Abortion, immigration, and squandered political power

Public opinion is something to be shaped, not feared.

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

It’s pretty late already, so let me just briefly talk about baseball before we get to the news.

First, let’s take a moment to remember the iconic Willie Mays, the greatest baseball player in history, who died today at the age of 93.

And second, a quick shout out to The Grimace. This is his era.

OK, now let’s get to it.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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1️⃣ Schools and libraries in Iowa were forced to remove more than 3400 books under the state GOP’s book ban law before it was hit with an injunction by a federal court. While some have been returned to public access, there are still 2000 books missing from shelves.

2️⃣ Voters in Oregon will decide in November whether the state should establish the first statewide universal basic income program. Initiative Petition 17 calls for the state to impose a 3% tax on corporations’ sales in Oregon beyond $25 million and redistribute the money equally among Oregonians. Right now such a tax would wind up redirecting $750 to every resident.

3️⃣ New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bone-headed decision to hit the breaks on congestion pricing has forced the MTA to stop its work on an extension of the Second Avenue subway line. The Q train currently stops at 96th street, on the very edge of East Harlem, and the extension was going to reach up to 125th street, giving the working class community there direct access to public transportation after more than half a century of broken promises.

Hochul, if you’ll remember, claimed to have “paused” congestion pricing so as to avoid hurting working class New Yorkers.

4️⃣ The average rent in the United States hit $1653 per month in May, the highest it’s been since October 2022, when the pandemic receded and everybody started trying to back to the cities they’d abandoned or simply lost their minds after two and a half years spent indoors.

5️⃣ Leaked itinerary revealed that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is in the midst of a busy few days of sucking up to billionaire donors here in NYC. I look forward to running into him tomorrow at around noon outside Cipriani.

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There are several ways to assess the fact that according to a new poll, 62% of Americans say that they would be in favor of deporting all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States.

One the one hand, the result could be seen as vindication of the political calculation behind President Joe Biden’s executive order to “shut down” the southern border and deport almost all asylum-seekers who cross it. Alternatively, that overwhelming a margin could be evidence not of Biden successfully prognosticating public opinion, but of his leading Americans in that direction.

Consider: The CBS/YouGov poll also found that 70% of Americans were in favor of the deportation elements of Biden’s executive order, whereas just 55% of Americans supported the policy in a poll conducted by the same pollster a few days later that. The one big difference between the two polls? In that latter poll, respondents were not told that the border crackdown was a Biden policy.

If it isn’t obvious yet that Biden’s ownership of the policy is fundamental to the public’s opinion, take the results of a third poll, conducted earlier this month by Monmouth University. That survey, which identified the immigration crackdown order as a Biden policy, found that the policy had the support of some 40% of Democratic respondents. The number far exceeds Democratic support for the policy in years prior, when it was the crux of an executive order issued by Donald Trump.

Whether those Democrats approved of the policy because Biden’s involvement signaled that mass deportation was morally acceptable or because the were convinced by the White House that it was politically astute, the reality is that decisive action caused a shift in public perception and political opinion.

Something similar happened with abortion policy just a few years ago.

According to Gallup’s annual tracking poll, Americans went back and forth on reproductive rights during the 2010s, with “pro-life” holding a nine-point lead in 2012 and a four-point advantage in 2019. It wasn’t until the Dobbs decision leaked in 2022 that “pro-choice” took a clear-cut lead, fueled both by outrage and the enormous emphasis that Democrats placed on the issue heading into the midterm elections.

As if to underscore the importance of campaigning, last year, when there were few elections, a reduced focus on abortion as a political issue corresponded with a slight narrowing in public opinion. And this year, amid a return to heavy campaigning on the issue, Americans once again support abortion rights by double digits.

For many years, even when more Americans considered themselves pro-choice, Republicans were able to count on the fact that anti-choice voters were far likelier to make abortion central to their choices at the ballot box. Now, it’s pro-choice Americans who are far more likely to vote only for candidates who share their position on reproductive rights.

Democrats in particular have become far more insistent that the candidate they support is pro-choice, jumping from just 37% in 2022 to 52% in 2024. While the end of Roe and proliferation of abortion bans obviously play a huge role in this shift, it has also required a bold defiance not typical of mainstream center-left politics. Without vocally pro-choice candidates or aggressive abortion rights ballot initiative campaigns, Republicans would have been successful in snuffing out both reproductive freedoms and the political will to fight for them going forward.

None of this should come as a surprise to anybody, but it’s important to point out because Democrats have for so many years tended to treat public opinion as if it were the weather: a fundamentally uncontrollable phenomenon to be managed and mitigated, something that can only be survived. Party leaders and voters alike also tend to view politics through the prism of procedural rules and outcomes predetermined by party-line vote counts.

This brings me, of course, to Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who has used these exact excuses time and again to squash legitimate opportunities for Democrats to use their political power to investigate the Supreme Court’s extreme corruption and use it as a political cudgel.

“Quite honestly, subpoenaing a Supreme Court justice is not in the cards,” Durbin told HuffPost on Friday. “It’s not going to happen.”

In this instance, Durbin was referring to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was recorded casually discussing the necessity of Christofascist triumph after his wife was caught flying insurrectionists flags and fantasizing about mocking LGBTQ+ people. Sadly, Durbin could have just as easily been referring to Justice Clarence Thomas, who got caught not reporting three additional trips on Nazi-loving benefactor Harlan Cowan’s private plane last week.

No matter how frequently those two get caught in grave conflicts of interest and borderline illegal ethics scandals, Durbin winds up citing bureaucratic difficulties, including what he insists is a lack of votes to even hold an investigatory hearing.

Later this week, I’ll have a piece looking at the legal options that counter Durbin’s arguments, but his political failures are just as — if not more — important to highlight, because they go far beyond “merely” holding these justices accountable for their ethical lapses and legal slip-ups. Durbin’s terrified inertia is increasingly worthy of being labeled deliberate political sabotage, and taken to a logical conclusion, the active aiding and abetting of far-right terrorism and the decline of American society.

Take guns, for example. On Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned a ban on bump stocks, which turn semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. The majority opinion, written by Justice Thomas, cited a vanishingly stupid technicality as the justification for what was clearly an ideologically motivated decision, one that is wildly out of step with the vast majority of Americans.

Now, there is nothing that Durbin could have done to prevent Thomas from writing that decision or to stop each of his fellow conservatives from concurring. Sen. And while Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had the good sense to jump on the decision and schedule an inevitably doomed vote to reinstate the ban in order to get Republican senators on record, Durbin has not said a word about the decision or drawn attention to Thomas’s clear conflicts of interest and history of unhinged gun fetishism.

It’s highly doubtful that many Americans are aware that Thomas wrote the 2022 Bruen decision or that it has been used to gut gun laws across country, a dismal status quo preserved by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s inaction. Durbin doesn’t even have to bother with a subpoena; simply holding expert hearings on how the far-right justices are culpable for rising gun violence would earn a whole lot of media coverage and help educate a public that is overwhelmingly in favor of gun control laws.

Keeping the focus on these deranged justices and making sure that Americans understand their outsized role in making life in this country increasingly awful would also go a long way toward turning the Supreme Court into an issue in the presidential election. While Biden brushed off court expansion, Democrats should still be making the case that this election is likely to determine the ideological makeup of the court for the next 30+ years.

Trust in the current Supreme Court is at an all-time low and nearly every issue at play in this election will be adjudicated in some way in front of its far-right justices. Electing to abstain from using political power and allowing these maniacs to stay above the fray is beyond ill-advised, it’s simply immoral.

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