Democrats took an important first step
Toward a political and national survival
Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
I’m writing this introduction on the train back to New York after four days in DC for More Perfect Union’s spring retreat. It was a packed week, so I’m only now getting to write, but I’ve got plenty of stories and new ideas in the works for the weeks and months to come.
While we were busy — I spoke with labor organizers, healthcare experts, voting rights lawyers and more — Washington itself was pretty sleepy. The area around the Federal Triangle and Dupont Circle is an eerie place: serene streets are surrounded by old houses and mid-rise office buildings filled with some of the best and worst people in the world. War criminals and humanitarians stand side-by-side in line for salads during lunch hour.
The political energy in the city right now reminds me of the summer I spent in DC as a college intern in 2006: A moronic Republican president causing chaos in the Middle East, corrupt corporations and conservative lobbyists feeding on the public trough, a voting public souring so thoroughly on the leadership it just re-elected that a recently feckless Democratic Party is getting a bit of swag ahead of the midterm elections. May Rahm Emanuel stay far, far away this time.
The stakes are somehow even higher, and the loathing of the administration is even more extreme now, as violent federal occupation has extended to domestic front. This, spotted near the White House, gives you an idea of the vibe:
Today I’m going to run through some news updates — I’ve been on the ballot initiative beat — and stories that I think you should read, and normal service, with original reporting, will resume going forward.
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Democrats pulled out a close victory in Virginia’s special redistricting election on Tuesday, securing a new map that could lead to the party picking up four additional Congressional seats.
Just as importantly, the party’s leadership seems to have grown a spine… or at least the beginnings of one. Whereas Democratic leaders in the Senate and White House meekly accepted the preservation of the filibuster when they could have rammed through a new and revitalized version of the Voting Rights Act in 2021 or 2022, the party has stepped up and fought back in response to Donald Trump and the GOP’s gerrymandering gambit.
Instead of complaining about aggressive partisan redraws in Texas and Ohio and cowering at the prospect of losing special elections, Democrats used all available power to implement their own new maps in California and Virginia, then spiked the football when they declared victory.
It’s rare for me to cite a Hakeem Jeffries with anything but exasperation, but the statement he offered in the hours after the win in Virginia was genuinely heartening:
“While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite,” Jeffries boasted in his statement, which ended in a striking promise: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
While often milquetoast on policy and reluctant to stand up to organized money, Jeffries showed a killer instinct during the referendum campaign, which should come as little surprise: this was about power, not ideology, and victory would get the Congressman from Brooklyn much closer to becoming Speaker of the House.
But for all the personal motivation, Jeffries also declared a broader philosophical shift for Democrats, taking the party from Michelle Obama’s famous declaration that “when they go low, we go high” to a much more era-appropriate mantra of “when they go low, we hit back hard.”
It’s a welcomed change for a party used to wringing its hands instead of getting them dirty, and the reward for shattering once-cherished norms should help convince lawmakers in DC to take dramatic action to pass a new federal voting rights act the next time Democrats have a trifecta. Ideally that comes in 2029, though the DOJ and Supreme Court will do their best to make it structurally impossible. Nothing motivates a politician like survival.
So again, it’s worth noting that this effort was made in service of securing power, not wielding it to materially improve the lives of constituents. There’s still a lot of work to do on that front: consider that at the same time that she campaigned to pass the redistricting amendment, Gov. Abigail Spanberger made draconian changes to a new law that would finally provide Virginia’s public employees the right to collectively bargain. Her proposed changes, which the Assembly will have to override, would so significantly water down the workers’ new rights that they’d be rendered almost useless.
As the Economic Policy Institute recently calculated, public sector workers in Virginia make on average 26.7% less than their private sector peers, a product of Jim Crow-era anti-union laws from a very different era in the state’s history. Speaking with folks from labor in Virginia, passing the public sector worker bargaining rights was a top priority, so much so that the unions held off from criticizing Spanberger when she said that she would not support a repeal to the state’s broader “right to work” anti-union law before the Democratic primary last spring.
Spoiling Republican plans to sabotage democracy and win more seats for Democrats has to be the means, not the end.
Primary surprise: The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board surprised northern California political observers this week when the newspaper endorsed City Councilwoman Mai Vang over longtime Rep. Doris Matsui (CA-7) in the upcoming Democratic Congressional primary.
Vang, 41, is running as a fresh, progressive, community-focused alternative to the 81-year-old Matsui, a moderate has represented the district since winning a special election in 2005 after her husband, Rep. Bob Matsui, died in office. The councilwoman has been highly critical of the incumbent, accusing her of failing to stand up to ICE during federal raids in Sacramento’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods last summer.
