It's Like Evil Larry David Is Running Wisconsin
It's Like Evil Larry David Is Running Wisconsin
But there's good gun news, at least
Welcome to a premium Thursday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
It’s been another busy day and not just because the Mets played a day game that ended via a controversial bases-loaded hit-by-pitch. Other news transpired as well, so let’s get right down to business.
Important News You Need to Know
Gun Violence
President Joe Biden today announced a big package of executive actions focused on reducing gun violence, cheering activists who have shown a new willingness to be critical of the administration.
Igor Volsky, who spoke with me for this past Sunday’s story on the issue, borrowed a Bidenism and called the measures a BFD, then ran down their impact in the thread below (just click through the tweet to see the whole thing):
This should be just the start of the reforms, though that, along with just about everything else, depends on the fate of the filibuster (more on that later).
Elections and Voting Rights
I hit send on the Tuesday evening edition of this newsletter while the results of two important elections were still pending. As was inevitable, the ballot tallies came in almost immediately after the newsletter landed in your inboxes, so let me catch you up real quick on their outcomes.
St. Louis: Tishaura Jones was elected mayor of St. Louis on Tuesday, winning 52-48 to become the first Black woman to lead the city. She ran as a proud progressive, promising to “take steps to prevent evictions, boost funding for homeless services, and invest in public safety beyond increasing the police budget,” according to The Appeal.
Wisconsin: Progressive public school advocate Jill Underly wiped the floor with Deb Kerr in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. While technically a nonpartisan election, there was little question about the candidates’ political associations. Underly was backed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the rest of the state party, and the major teachers’ unions, while Kerr was supported by former Governor and current spray-on toupee enthusiast Scott Walker.
Counting Underly as a Democrat gives the party ten wins in the past 11 statewide elections since 2016. And yet, because Wisconsin is so offensively gerrymandered, Republicans have retained an iron grip on the state legislature.
Without having to worry about job security, they’ve been able to act on their most sociopathic instincts, which have and will continue to get people killed. Wisconsin Republicans still refuse to expand Medicaid, despite a $1.4 billion windfall it would receive from the federal government, and as confirmed today, a lawsuit that GOP legislators filed to further strip Evers of power is going to lead to Wisconsin having to forfeit over $50 million a month in food subsidies for its poorest residents.
In a stupid way, this reminds me a little bit of the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry is so incredulous about being banned from a local coffee shop that he decides to open up his own coffee shop right next door out of sheer spite. Unbothered by any financial losses he might incur, Larry continually undercuts Mocha Joe’s prices and pilfers his customers, ready to put the guy out of business motivated only by sheer demented principle. Wisconsin Republicans are not nearly as (intentionally) funny as Larry, they’re ideological monsters, and their decisions hurt hundreds of thousands of people, but still, they’ve got that same single-minded spite-driven psychosis.
Case in point: Well aware that they are becoming increasingly unpopular, Wisconsin Republicans are jumping aboard the racist voter suppression train. They recently unveiled a new legislative package that would make it much more difficult to vote via absentee ballot (they’ve already got super-right voter ID laws that depress Black turnout).
With Evers as governor, none of these proposals will become law, but consider them messaging bills and a preview of what they’ll do if they gain full control of the government in 2022.
Virginia: While Virginia’s new state-level Voting Rights Act marks a remarkable advance for democracy in what was once the heart of the old south, not everything is all hunky-dory there. Like everywhere else where Democrats are in power, there is in Virginia something of a tension between the left flank and the centrist old guard. Right now, that’s expressing itself in a strange controversy that suggests a bit of foul play or shenanigans on behalf of the centrists in power.
Matt Rogers, a long-time chief of staff to State Sen. Dave Marsden and a progressive activist, is running a primary challenge against Arlington-area Delegate Patrick Hope. Rogers says that he’s being unfairly blocked from being appearing on the ballot by the state Board of Elections, which claims it never received his required paperwork. Rogers, who has worked statewide to recruit other candidates and help them navigate the bureaucratic thicket involved in running for office, says he always sent in his paperwork as soon as was possible, and then never heard that there were any issues with his filings until it was too late.
“They claim they never got it,” Rogers told me this afternoon. “I provided these forms a second time after being alerted that they hadn’t been received, but after the date they could choose to disqualify.”
There were no other issues with his paperwork, he says, making it all the more frustrating.
The Virginia Board of Elections generally grants extensions to candidates who have had paperwork snafus, but decided against doing so this year, shutting out Rogers and two other Black primary challengers. The state NAACP has jumped into the fray, asking the Board to offer these candidates the same grace period that they provide everyone else, but thus far, they’re not budging.
As it so happens, two out of the three members of the current Board are former delegates, one of whom Rogers says is good friends with Del. Hope.
“This overwhelmingly Democratic district hasn’t had a primary since 2009,” Rogers says, explaining why he decided to run in the primary. “The area has moved significantly in that time in ways that the incumbent has been slow in adapting — despite his recent pleas to the contrary.”
Legal action, he says, is already in process.
Arizona: Undoubtedly terrified by the fevered few days of attention focused on Georgia-based corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola in the wake of their home state’s passage of racist voter suppression laws, major companies based in both Arizona and Texas are getting out ahead of the game and publicly urging their own local GOP lawmakers not to enact similar Jim Crow restrictions.
