Progressive policy is off to the races in 2025
But red states are still attacking democracy
Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.
If you were worried that the end of 2024 might bring even a glimmer of optimism or reason to believe in humanity, you can rest easy, because the first three days of 2025 were just as bleak.
The details that are emerging about the Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas are increasingly disturbing and depressing, though you wouldn’t know it by the way that the media seems to be covering up the bomber’s violent past and far-right ideology. It’s a troubling if not surprising glossing over by the national press, which has long coddled fringe freaks from the right and treated them as people to be studied and understood instead of the domestic terrorists they so often become.
Trump’s victory in November and the media’s poor standing with viewers will only reinforce that approach, and when Trump pardons the Jan. 6th insurrectionists, there will be little to discourage extremists from starting new militias and taking their violence to yet another level.
But I’m not here to depress you — there are enough newsletters out there expressly focused on the nightmare of our national news cycle. Instead, today we’ll dive into what’s happening at state capitals and courtrooms around the country. I’ll have a report on some major union strikes and activity in the next day or so.
Note: Now that we’re no longer in an election year, there’s going to be a whole lot more actual policy and activism to cover than there was last year. To make sure I can stay on top of it and get more in front of you, I’m going to be experimenting with more concise write-ups in news round-ups. The newsletter is most useful when it gets as many stories as possible in front of a national audience.
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Progressive policy is off to the races
Lawmakers and other officials have already filed about 20% of the bills expected to be considered in Nevada’s legislative session this year, including several major proposals that would rein in corporate power and help the state’s poorest residents.
At the top of the list is Attorney General Aaron Ford’s proposal to ban price gouging on essential goods and services. Specifically, it would prohibit individual fraud or industry-coordinated price manipulation that leads to items that a person needs on a daily or recurring basis — including food, medicine, and shelter — to cost either more than $750 per month or $9000 per year.
It’s likely that the actual execution of this law would focus on known scourges: PBMs that set drug prices, grocery store chains that inflate food prices, and algorithmic pricing and collusion by property management companies that use software like RealPage to inflate housing prices.
Similar legislation targeting algorithmic price fixing and RealPage has been introduced in several other states and municipalities. Lawmakers in New Jersey advanced a bill to ban the practice in late October, after evidence emerged that the software was being used to inflate rents and limit competition in Jersey City. The move that came the same week that Philadelphia passed a law that made the practice illegal.
Cities across California, where the housing crisis has persisted for decades, have also pursued such legislation. San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the nation to ban the software in July, while San Diego is also pursuing a ban. Statewide legislation failed in 2024, but its sponsor said she planned on introducing it again this year. New York’s attorney general proposed new regulations against price gouging in 2023, which would make harder for landlords and companies to get out of lawsuits.
Until November, corporate landlord-friendly legislators were able to cite the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against RealPage, which costs renters nearly $4 billion a year. That suit is now facing a very uncertain future under a president who built his name and fortune in the real estate industry and has nominated an anti-regulation Republican to chair the FTC. Eight states joined the lawsuit, so it could theoretically continue, or be filed again, but it’s become far less likely that any meaningful change will happen at the top.
In Colorado, state Rep. Javier Mabrey told me that he plans on filing bans on anti-competitive software like RealPage in the coming session, and that the urgency to do so has only increased since Donald Trump’s election victory.
“It’s pretty clear that the Trump administration is gonna be pretty serious about making sure that his wealthy buddies, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley can run amok, unregulated,” Mabrey told me. “Things like algorithmic price setting discriminating against renters, algorithmic wage discrimination happening with Uber and Lyft — there's certainly not gonna be fear of regulation or honing in some of these bad practices at the federal level, so states need to step up and demonstrate that we have workers' backs.”
Mabrey is also the House sponsor of the Colorado Worker Protection Act, which would end the requirement that unions win a second election — with more than 75% of the vote — to attain full representation rights. It’s a top priority of the state’s organized labor community, and I’ll have a report on that next week.
Colorado was the only state that moved left in 2024, even if the legislative map meant that Democrats lost their supermajority by one seat. With a governor’s race on tap for 2026, lawmakers will look to make the most of this session, and a number of other priorities have already emerged.
Near the top of the list is a new effort to strengthen the state’s ban on high-capacity magazines for firearms, which has not stopped gun dealers from selling them in the 11 years since the ban passed. Colorado Democrats have been unable to pass a more comprehensive ban on assault weapons, despite the multitude of mass shootings in the state; this proposal to ban weapons that use detachable magazines, which would also ban bump stocks and rapid-fire triggers, represents a scaled down effort to find a compromise.
