A good week for reproductive rights and workers

Big decisions abound and reasons for optimism

Sep 02, 2023

Welcome to Friday evening edition of Progress Report.

It’s been an incredibly busy week filled with legal rulings, major decisions by federal agencies, state and local policy updates, and important revelations. The headlines were a mixed bag, but I’m not going to kick off your long weekend with too much negativity, so I’ll minimize the infuriating stories before getting into all the good news that happened this week.

OK, brace yourself, here’s your ongoing outrage of the week…

Supreme Court: Justice Clarence Thomas filed a new personal financial disclosure form on Thursday, offering the absolute bare minimum with the utmost contempt for having to do so.

The updated form acknowledges three trips that Thomas took on billionaire Nazi tchotchke-collector Harlan Crow’s private jet in 2022 and provides lame attempts to justify them — one came after the Dobbs decision, because god forbid he meet the public whose rights he has gleefully stripped away.

Thomas explained a few other omissions “inadvertently” made in past financial disclosures, such as Crow’s generous purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia, as well as $700,000 paid to his wife by the Heritage Foundation from 2003-07 (she can hide payments in her LLC now). He declined to disclose any other trips, favors, gifts, and thick wads of cash given to him by right-wing billionaires with business before the court, even those revealed by ProPublica and other news outlets over the past few months.

There’s little indication that he’ll provide any further official acknowledgments of the bribes he’s accepted over the years, largely because there’s little indication that anyone’s willing to hold Clarence Thomas accountable. Senate Democrats could vote tomorrow to subpoena Thomas and his coup-planning wife, but Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin still refuses to do his job, preferring to preserve short-term comity over the future of democracy.

Every day that Thomas remains on the court takes us closer to the precipice of Christofascism. He pushes other justices further and further to the fringe fanatical right, and over the past year, Thomas’s opinions have galvanized the worst people in the country to be their worst selves. In Texas, that’s meant a torrent of autocracy and bigotry, and increasingly, laws that turn women into prisoners to the state and slaves to their rapists.

OK, now I’m all worked up and this is supposed to be the good news newsletter, so let’s move on to the positive stuff.

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Rhode Island

Race: Congressional District 1, Democratic Primary

Date: September 5th, 2023
Candidates: Former Rep. Aaron Regunberg, Gabe Amo, state Sen. Sandra Cano, and Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos

The Details: This is a safe Democratic seat, vacated at the end of May when progressive Rep. David Cicilline resigned to become the president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, the largest funder of non-profits in the Ocean State. Cicilline had been one of the strongest voices in Congress on anti-trust issues, especially as it applied to Silicon Valley, so he leaves big shoes to fill.

CD-1 is a safe blue seat, so the winner of the primary is all but guaranteed to be a member of Congress come January. It’s an appropriately crowded field, with no shortage of qualified candidates; the four listed above make up the top tier of candidates. There’s no obvious front runner, though Regunberg has the momentum and led in a mid-August internal poll conducted for another candidate.

Lt. Gov Matos was the initial front runner, but she got ensnarled in a weird controversy over allegedly fake petition signatures that continues to hamper her despite air support from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Emily’s List. Amo worked as a staffer in the Obama White House and returned when Joe Biden took over, most recently serving as Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs.

Regunberg is the most progressive of the bunch, and has taken aggressive stances on corporate power and climate change. That’s earned him endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the Working Families Party, among others.

OK, now to the good news!

Reproductive Rights:

Better late than never: After three damaging decades, Pennsylvania is finally pulling state financial support for an organization that funds scam anti-abortion centers.

Since the mid-’90s, Pennsylvania has given tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to a group called Real Alternatives, which has in turn distributed that cash to “pregnancy crisis centers,” which exist to trick lower income women out of having an abortion.

All told, the state has given more than $100 million to these scammers, who provide what is often dangerous advice and unscientific treatment to vulnerable women who unwittingly turned to them for help. Pennsylvania was the first state to provide such funding, which inspired more than a dozen other states to follow suit. Tennessee just provided $20 million in funding for organizations that run these kind of interference centers.

Activists have been fighting to have the funding shut down for years now, as it has helped fuel the growth of “pregnancy crisis centers,” which outnumber actual abortion clinics by a 9:1 ratio in Pennsylvania. They money for those anti-abortion centers has been diverted from the Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) program, just how conservatives like it.

