In politics and the courts, no more pulling punches

From redistricting to primaries to the courts, new fights are rising (or should be)

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

Just a personal update for anyone wondering: Now that I’ve shaken the Covid offered as a parting gift when I left the hospital, I’ve started to slowly — slowly — begin rehabilitating from my surgery. Having been through similar things before, I anticipated some difficulty, but between the size and complicated nature of this one, it’s been far more of a knockout punch than expected.

What does that mean for Progress Report? Well, mostly that it’ll be more guest posts and features that I began prior to the surgery. They’ll all be fresh and engaging, of course, because what’s the point of surviving major heart surgery if you’re not going to keep making good content?

Well get back to full strength or even better in the next month, and if you can stick with me, the more resources I’ll have to pay additional guest writers and journalists. Thank you as always for your support.

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Taking Back South Texas

The Texas Democratic Party is an utter mess, so several outside organizations are stepping in to wrest back border communities that were once blue strongholds.

LUPE Votes, a sister organization of La Unión del Pueblo Entero, is putting its muscle behind three Democratic candidates. Most prominent among the endorsees is Michelle Vallejo, who is running for Congress again in TX-15, a border seat that flipped Republican for the first time in 2022.

GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz has been happy to vote with her party on most issues, including tougher immigration and asylum laws. She also voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week.

Vallejo is in favor of the right to apply for asylum in the United States, but she hasn’t put much emphasis on the subject ahead of the start of early voting on Tuesday. Instead, she’s discussed her dedication to “healthcare access, defend[ing] reproductive freedoms, and fight[ing] for solutions for our hard working families.”

Like Vallejo, state Sen. Ruben Cortez candidate is running to win back a south Texas district that went red for the first time in 2022.

Union offensive in Illinois

With Democratic allies in place in both Chicago and Springfield, organized labor is now pushing into several GOP primaries in Illinois.

Public sector unions are pouring a combined $250,000 into primary challenges against state Reps. Adam Niemerg and Blaine Wilhour, both of whom are members of the far-right Freedom Caucus. The unions, led by the Illinois Education Association, say they’re backing much more moderate Republicans who support public education and teachers’ unions.

Adding an additional dynamic is the fact that Niemberg was actually kicked off the GOP primary ballot and is now running a write-in candidate. Just how strong his following and how far-right his south Illinois district are will both be put to the test.

Redistricting Battles Roll On

Democrats in New York not seem willing to voluntarily accede to asymmetrical political warfare.

After initially staying silent, leaders from across the party have made it clear that they want to see the state legislature reject a new-ish Congressional map passed on Thursday by NY’s Independent Redistricting Commission. The map, drawn under mandate by the state’s highest court, makes a few minor tweaks to the current district lines but otherwise protects incumbents; New York, a deep blue state, sends 16 Democrats and 10 Republicans to Congress.

State Sen. Liz Krueger, who represents parts of Manhattan, was less than impressed.

“I haven’t really looked at the maps completely yet, but it looks like they’re pretty much the maps that same one Republican judge from upstate New York with a temporary assignment and a few thousand people in his district decided to draw for us,” she said bluntly.

“I didn’t like those maps then. I thought we would be getting different maps; it appears we didn’t really get different maps,” Kruger added. So I can certainly see an argument for the legislature rejecting these.”

Her colleague, state Sen. Mike Gianaris, who runs redistricting on the Senate side, added that Democrats were ready and willing to move quickly to design their own map should they follow Krueger’s lead and reject the retread districts.

Even Jay Jacobs, the worst party chair in the country and a man who has worked tirelessly to prevent Democrats from wielding power, is no fan of the map.

“We owe it to the public to carefully review these maps, especially in light of serious concerned being raised by various communities of interest,” Jacobs said in a statement released by the NY Democratic Party. “The fact that Lee Zeldin — who undermined the foundation for our democracy by trying to overturn the will over the voters on January 6 — endorsed this map should give us all pause and require a thorough examination, which the legislature will now do.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a close ally of Jacobs, was too busy fantasizing about liquidating Canada to comment on the map. But a spokesman for Congressional Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for a “meticulous” review of a map that he very clearly dislikes.

“Instead of remedying several of the substantive issues raised by good government groups related to communities of interest, the IRC map ignores or exacerbates them in parts of New York State, including the upper Hudson Valley. The IRC map breaks apart six additional counties in New York State, including one that appears gratuitously designed to impermissibly benefit an incumbent in the 19th Congressional District,” the spokesman said.

“That would be a clear violation of the New York State Constitution. Now that the Independent Redistricting Commission has completed its work, it is important that the legislature ensure — as the Constitution contemplates — that the people of New York State be afforded a fairly drawn congressional map.”

The stakes are personally high for Jeffries, who is a few seats away from becoming Speaker of the House. As it stands, Democrats are likely to pick up a seat apiece in Alabama and Louisiana, but lose a few in North Carolina, which was gerrymandered to the hilt after Republicans flipped the state Supreme Court.

So what is the right thing to do? And what is the smart thing to do?

As Sen. Kreuger alluded to in her comments, the current lines were drawn in 2022 by a “special master” appointed by a Republican lower court judge. Civil rights leaders and Democratic lawmakers blasted that map for dividing minority communities, but they were enforced by what was then a conservative majority on the state’s top court.

The conservatives have since been replaced by a liberal majority, which should give Democrats some confidence to disregard the new map and draw one that better suits their needs. Whether they should do that is a different question entirely, of course, and one with which I struggle.

There is a basic hypocrisy to blasting Republican gerrymanders and suggesting that they herald the death of democracy, only to turn around and embrace Democratic gerrymanders. At the same time, Republicans still have three times the number of gerrymandered districts than Democrats, and I’d rather feel like a minor hypocrite than live under a dictatorship. If a few extra districts can help Democrats take back Congress and pass a new Voting Rights Act that mandates fair, independent redistricting everywhere, I’d call that a worthwhile trade-off.

Amazon has joined SpaceX and Trader Joe’s in lawsuits aimed at gutting the NLRB of its ability to protect workers.

The most serious and prolific violator of labor rights over the past four years, Amazon has been dinged again and again by the NLRB’s in-house courts for intimidating, discriminating against, endangering, and firing workers who have sought to have their voices heard at the company’s warehouses and shipping centers.

Facing legal battles with workers and regional judges in New York, Kentucky, Chicago, Missouri, NJ, and Florida, among other places, the mega-corporation’s lawyers decided it’d be prudent to go for the jugular all at once. In this case, that means challenging the existence of the NLRB’s administrative law judges, who are experts that hear cases between workers and employers. The ALJs have regularly found Amazon guilty of going to extreme lengths to prevent collective action, so the company, like SpaceX and Trader Joe’s, want their authority thrown out entirely.

The corporate lawyers are relying in part on the bunk Major Questions Doctrine, which conservative jurists have mainstreamed in recent years to justify defanging the regulatory state. Their goal here is to get all hearings and trials out from under the auspices of the NLRB and into the clogged courtrooms of a much more conservative federal judiciary. It’s a frankly absurd attack on a century’s worth of established precedent, but with the makeup of the current Supreme Court, its chances of success cannot be underestimated.

If only there were some kind of weakness or corporate corruption investigation facing the most conservative members of the court, something that might chasten them or highlight their links to the far-right lawyers and foundations pushing these rights-crushing theories…

I may have been in a medicated coma, but I did not forget about your acquiescence to the downfall of society, Dick Durbin. Fun fact for you, Dick: Did you know the NLRB was first upheld in 1937 by the conservative Supreme Court after FDR threatened to expand and water it down?

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