New Mexico has had a smaller number of bills pre-filed, and many of them represent more minor bureaucratic proposals. There are two notable pro-education proposals among them: One would allow tribal reservations to strike deals with the state to create local public funded schools, while another would prohibit state funds from going to libraries that ban books based on “partisan or doctrinal disapproval of the material's content or based on the author's race, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation or political or religious views.”
Legislators in red states like Texas have already rushed to pre-file cruel culture war bills that further limit the rights of trans people, but there will likely be some points that could benefit working families.
In South Carolina, two Democratic lawmakers introduced companion bills that would together end sales tax on diapers, breast pumps, baby formula, and other food products specifically intended for children under three (including purees, puffs, and teether crackers). It’s the kind of bill that’s been successful in other red states, including Florida, where state Rep. Anna Eskamani sponsored and carried a law that ended the sales tax on diapers.
An interminable wait: The state’s constitution now guarantees the right to an abortion, but it may be quite a while before people are actually permitted to undergo the procedure in Missouri.
Voters in November approved a constitutional amendment that protects abortion care up until fetal viability, which is around 23 weeks of pregnancy. The problem is that Missouri has a multitude of laws that render providing abortions all but impossible, and Republican legislators aren’t exactly rushing to repeal them. It will thus require extensive litigation to have them all rendered defunct, and until that time, providers like Planned Parenthood say that their hands are all but tied.
Cheap tricks: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine quietly signed a gigantic omnibus into law late on New Year’s Eve, a tactic designed to minimize public awareness of policies designed to keep the public in the dark.
Most significantly, the 450-page bill contains provisions that could make it prohibitively expensive for some people to obtain footage from police body cams and prison security systems. Police departments can now charge up to $75 per hour necessary to “process” such requests, with precincts and prisons permitted to charge up to $750 per ask.
Fittingly, the provision was never introduced to the public and never was subject to a hearing of any kind. DeWine told reporters that he supported transparency and that the policy was designed to help departments defray the cost of searching through the footage and responding to specific requests.
What the proponents of the policy don’t acknowledge is that it’s now remarkably easy to scrub through, annotate, and transcribe footage through simple AI tools.
Here’s a twist: The National Redistricting Foundation was one of many pro-democracy groups to urge the Supreme Court to uphold Louisiana’s new Congressional map, but the alliance between civil rights groups and the state’s GOP leadership is far more tenuous than the flurry of amicus briefs may suggest.
When Louisiana Republicans drew a second majority Black district at the behest of a federal court in 2023, they did so by carving out a narrow strip of land across the state that looks like its own mildly absurd gerrymander. It was done for political purposes, which is now legal according to the Supreme Court, but now the state is being sued for what a number of “non-African American” plaintiffs are claiming is a racial gerrymander in favor of Black voters.
Instead of rejecting that claim, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill argued that the map should be upheld by the Supreme Court in order to “provide clarity to states that, like Louisiana, are forced into endless litigation every time a new census requires redistricting.”
In other words, Murrill asserted that states should be left to their own devices when it comes to redistricting. In a teleconference with reporters this week, the National Redistricting Foundation’s executive director suggested that the state’s argument amounted to an attempt to weaken the Voting Rights Act even as it technically defended its own law.
“The state of Louisiana has presented outlandish arguments intending to undermine precedent on Section 2 claims, going as far as to say that the state has no obligation to comply with federal law and vote dilution claims.”
The Supreme Court announced in November that it will hear the case sometime early this year, and its decision may wind up dictating the survival of what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
Maine: Conservatives aren’t opposed to ballot initiatives that change the laws around democracy… so long as they weaken fair elections.
Shortly before Christmas, the state agreed to delay implementation of a new law that would drastically cap the amount of money that could be donated to Super PACs. The $5000 limit, set by a ballot initiative that was approved by 74% of voters in November, is being challenged by conservative groups tied to a Republican legislator and prominent right-wing activist.
It’s important to note that the initiative’s backers always anticipated this challenge, which they hope can lead to a new legal precedent on money in politics. It’s somewhat of a long shot, but if nothing else, it shows how popular an issue this can be for populists willing to pursue it.
Meanwhile, the same conservative organization that is leading the lawsuit trying to overturn the dark money initiative is also pursuing its own referendum, which would implement a strict voter ID law in Maine. They collected signatures last year but held it off the ballot in 2024, claiming that they hoped that the Democratic legislature would enact an ID law itself. That’s clearly not going to happen, so conservatives now aim to get the voter ID referendum on the ballot in this year’s local elections, when it’ll be far more likely to pass.
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Remember that there are three special elections in Virginia next Tuesday Jan 7th.
Jordan Zakarin informs truthfully.