As the daughter of refugees from Laos, the issue is personal to Vang; as the eldest of 16 children who grew up in poverty, so is the government’s role in providing relief and creating opportunity for people. Matsui is married to the billionaire founder of an energy company in Virginia, and has done little to engage with constituents. Her refusal to meet with the Bee’s editorial board disqualified her from contention for the endorsement, but the paper made it clear that Vang was not simply the default:
Vang is truly a people’s candidate. She has been a tireless advocate for her council district, seemingly everywhere and never afraid to engage a constituent in a discussion. Matsui’s refusal to discuss Sacramento’s future in a conversation with Vang and The Bee is not some exception to the rule. Matsui avoids public meetings requiring spontaneous exchanges. In one virtual “town hall” in 2024, it was clear that both the questions and answers were scripted in advance. Matsui’s eyes moved from left to right as she read the prepared responses.
This congressional district, significantly redrawn last November via the voter-approved Proposition 50, now covers the southern half of Sacramento and heads south to Lodi, west into West Sacramento and east to Placerville and El Dorado County. Much of this territory is even new to Matsui.
Vang will be tasked to champion the needs of new communities and neighborhoods, including the very different challenges facing rural residents. This district is not some haven of privilege. Most voters have much in common with Vang, and little with the incumbent.
For more on the race and the challenger herself, check out my February interview with Councilwoman Vang right here:
Prefer to read? You can do that here.
Ballot initiatives: Voters continue to gain additional issues to ponder as new amendments and referenda wind their way through the long and sometimes arduous qualification process. I’m updating the lists over at the On The Ballot site, including these new additions:
Missouri: Gov. Mike Kehoe wants to phase out and replace the state’s income tax with an increased sales tax, a very regressive proposal that the GOP legislature just put on an upcoming ballot. It remains to be seen whether it will go before voters during the August primary or in November.
California: Anti-tax activists have qualified an amendment that would severely cap local real estate transfer taxes, which provide a large percentage of the budgets in some of the state’s biggest cities. It’s aimed in particular at LA’s 5.5% mansion tax. It would also make it virtually impossible for local voters to raise taxes on the ballot.
Maine: Activists are aggressively challenging petition signatures on the ballot measure that would ban trans kids from playing girls’ scholastic sports. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has said that there aren’t enough challenged signatures to put the qualification at risk, activists with Equity Maine are more bullish on the chances of knocking the initiative off the ballot.
Akron, OH: Voters approved the creation of a police oversight board in 2022, after the local police murdered a 25-year-old motorist named Jayland Walker during an attempted traffic stop. Now, local activists are pushing to reform the board selection process, to prevent it from being stacked with law enforcement members and allies. The group behind the initiative, Freedom BLOC, is also pursuing a pair of housing ballot initiatives from a list of 14 proposals released earlier this year.
San Diego, CA: The City Council is backing a potential ballot initiative that would place a tax on corporations that “own and rent out more than 10 single-family homes or homes in small buildings like duplexes.” It may or may not wind up on the ballot in November, as lawmakers could wind up deciding to conduct further research or negotiate a deal with the real estate industry.
Illinois: With the Supreme Court poised to kill off the rest of the Voting Rights Act, legislators in Illinois are looking to create a list of priorities that must guide future redistricting decisions. They have until early May to approve a state constitutional amendment that would go before voters later this year. The districts would have to ““to be substantially equal in population; to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of his or her choice on account of race; to create, where practical, racial coalition or influence Districts; to be contiguous; and to the extent practicable, to be compact.”
Abortion: States continue to move in diametrically opposite directions on the right to choose.
In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court overturned a ban on state Medicaid funds being used to pay for abortion. The Democrat-dominated court’s decision marks the first time the high court has found that the state constitution guarantees the right to reproductive choice.
South Carolina Republicans moved forward with a bill that would ban abortion from the moment of conception, remove exceptions for rape and incest, and charge women who terminate pregnancies with a crime. The proposal would put doctors in prison for up to 20 years and imprison women for up to two years. GOP Sen. Tom Davis has vowed to block the bill from becoming law; in the meantime, the legislature voted unanimously to approve tax credits for donating to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers.”
Bad bosses: With just 1800 OSHA inspectors across the nation, enforcement of workplace safety rules has become almost non-existent; with 160 million workers in eight million workplaces nationwide, that’s just one inspector per 84,000 workers. According to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a worker dies every 104 minutes in America.
This dearth of enforcement makes the work of the nonprofit even more important, and on Wednesday, NCOSH released its Dirty Dozen annual report on twelve companies that have brazenly put workers’ health and safety in danger in pursuit of profits. According to NCOSH, a worker dies every 104 minutes in America.
Cruelty is the point: As the Trump administration gets set to strip SNAP benefits from millions of Americans, a new study finds that work requirements do not reduce the unemployment rate. Instead, they simply lead to people with jobs missing out on their benefits due to bureaucratic issues and prevent people who can’t hold jobs from eating.
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