A blue state plays an anti-Trump trump card

And proof that fighting works

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

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As a bonus, I’ll get some of the authors and directors to join us during our Zoom discussions. The club will be open to paid subscribers, who will help determine what we read and watch and how often we meet.

For the first go-round, I’m leaning toward having us read If It Sounds Like a Quack…, a deeply relevant book about the rise of the fringe alternative medicine movement and how it wound up overtaking the American health care system. It’s great.

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Nihilism is bad: It turns out that the government’s disappearing of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador is not exactly the overwhelmingly Republican issue of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s exhortations.

A new poll out today revealed that Americans overwhelmingly want the Trump administration to return Garcia to his family in Maryland, as ordered by the US Supreme Court.

A full 50% of respondents said Garcia, who fled gang violence in El Salvador as a teenager and is married to an American citizen, should be brought back to the US, where a court order had prohibited his deportation. Just 28% of respondents said no, while 22% weren’t sure.

More broadly, a majority of Americans now disapprove of Trump’s performance on immigration issues.

As I wrote on Monday, it was foolish for Democrats to think that Republicans have an immutable advantage on immigration or that a majority of Americans are unbothered by the unconstitutional kidnapping and immediate deportation of an innocent man. Public opinion is not static, and there’s really nothing that cannot be changed with smart campaigning, relentless pressure, and righteous indignation.

Happy Trails: Big props to Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who today announced that he will retire when his term expires at the end of 2026.

Wait, hasn’t Jordan spent the past three years ranting about Durbin, who he has consistently called a useless coward?

Yep, and I still believe that Dick Durbin’s outright refusal to hold Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito accountable for their unprecedented corruption was an inexcusable dereliction of duty that will likely haunt this country for decades to come. And yep, I still regard him as the prototype for a generation of Democrats whose fealty to crumbling institutions enabled the MAGA movement.

But I also have to give Durbin some credit for recognizing that, at 80-years-old, it was time for him to let go of power and pass the torch to a new generation, as he said in his retirement announcement video. The party desperately needs new and younger leaders, so bravo to the second-most powerful Democrat in the Senate for recognizing it. And the same goes to his fellow 80-year-old Illinoisan, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who will soon announce her own retirement.

New York plays an anti-Trump trump card

The first three months of the second Trump presidency have produced plenty of conflicts between the administration and blue state governments, but anything more than heated rhetoric has largely been confined to lawsuits over technocratic disputes.

Lawmakers in New York are looking to change that.

Introduced in Albany late last month, the RECOURSE Act would authorize New York to withhold payments due to the federal government in the event that the Trump administration illegally freezes funds appropriated to the state by Congress or a federal agency. New York would hold on to grant repayments and payroll taxes from state employees, which would be used to ensure that important work and services are not interrupted by the cessation of federal funds.

The bill is hardly just political posturing. Instead, it’s an escalation of an intensifying battle.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has ordered New York to end congestion pricing in Manhattan on multiple occasions, and on Tuesday, threatened to withhold federal funds for public construction projects if the state doesn’t comply by late May. The MTA responded by suing Duffy over his attempts to unilaterally shut down the program, but uncertainty remains.

If Duffy were to really cut the state’s transportation funding, the RECOURSE Act would authorize Gov. Kathy Hochul to keep the equivalent amount of money being held by the feds.

A few caveats: the law would only apply to public institutions — sorry, Columbia — and would require a judge to rule that the funds were being illegally withheld. As in the case of congestion pricing, a federal judge deeming a program legal would also activate the RECOURSE Act. Cutting off support for the state’s public schools in retaliation for their refusal to end so-called DEI programs would also qualify.

Battles already underway

Trump has already withheld hundreds of millions of dollars from New York State; in March, the White House pulled back $100 million in grants to the NYC health department and $300 million for substance abuse and mental health treatment programs.

The White House has been particularly punitive when it comes to disaster relief funding, eviscerating programs designed to help vulnerable communities nationwide. In New York, the administration clawed back $80 million earmarked to help shelter migrants and $325 million intended for critical flood mitigation projects in neighborhoods that were severely damaged by Hurricanes Ida and Maria.

$100 million of the FEMA funds were taken from the Queens district represented by state Sen. Jessica Ramos, the sponsor of the RECOURSE Act. Her district is solidly working class and one of the most diverse in the country, and it was utterly wrecked by the two hurricanes. That makes the bill personal for her, as does the Trump administration’s dispatching of ICE to harass her constituents.

(In full disclosure, I know Sen. Ramos and did some volunteering for her mayoral campaign. That said, I had no idea that she’d sponsored the RECOURSE Act until after I’d already began writing this piece.)

With Elon Musk’s chainsaw proving blunt and DOGE failing to really make a dent in federal spending, there will likely be massive cuts to vital programs in the 2026 federal budget. And beyond that, it’s very probable that the administration will seek to freeze some of what is appropriated for any number of annoying and illegal reasons. The RECOURSE Act would be insurance to mitigate White House tantrums and ensure services continue without interruption.

The bigger picture

This is also a potential watershed moment in the fight to defeat the worst of Trumpism.

The RECOURSE Act represents the first time a big blue state has indicated that it could be willing to pull its trump card on the Trump administration in response to overreach or draconian impositions.

New York is one of around a dozen states that typically sends more money in taxes to the federal government than it receives back in federal funding; even during the pandemic, when the feds swamped states with money, the ratio was nearly one-to-one.

I’ve written about this discrepancy as a potential point of leverage before, suggesting that blue states could cause serious pain for the federal government — and the red states that depend on it — in response to culture war incursions or other impositions. The idea is that instead of rolling their eyes at the irony of red state lawmakers railing about the government wasting their tax dollars when they actually receive huge amounts of cash from the feds, they could weaponize that imbalance.

The RECOURSE Act would go about this a bit differently, indicating to the feds that a state can fend for itself instead of bending the knee. The federal government would ultimately win a stare down, but if other states also withhold funds, it could spark a serious reckoning about the balance of power and which states a president can extort.

As states with part-time legislatures race to wrap up their annual sessions, several major progressive policies are hanging in the balance — and I’ve got inside updates on several of them.

Colorado: Pro-labor lawmakers continue to negotiate with Gov. Jared Polis’s office over the Worker Protection Act.

The bill would finally repeal the requirement that organizing workers win a second union election with more than 75% of the vote in order to obtain full representation rights. It has the support of more than enough Democrats to fly through the legislature, but Polis has threatened to veto it time and again.

Polis wants labor and business groups reach some kind of compromise, which is almost impossible to envision happening. Instead, legislators and labor have been in direct talks with the governor and his staff, seeking a deal that would significantly lower the barrier to unionizing while allowing Polis to burnish his “moderate” credentials.

Some “compromise” possibilities include dropping the second election if the union wins a supermajority in the first go-round, and/or a much lower threshold in the second election. Word is that the governor’s office is beginning to soften and move a bit, though they’re not there yet.

Washington: Gov. Bob Ferguson may have scuttled the full-blown wealth tax that Democratic lawmakers were aiming to insert in this year’s budget, but some legislators haven’t given up on the concept quite yet.

They’re reaching crunch time in budget negotiations, which have to be complete by Sunday, and I’m told that the state Senate is looking likely to pass a modified version of that tax on net worth. If it does pass the chamber, it would represent the farthest along such a tax has ever advanced in a state legislature.

The House would then have a chance to make history by sending it to Ferguson’s desk, who could be persuaded to pass it as a pilot program. The odds of those things happening aren’t great, but the tax proposal also serves another purpose: moving the goal posts so that progressives could win an increase to the capital gains tax.

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