Florida Republicans want to ban all abortion (and some cities, too)

Good news on the Nazi and clown mayor fronts, though

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

A quick update for you before we get going: Substack has reversed course and decided that it shouldn’t allow avowed neo-Nazis to use and monetize its platform after all.

Last month, I was one of nearly 250 authors to publish a letter calling on Substack’s leadership to remove a number of virulent bigots who openly promote vicious conspiracies like Great Replacement and dabble in swastika aesthetics. It seemed like a reasonable ask — we only went after the most explicit skinheads, ignoring the more professional racists and dangerous anti-vaxers that have large followings on the platform — but co-founder Hamish McKenzie initially blanched at the request anyway.

I’m not entirely sure what changed, though the it’s pretty clear that the reversal is being done through gritted teeth. In any case, it certainly won’t please people like Bari Weiss, whose brand of self-serving conservatism has allowed her to be both a pro-Israel absolutist determined to silence any dissent over the ethnic cleansing in Gaza as well as a cheerleader for “free speech” for neo-Nazis.

Anyone who tells you this stuff is complicated probably wants to complicate it for a reason.

Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep Progress Report afloat and sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you. Please help us fight the good fight.

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For all the time that we spend wringing our hands over the imperilment of American democracy, there are plenty of state houses where public opinion doesn’t really seem to factor into lawmakers’ decision-making.

Florida Republicans try to snuff out local and personal autonomy

In last night’s newsletter, I listed a whole bunch of depraved bills that were pre-filed by Florida Republicans ahead of this week’s legislative kickoff. It was a dismal list, but hardly exhaustive — I missed a proposal to lower the age requirement to buy a gun from 21 to 18, undoing a law passed after the Parkland massacre — and after a weekend back home, those same GOP lawmakers returned to Tallahassee on Monday and resumed their uninhibited assault on representative government.

The biggest headline was a bill that would create a near-total abortion ban in the State of Florida. Filed by GOP Rep. David Borrero, HB 1519 would make it a third-degree felony to perform an abortion “except to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency,” a standard that has been proven meaningless in recent weeks. Under the bill, a medical professional that performs or attempts to perform an abortion would be subject up to 10 years in prison and/or a $100,000 fine.

Abortion is currently illegal after 15 weeks in Florida, with no exceptions for rape or incest. That law is the subject of a court challenge by the state’s chapter of Planned Parenthood, and if the Florida Supreme Court upholds the 15-week ban, it’ll trigger the enforcement of a six-week ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.

Republicans’ attempt to end all abortions in the state contrasts sharply with public opinion, which state Attorney General Ashley Moody is working hard to suppress.

On Friday, a coalition of pro-choice organizations working together as Floridians Protecting Freedom announced that it had submitted the prerequisite number of petition signatures required to qualify a reproductive rights amendment for the 2024 ballot. Before it can appear on the ballot, however, lawyers for the coalition will need to overcome Moody’s attempt to have the amendment disqualified by the state Supreme Court.

Florida Republicans have been showing their range by proposing bills that would handicap local governments and make life more difficult for working people.

First up, a tax break for wealthy homeowners that would starve local governments of vital revenue. Plunging municipal governments into bankruptcy wouldn’t just be a side effect of the GOP’s anti-tax fervor, but one of the central features of the bill. Jacksonville Rep. Wyman Duggan gave away the game today when he went on a bit of a rant during the House Ways and Means Committee’s schedule debate and suggested that legislators should consider consolidating counties and eliminating cities altogether.

Also on the docket is a bill that would prevent local governments from insisting that government contractors pay a living wage that exceeds the state’s minimum wage. Why? I’m going to guess that donations from local Chambers of Commerce and industry organizations don’t hurt.

The two bills are just the Florida legislature’s latest attacks on local democracy, which has developed into a favorite Republican pastime over the past few years. Gov. Ron DeSantis last year signed series of preemption laws that banned county and local governments from doing anything to protect renters and rolled back existing local laws that provided any such protections. DeSantis also signed a law that gives business the right to sue towns if they make any decisions that could conceivably cost them more than a million dollars in revenue.

Arizona Republicans defy voters, then steal nearly $1 billion for their donors

The absolute circus that erupted in the aftermath of the 2020 election affixed a sense of unhinged absurdism to the Arizona GOP’s disdain for representative government, but the failure of the conspiracy-addled clowns shouldn’t overshadow the very real damage that’s been done by the more sober-minded enemies of public opinion.

The state is facing a $400 million budget deficit this coming year and a $450 shortfall next year, and unlike a number of other states, which are looking at financial gaps caused by the end of Covid-era federal aid, Arizona’s hole is due almost entirely to spending that was explicitly rejected by voters.

The single biggest contributing factor is the soaring cost of Arizona’s universal school voucher program, which will run the state $900 million in 2024. That’s exponentially higher than the mere $68 million that Republicans suggested the program would cost when they pushed it through in 2022, not that anyone believed their farcical estimates at the time.

GOP legislators really had no choice but to lie through their teeth about the cost of subsidizing private school education, because Arizonans had already overwhelmingly rejected the plan when it was put to a vote via ballot initiative in 2018, then voted to raise taxes on the rich to pay for a large increase in public school funding in 2020. The state Supreme Court tossed out that initiative, which opened the door for the GOP to instead pass a tax cut for the wealthy that is also fueling the budget deficit.

Whereas we’ve sadly come to expect unfair tax policy, it’s the school privatization scam that presents a truly audacious new wrinkle in the oligarchical transfer of wealth. A majority of the vouchers are going to families who live in wealthy zip codes and whose children never attended public school.

Most of these families were already able to pay for their kids’ private schools, and that in turn has allowed many of those schools to increase tuition far beyond the rate of inflation, and in some cases even more than the value of the average student voucher.

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs opposed vouchers when she ran for office in 2022 and proposed a partial repeal last year, only to be rebuffed by the thin GOP legislative majority. This year she wants to implement some smaller yet desperately needed reforms, like holding charter and private schools that receive taxpayer money to the same standards as public schools.

Hobbs also wants to require students to have attended public schools for at least 100 days before getting a private school voucher, which would stop the program from being simply a subsidy for the wealthy.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams can compete with just about any leader when it comes to coddling special interests at the expense of residents, yet no politician can come anywhere close to matching Adams’ ability to churn out moments of gobsmacking slapstick tragicomedy.

It’s all subjective, but for my money, the mayor on Monday produced what may be his most gloriously stupid moment of surreality yet. Here’s the straight-forward headline from the excellent local news site Hell Gate:

The story is even more ludicrous than what’s revealed in the subhead, but all I can really think about is Eric Adams bringing to life this classic scene from Austin Powers. That kind of thing is his bag, baby.

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