Blue states make slow but steady progress
Plus: People hate Trump and Utah workers are killing it
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
Note: I’m re-sending this newsletter from last night because Substack seemed to have trouble delivering it to most people. Apologies if it’s redundant for you!
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OK, now let’s get to a big news day.
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Leading off: Election officials in Utah confirmed that organizers have submitted more than enough valid petitions to qualify a ballot referendum that would repeal the state’s new prohibition on public unions’ ability to negotiate on behalf of members.
It’s a huge, huge victory for Protect Utah Workers, a coalition of unionized teachers, municipal workers, state employees, and private sector unions that threw down in solidarity. Utah has some of the most onerous referendum requirements in the country, and now opponents of the proposal have 45 days to try to convince petition signers to rescind their support.
We covered this campaign in depth in a recent live video interview with some of its organizers.
This is the ball game: The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday in a case that could blow up the entire American public education system.
An online Catholic school seeking to become the nation’s first publicly-funded religious charter school asked the high court to overturn the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision to topple the wall between church and state. It’s been a high profile case in Oklahoma, where Republicans, and the state education supervisor in particular, have repeatedly sought to inject religion and conservative politics (including a Donald Trump bible) into the classroom.
The set-up is unusual: St. Isidore, the would-be charter school, along with the state charter school board, are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom in a lawsuit against Oklahoma’s attorney general, a Republican named Gentner Drummond.
"This is a situation where the applicant and the state have formed a charter school that is sectarian in every way and that in consistent with Oklahoma's constitution and our statutes, it violates those," Drummond told a local TV station. "This case will turn on whether St. Isidore Charter School is a public school, which means it is a governmental entity, or whether St. Isidore is not a governmental entity rather it's a private school seeking charter school funds."
I’ve been following this case for years now and am unnerved by the Supreme Court’s decision to take it up, given its previous ruling on behalf of religious actors in public schools. Don’t let the specific details here fool you, because it isn’t simply a matter of funding religious schools. Oklahoma already pours hundreds of millions of public dollars into school vouchers, plenty of which go to pay for private Christian schools.
The goal here is to give religious education equal place in public school systems, so that they can ultimately push the court to rule that non-religious schools actually discriminate against Christians.
Progress is slow but steady in Democratic states
Democratic lawmakers in two strong Democratic states spent their weekends trying to convince their Democratic governors to either back solid progressive policies or back off their own regressive demands.
Washington State: Crunch time negotiations between the legislature and Gov. Bob Ferguson produced a budget that includes one historic progressive achievement and the promise to keep fighting for a second.
First, the good news: The legislature approved a rent control bill that caps annual rent increases at either 7% plus inflation or 10%, whichever is less. It also prohibits rent increases within the first year of occupancy. Single-family homes are not exempt, a critical win as private equity and major corporations are buying up those units and putting them up for rent at extortionate prices.
The bill represented a compromise from the original, which did not have the 10% clause, but it is nonetheless is an enormous accomplishment at a time in which the average rent in Seattle has soared past $2000.
Gov. Ferguson has not indicated whether or not he’ll sign the bill, which is actually a decent sign for its fate, as the governor has not been shy about veto threats. His public unease with a wealth tax ultimately kept it out of the budget, but only after it passed out of the state Senate.
As sponsor Sen. Noel Frame explained to me this weekend, that makes it the first wealth tax to ever pass a chamber of a state legislature. The bill would have added a tax to personal assets beyond $50 million, which would hit the state’s many tech ultra-millionaires and billionaires and thus drew their deep opposition.
Frame has sponsored the bill for several years now and is encouraged by the progress it made this time around and has promised that it will be back next year.
Colorado: A handful of legislators and labor groups are juggling a number of promises and threats in a three-way negotiation/duel with Gov. Jared Polis and the state’s business lobby.
As I’ve reported extensively here, Democrats in the state House and Senate are eager to pass the Worker Protection Act, which would end the absurd requirement that employees win a second election with 75% of the vote to secure full unionization rights. The bill has cleared the Senate and two committees in the House, but Polis has threatened to veto it without changes agreed to by the business community.
Word emerged this weekend that a few potential compromises were taking shape:
The business lobby proposed allowing workers to circumvent a second election if they win the first with over 66% of the vote or win a simple majority of all workers who are eligible to vote, not just among those who voted.
Polis’s team suggested that if 66% of eligible employees vote and the union wins 62.5% of the vote, it can skip the second election. If not, a second election would require a simple majority to win.
Unions pitched canceling the second election if they win 53% of the initial vote, with no turnout requirement. A second election would require a simple majority.
