Exposing the Shadowy Far-Right’s Next Targets

Workers rights, voting rights, and more are under the gun

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

There’s a lot to cover today. First, we’ve got our feature story, exposing a powerful and shadowy right-wing group’s new targets for 2024. Then, we’ll tackle some news, including updates on Ron DeSantis’s latest madness, Wisconsin Republicans’ latest hypocrisy, and good news on abortion rights, workers’ rights, housing, and more.

Quick programming note: I will be appearing as a guest on the Michelangelo Signorile Show on SiriusXM Progress today at around 5:30pm. Listen here!

One more thing: Since I brought this newsletter over to Substack in 2019, I’ve never once raised the subscription price. With inflation, it now earns me 20% less revenue per subscription. It’s killer!

I don’t want to raise the price, but I’ll have nudge it up if I can’t make up the lost revenue. If you enjoy the newsletter and want to keep it sustainable at a rock bottom price, please consider subscribing or donating today.

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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been quietly uploading new pieces of model legislation for Republican lawmakers across the country to pursue next time they’re back in session.

ALEC, a right-wing corporate policy front group, connects executives and lobbyists with lawmakers nationwide. They essentially take ideas that come out of those meetings, along with pet causes from places like the Heritage Foundation, and put them into template form so that lawmakers have to make minimal effort to do the precise bidding of their donors.

ALEC tends to keep these things hush hush so that they can introduce and rush them through the legislative process, so consider this something like finding the other team’s game plan. Here are the most troubling (and in some places, surprising) elements of their plan:

“The Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act”

No model bill on this list has a more grammatically painful or factually misleading name than the Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act. It’s also perhaps the most specifically and explicitly political, and aligned with current GOP goals and policies.

The bill is designed to ensure that private businesses can load up on valuable tax breaks and subsidies without having to worry much about their workers unionizing.

Specifically, the bill would ban companies from giving worker contact information to union organizers (a typical practice) and prevent employers from voluntarily recognizing the union. The language, of course, makes it sound as if employers would actually be protecting workers’ rights:

WHEREAS, it is the intent of the [insert state legislature], as part of its economic development policy, that whenever State funds or benefits are sought by a private business that such benefits are conditioned on the private business agreeing not to waive its employees’ right to a secret ballot election when recognizing a labor organization as a bargaining unit or requiring subcontractors to waive their employees’ right to a secret ballot election.

Anti-union conservatives are increasingly harping on the “right to a secret ballot election,” conflating it with political elections. A union election is a binding mechanism that is only triggered when an employer does not want workers to unionize; that it’s become something of an unofficial standard is down to the fact that most employers either don’t want their employees to unionize or at least don’t want to facilitate it. It takes a long time for an election to take place, and it’s during that interregnum that most employer union-busting takes place.

The bill could apply to any project subsidized by the government, but the clear intent is to neutralize Democrats’ promise that their major infrastructure laws would create “good union jobs” and revive industrial communities. It would also allow Republican governors to reward their donors with massive margins on gigantic contracts and attend lots of ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

“Safeguard American Votes and Elections Act”

This bill would simply ban all iterations of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), which is becoming increasingly popular in big cities, small towns, and whole states alike.

As I’ve covered here before, RCV is one of the best methods to marginalizing extremists in a two-party system. It’s especially true of Republicans, whose primaries tend to have low turnout and are generally dominated by the fringes.

For example, Sarah Palin has been on the warpath against RCV since she lost a special election for Congress that was run under Alaska’s new version of the process. I would think most Americans would see that as a great argument to institute RCV everywhere.

Some GOP states are already working to ban Ranked Choice Voting. Florida and Tennessee, the two least-democratic states in the country right now, were the first to ban it, doing so in 2022. Since then, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota have also prohibited the practice.

“Resolution in Support of Free Market Solutions and Enforcement of Existing Regulations for Uses of Artificial Intelligence”

This is the sort of policy that even a lot of Republicans would naturally oppose, at least until all the lobbying and campaign donations kicked in. And it’s even more extreme than I could have even anticipated.