Several other states are weighing crackdowns on anti-abortion policy, as well.

In New Mexico, the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments in a lawsuit that challenges the legality of abortion bans passed in several counties and small cities. Reproductive rights are guaranteed by law and state constitution in New Mexico, but that hasn’t mattered much to municipalities in the more conservative eastern part of the state.

Workers Rights:

Galvanized by both the upcoming holiday and the potential departure of a Democratic board member, the NLRB and Biden administration went on an epic run of pro-worker rulings and announcements.

The Department of Labor proposed a new rule that would significantly increase the income threshold at which salaried workers become no longer eligible for overtime pay. The proposed jump, from $35,568 per year to $55,000, would mean a significant raise for at least 3.6 million people.

It would be a big win for many retail and food service managers, who are often worked to the bone for paid salaries that wind up being slightly more than what their hourly employees make. Chains like Dollar General are particularly exploitative of their managers, who often work 12+ hour days, sometimes with little to no help.

Public comment is now open on the proposed rule, which will take months to go into effect.

Thanks to the odious Taft-Hartley Act, which bars low-level managers from joining unions, retail and food service managers are often tasked by their corporate employer with trying to snuff out any union organizing being done by the workers that they oversee. That’s been a splintering point for class solidarity for decades now, but thanks to a new ruling by the NLRB, the consequences for a company caught union-busting are about to get a whole lot more severe.

Zooming in a bit, legislative staffers in Oregon finally have a contract with their employers at the state capitol. It took 20 grueling months, but the 200 staffers, who are repped by the IBEW, are the first legislative aides to win a contract. The movement is growing in other states, so this is a serious breakthrough.

Much more to come, including coverage of several other major victories for workers and middle-class Americans, in an upcoming Labor Day edition of the newsletter.

Texas:

A judge in Travis County ruled this week that the democracy-destroying Death Star bill violates the Texas state constitution, upping the ante in an ongoing war between left-leaning local governments and the ultra-conservative state legislature.

The law will still go into effect, but the ruling gives local governments legal cover when they are inevitably forced to sue over state enforcement. The law essentially bans counties and cities from governing themselves in any meaningful way, from setting labor standards and housing rights to issuing licenses for pet groomers.

As longtime Progress Report readers know, we were sounding the alarm on the Death Star bill before any national press took interest. We’ve also been all over the Medicaid unwinding ahead of true national concern, and now it’s largely an ongoing disaster.

There were a number of other good legal stories out of Texas this week. Top of mind is the news that a state district court judge put a pause on the terrible new teacher evaluation system that’s being imposed on the Houston Independent School District’s teachers union. The Texas state government took control of the district in an act of pure spite and loathing of public schools, and its new administrator has been implementing a plethora of horrible rules, including severe new punishments for children.

Progressive Wins

Let’s run through some quick hit highlights of big policy developments and accomplishments from state capitols around the country.

In California, the state is moving toward further implementing its massive free universal Pre-K promise, in part by creating a new grade called “transitional kindergarten,” which was initially conceived of to serve kids who were born later in the year.

Transitional kindergarten: It’s exactly what it sounds like: a step between preschool and kindergarten, and it’s being implemented in several installments between now and 2025, though it won’t take that long in major cities.

Over in Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is hoping to cap off a super-productive first year of full Democratic control with a late rush of additional progressive policy accomplishments.

Here’s a list of her priorities, in no particular order:

Passing guaranteeing paid family and medical leave
Creating a 100% clean energy standard for energy production in the state by 2035
Repealing the 24-hour wait period for abortions and a 2014 law that banned health insurers from automatically including coverage for abortion in their plans
Expediting solar and wind energy projects by moving the permitting process to the state government
Protecting election workers from the state’s healthy contingent of fanatical far-right lunatics and militias

And speaking of fanatical far-right lunatics and militias, leaders of the Proud Boys paramilitary loser brigade continue to get tossed in prison for 15+ years for leading the Jan 6. insurrection.

There’s more good news to discuss, so I’ll be back with a *premium member only* follow-up tomorrow, as well as another piece later in the long weekend.

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