The various parties spent all of Monday negotiating, with just a few days to hammer out an agreement. I’m told that if a deal fails to materialize, Democrats will vote to put the original on Polis’s desk and dare him to veto it.
Both labor and the business lobby have cards to play in the form of potential ballot initiatives: Unions have begun the process of qualifying an initiative that would enact Just Cause firing protections for workers, which would impact far more employers; and business groups have threatened to put full-blown “Right to Work” on the ballot.
The legislature also passed a state Voting Rights Act that provides protections that may not exist on the federal level for much longer:
The bill would expand access to multilingual ballots in certain local elections, protect access for eligible voters confined in local jails, require residential facilities that house people with disabilities to provide nonpartisan voter information, and empower the Attorney General to enforce voting rights. The bill would also prohibit impairing an individual’s right to vote based on their gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation and would create a publicly available, statewide database of election information without compromising any personal voter data.
New York: It’s nearly a month late, but the annual tradition of backroom horse trading between the governor and top two legislative leaders has finally led to a budget agreement that everybody can feel OK about.
The budget was delayed in part by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s insistence that the state enact a public mask ban, a demand that was en vogue this time last year during the protests over the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The budget instead makes it extra illegal to wear a mask if you’re trying to escape law enforcement.
A challenger emerges: Justice Democrats, the progressive outsider organization that helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of The Squad topple longtime Democratic incumbents in 2018 and 2020, is officially returning to its roots.
The group will back Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney in his challenge to Rep. Shri Thanedar, a strange pharmaceutical magnate who is in his second term representing MI-13. McKinney, 32, is a working class progressive who represents a new generation of leadership in Lansing, while Thanedar, 70, has no real apparent political convictions beyond the notion that he should be in office.
Thanedar ran for governor out of nowhere in 2018, spending $10 million to finish in last place in the Democratic primary, then won a seat in the state legislature in 2020. He made the jump to Congress in opportunistic fashion, moving from Ann Arbor to Detroit and pouring $5 million of his own money into a divided primary that he wound up winning with 28% of the vote.
The India-born legislator has gone from leftist outsider to an avowed ally of right-wing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and survived a primary challenge with significant investment from a pro-Israel Super PAC. Former state Sen. Adam Hollier, who attempted to primary Thanedar in 2024 but did not make the ballot, is also likely to run this time around.
This winter, McKinney fought to prevent a total capitulation on Republican efforts to cancel the state minimum wage increase and paid leave mandate. He spoke about the effort in this piece that I produced on that fight.
Not great, Don: Americans are increasingly unimpressed with Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. Asked by Marist to grade his first 100 days in office, voters indicated that he’s left much to be desired:
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are still standing behind their man: 54% of GOP voters give him an “A” and another 29% dinged him slightly and awarded him a more modest “B” for his first 100 day performance. It’s sometimes hard to believe that we live in the same reality, much less the same country.
Just shy of half of independents said that he deserved an “F,” while 49% of Americans say that Trump’s policies have negatively impacted them. Astonishingly, 67% of Republicans say that Trump’s policies have personally helped them, so I can only assume that they love racism and plane crashes more than they enjoy having money in their bank accounts.
State-sanctioned violence: No matter how they decide to go about it, Republicans will have an unfathomable amount of blood on their hands if they make major cuts to Medicaid.
The numbers, per CAP, are stunning. If they reduce the percentage of Medicaid expansion covered by the federal government, for example, nearly 11 million people would become uninsured and more than 34,000 people would die per year.
Adding work requirements to Medicaid would also be catastrophic, costing five million Americans their health insurance and killing around 15,000 per year.
All this to help the wealthiest people in the world retain their big tax cuts.
North Carolina: Republicans moved one step closer to legalizing strike-busting in the state that already has the second-lowest union density in the country.
The Senate Judiciary panel approved a bill this week to make it illegal to picket businesses in such a way that it disrupts commercial activity and access to the facility — banning, in effect, picket lines altogether.
Democratic Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed sponsored multiple clarifying amendments, including one that exempted “protected labor activity,” but in my experience, that’s already vague enough that it does little to prevent aggrieved management from calling cops to break up worker protests.
Missouri: In much better news for working people, the Missouri Supreme Court has come through again, batting away the business lobby’s challenge to the voter-approved minimum wage increase and earned leave mandate. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that there was nothing irregular about the initiative, which the lawsuit argued violated the requirement that initiatives stick to one single subject.
The law isn’t out of the woods just yet, as Republicans are still in the process of trying to modify or fully repeal it. Voters backed the new benefits by nearly 58% in November, and Democrats have been galvanized to defend it with two all-night filibusters in the state Senate.
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