.
I have no idea how you get that idea.
> In many locales you will still have to ask voters for permission and/or have a constitutional referendum in addition to having the local legislature acquiesce.
Yeah, and with a sense of urgency, those things can be and routinely are done quickly. Assuming that this argument is in good faith, yYou seem to have a concept of American government derived entirely from a loose knowledge of bits of abstract theory with no connection at all to the reality of practice.
> All of those parties can do whatever they want and a large percentage of them don't understand and DGAF.
Yeah, a broad non-ideological consensus that retail will be legally impossible due to easily communicated, widely=publicized changes in the external conditions without a tweak to sales tax law will easily overcome both the don't know and don't give a fuck of the vast majority of people engaged enough to be involved in the decision-making process at any level, including voting. Things are hard to solve when lots of people have existing strong preferences for particular solutions and those preferences are in fundamental conflict, but this isn't that kind of thing.
> I'd be perfectly happy for pennies to disappear but I am not ignorant of the realpolitik that makes implementation nearly impossible.
Not only do you seem to be ignorant of the political realities, you are also apparently ignorant of the meaning of “realpolitik”, which really doesn’t apply here.
The penny is going away, there'll be some isolated local cases where the timing of effective dates of legislative/administrative fixes to rules written in the assumption that pennies would be widely available vs. the availability of actual pennies will cause some minor inconveniences, and in a decade will look back on apocalyptic claims of near-impossibility the same way we look back at people protecting civilizations-ending consequences from the Y2KK bug. Well, unless we're all dead or living in a nightmarish dystopia for reasons unrelated to the elimination of the penny.