Progressives Every Day: Supremely Mixed News and a Great Alternative
Progressives Every Day: Supremely Mixed News and a Great Alternative
And southern COVID madness
It’s Thursday evening, which means it’s basically Friday, which… doesn’t mean all that much in the purgatory in which we now live. Still, it’s time for Progressives Everywhere!
A Supremely convincing argument
The Supreme Court today ruled that President Trump is not immune from the law and cannot block the release of his tax returns to the state prosecutors who subpoenaed them. This is a fundamental victory for democracy but, practically speaking, one that will have little immediate impact. Not only did the Court rule in a separate case that Congress’s request for the same records must be re-examined by lower courts, it gave Trump’s lawyers a chance to negotiate further over the scope of what they must hand over to state prosecutors. There is very little chance that either case will be settled before the November election.
It didn’t have to be this way. Rep. Richard Neal (MA-1), the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, dragged his heels for months and months on a subpoena of Trump’s tax returns; had he issued it right away, there’s a solid chance that this case would have been decided this winter, giving Democrats a better shot of obtaining the tax returns.
Alex Morse, the uber-impressive progressive mayor of Holyoke who is challenging Neal in the Democratic primary, made this point in explicit terms earlier today, excoriating Wall Street’s favorite member of Congress for sabotaging any hope of true oversight.
“What good is Richie Neal’s power in Congress if even Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are doing more work to hold Trump accountable than he is?”
Good question! Neal isn’t just useless, he’s an actual obstruction to progress and justice. We need to remove him from power ASAP and get a progressive champion like Morse in there ASAP.
You can DONATE to Alex Morse’s campaign here!
Mixed ruling in Wisconsin
After Democrat Tony Evers dethroned Republican supervillain Scott Walker in the 2018 Wisconsin gubernatorial election, the state’s far-right GOP legislature — which survived thanks to an egregious gerrymander — used the lame-duck session to rush through as many limitations on the incoming governor’s powers as possible. They also did their best to kneecap the state’s new Democratic Attorney General, Josh Kaul, with a series of laws that took away the power they were happy to allow his Republican predecessor.
The lame-duck laws have been subject to litigation ever since, and today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling that largely bent in favor of the GOP but made some key concessions to Evers and Kaul. Here’s the bad news, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
The lame-duck laws require a committee of legislators, rather than the attorney general, to sign off on some court settlements and they allow lawmakers to easily intervene in lawsuits involving the state.
The lame-duck laws also give lawmakers the ability to more easily block rules written by the Evers administration. They say courts can't defer to state agencies when they interpret state laws. And they give lawmakers the ability to block the administration from changing security policies in the state Capitol.
The justices unanimously agreed all those provisions are constitutional, though they said more specific challenges could be made to those parts of the laws in the future.
The silver lining here is that the court did declare unconstitutional the legislature’s attempt to require the Evers administration to get public comment and provide onerous citations before publishing state documents and interpreting state regulations and laws.
“Capturing the executive's ability to communicate his knowledge, intentions, and understanding of the laws he is to execute makes him a drone without the energy or independent wherewithal to act as a co-equal member of government,” Justice Daniel Kelly wrote in the majority decision.
What’s interesting is that Kelly is not only a conservative justice, he’s also a lame duck — he lost his bid for another term on the court earlier this year to a progressive challenger, Jill Karofsky. When Karofsky takes her seat on the bench, it’ll reduce the conservative hold on the court from 5-2 to 4-3, which could be pivotal going forward.
Trouble in Texas
Things are on fire in Texas, where COVID-19 numbers continue to skyrocket:
The rise in deaths is particularly troubling because up until this week, the silver lining to the spike in new cases was that the death rate from the virus was staying relatively flat. Deaths are always a lagging indicator, though, and we’re seeing that the other shoe is starting to fall.
Gov. Ken Abbott finally mandated masks last week, so there’s a chance we’ll see the numbers start to go down in a week or two… if Texans actually comply with the mask mandate. Right now, the mechanism to enforce the mandate is pretty weak — a warning the first time someone is caught maskless and up to a $250 fine for repeat offenders — so city lawmakers in Austin are discussing ratcheting up the punishment. The city might implement a fine of up to $2,000 for anyone who is caught maskless in public, and notably, Abbott on Thursday signaled that he would support such a policy.
Abbott’s mask mandate exempts polling sites, which in turn is scaring off poll workers and forcing counties to shut down some of their voting locations. Abbott claims that he didn’t want to disenfranchise people who didn’t have a mask, which would be sort of believable if his Attorney General wasn’t fighting tooth and nail to stop people who are concerned about coronavirus from voting via absentee ballot.
Quibis
Yesterday I mentioned the COVID outbreak in the Ohio State House, but it pales in comparison to the wildfire of coronavirus cases raging through the Mississippi Capitol building. At least 26 lawmakers have been diagnosed with the virus, including the Speaker of the House and Lieutenant Governor! And wouldn’t you know, the very Republican legislature ignored all health protocol and more or less asked for this.
In Kentucky, a circuit court blocked Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s executive order that would have limited daycare class sizes to 10 or fewer students. Daycare center operators were outraged by the order, saying they couldn’t afford smaller classes and hiring the additional teachers they would require. It shouldn’t have ever come to this, but instead of just sending people more money, the federal government is forcing them to endanger children to survive.
In Portland, activists were able to qualify a ballot initiative that, if passed, would provide free public pre-school that is financed by a tax on the wealthy. Notably, they collected over 32,000 signatures in just five weeks due to legal challenges pushed by the Portland Business Alliance.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is so awful that I’m now cheering on a Republican sheriff, which is pretty hard to believe, especially at time when we’re all chanting “defund the police.”
If you haven’t seen it yet, make a note to watch the first season of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones as soon as humanly possible. After you binge it all, read this interview with Edi Patterson, the show’s breakout star. She’s an absolute genius.
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