The concern may well be performative (see below) but it does get them on the record as opposing voter suppression, which moves the public paradigm in ways that we shouldn’t underrate. In the late aughts and early 2010s, corporations began to cloak their logos in rainbows and offer platitudes in support of gay marriage, which helped intangibly “normalize” queer relationships. (They deserve little credit for cynically waiting until decades of hard work by activists brought the LGBTQ rights movement to the point that it was more lucrative to be seen as an ally, of course.)
Illinois: In a bit of good news, Gov. J.B Pritzker of Illinois signed a bill that codified into permanent law the temporary emergency measures used to expand voting access amid the pandemic. Drop boxes and vote-by-mail will be regular parts of elections in Illinois going forward.
Workers’ Rights
So, bad news: The union vote in Amazon is not looking likely to succeed.
I know, it’s simply shocking that low-paid and abused employees who get punished for even taking a piss break and were subjected to two months of relentless anti-union harassment and propaganda that threatened their livelihoods did not vote to authorize a union.
It’s a bummer, but as Applebaum says, this was hardly a fair election. Imagine if for months before a presidential election, the government that controlled every aspect of your life, down to your defecation schedule, subjected you to endless propaganda and veiled threats about voting for the challenger. Would you consider that a fair election?
The election is likely to be challenged and thrown out anyway, given the stuff that’s coming out about the patently illegal intimidation and union-busting strategies that Amazon pursued. Like the below:
Click through. It’s a doozy.
Filibusted
(Note: I wrote some of this in a Daily Kos diary entry, but since you’re a different audience, I want to make sure you see it, too.)
At this point, Joe Manchin is either a master political operator performing an unprecedentedly deft act of political theater, a remarkably stubborn legislator enjoying the outsized spotlight he’s being afforded right now, or just astonishingly out of touch with today’s politics. Regardless of the answer, his brand new, mind-bogglingly wrongheaded op-ed about the filibuster is so riddled with illogical statements and factual errors that I’m stunned that he’d want to put his name on it.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post bluntly titled “I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Manchin lays out a grievously flawed rationale for his refusal to, well, vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.
Many Democrats who have been hesitant to eliminate the filibuster have recently said that they would make an exception for voting rights, including California Sen. Diane Feinstein just this week. Yet Manchin suggests that he will need Republican votes on this bill — and that somehow, Democrats will get them.
There is also bipartisan support for voting reform and many of the initiatives outlined in the For the People Act. Our ultimate goal should be to restore bipartisan faith in our voting process by assuring all Americans that their votes will be counted, secured and protected. Efforts to expand voting hours and access, improve our election security and increase transparency in campaign finance and advertisement rules should and do have broad, bipartisan support and would quickly address the needs facing Americans today. Taking bipartisan action on voting reform would go a long way in restoring the American people’s faith in Congress and our ability to deliver results for them.
Now, we all know this is not just wrong, it’s laughably wrong and downright delusional. Republicans in state legislatures have proposed more than 300 voter suppression bills over the past few months, passed major restrictions on voting in Iowa and Georgia, and are trying to push them through in Arizona and Texas (you can read my story detailing those restrictions right here).
And in DC, Republicans have made it clear that they will not compromise on voting rights. A few weeks ago AP reported that Sen. Ted Cruz is rallying the troops and is making sure there is no budging on voting rights. In fact, the entirety of the vast right-wing infrastructure is mobilizing around voter suppression in states across the country, making it their number one priority.
Here’s an excerpt from that story:
Asked if there was room to compromise, Cruz was blunt: “No.”
“H.R. 1′s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century,” Cruz said told the group organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed, conservative group that provides model legislation to state legislators.
Clearly, bipartisanship isn’t going to happen on this. Republicans want to gerrymander and Jim Crow their way to a majority without compromising on a single one of their bloodthirsty policies. This week, the National Review ran a story suggesting that even fewer people should get to vote, calling for “better voters,” which is about as subtle as a punch to the face. And now Manchin is slapping us all in the face with his nonsense.
The rest of his op-ed is equally as flawed; he suggests Republicans want to work on infrastructure, but they’re already attacking Biden’s plan as far-left socialism because it — gasp! — includes care for seniors.
In reality, bipartisanship is easier when the minority party knows that bills are going to pass without their votes. In that situation, they actually have a reason to cooperate and try to get some of their priorities into a bill; otherwise, they can just stonewall and stonewall and not make a single effort to reach across the aisle.
Kyrsten Sinema also made this egregious and honestly annoying mistake in a recent conversation, suggesting that the problem isn’t the filibuster, but the fact that Democrats and Republicans just don’t want to work together.
“When you have a place that’s broken and not working, and many would say that’s the Senate today, I don’t think the solution is to erode the rules,” she told a few constituents. “I think the solution is for senators to change their behavior and begin to work together, which is what the country wants us to do.”
Has she not met Mitch McConnell? The guy has spent the last eight years doing everything he can to stonewall popular Democratic legislation and judges out of sheer hunger for power.
Maybe they are aware of this. Maybe they’re trying to play the long game. But Manchin and Sinema continually making these verifiably false arguments that undercut Democrats’ efforts to actually do the work they were elected to do and save democracy itself from endless GOP treachery.
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