Republicans block help to 16 million poor kids

Plus wins for workers and battles over education and abortion

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

I’m writing this newsletter from Philadelphia, where I saw Liverpool Football Club defeat Arsenal in a pre-season exhibition match on Wednesday night. It was a sell-out crowd, with more than 69,000 fans in the stands. They came from all over the country, uniting for days of warmup festivities and pre-match tailgating, united by nothing more than a furious love for clubs many had never seen play live in person, much less at their home stadiums in England.

The natural instinct would be to call it an apolitical event, but creating that kind of community is something of a miracle in this era of isolation, micro-factions, and cultural fractions. Each of these clubs provide a rich history, a shared language, opportunities for earnest celebration, a common goal, and critically, consistent proof that the people in charge are working hard to achieve it. A political movement that can do those things will thrive.

Tonight we’re dissecting the fight over major pro-family legislation, diving into some huge news for working people, and examining high-stakes abortion and education battles that are unfolding across the country.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Senate Republicans voted to block a modest expansion of the Child Tax Credit on Thursday, scuttling legislation that advocates said would have pulled half a million kids out of poverty.

The bill, which combined a renewal of some business tax cuts with the child tax credit expansion, was negotiated by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Republican Rep. Jason Smith. It passed in the GOP-controlled House by a wide margin in late January, but faced strong opposition from upper chamber Republican leaders.

“The timing of today’s vote—coupled with the lack of meaningful engagement since January to reach a compromise—confirms that the strategy was always a take-it-or-leave-it proposition in the Senate,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) said in a statement.

Anna Aurilio, senior campaign director for Economic Security Project Action, which worked closely on designing and advocating for the bill, told Progress Report that she instead blamed Senate Republicans, primarily Crapo and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), for the delay and demise of the legislation.

“When this bill came out of the House, Finance Committee ranking member Mike Crapo immediately started complaining about it,” Aurilio said. “We heard that a lot of Republicans were speaking up behind the scenes, saying ‘Hey, we want to support this bill.’ And one by one, Crapo and McConnell, were like, ‘No, no, wait ‘til next year, and I'll get you a better deal.”

The Trump tax breaks for individuals are due to expire next year, setting up what should be a blockbuster legislative fight. Crapo would be in line to take over as the chair of the Senate Finance Committee if Republicans flip the chamber in November.

What could have been

The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit, passed as part of the American Rescue Plan, sent parents up to $3600 per young child (ages 5 and below) and $3000 for older kids (6-17). It cut child poverty in half, then expired at the end of 2021. Once Sen. Joe Manchin dashed any hope of extending its impact, a coalition of progressive organizations began working for what became, out of political necessity, a far more modest and targeted boost.

“We wanted it to focus on the lowest income kids,” Aurilio said. “There are 19 million kids who are currently left out of the full credit because their parents don't make enough money. This bill would helped 16 million of those 19 million children.”

As currently constituted, the full Child Tax Credit is available only to parents and guardians who meet an income threshold, a feature that was temporarily lifted in the 2021 law.

Right now, those who fully qualify can receive $2000 per child. This bill would have been upped to $2100, while the cap for the lowest-income families, who don’t qualify for the full credit, would have been raised from $1600 to $1800 this year, $1900 next year and $2000 the year after.

Even more significantly, while those lower-income families are currently ineligible to receive credits for multiple children, this bill would have ended that imbalance, potentially doubling the amount that parents could claim.

“f you're a waitress and you make $15,000-a-year and you have two kids, maybe you'll get up to about $1,800. But under this change, you would have gotten $1,800 for one kid and $1,800 for the second kid, so this particularly benefited larger families,” Aurilio explained.

All told, the average low-income family would have received an extra $900 this year. Not a ton, but enough to lift 400,000 children out of poverty in its first year and half a million by its third.

The politics of it all

The bill enjoyed wide support from both sides of the aisle, from lawmakers — it earned 370 votes in the House — and advocacy groups alike. Part of that was its attachment to corporate tax cuts for R&D and other expenses, but that was part of the strategy.

The Chamber of Commerce, Farm Bureau, and even Grover Norquist, the sworn enemy of anything that helps working people, were compelled to signal their support for the deal.

Crapo repeatedly called the modest expansion a handout that disincentivized work, railing against the fact that it helped parents who didn’t pay taxes due to their low income. Progressives would have would have loved that, Aurilio said, but the best they could do was work in a provision that allowed parents who struggled to retain a job in any given year to claim their credit based on their income from the year prior.

In reality, its phase-ins were structured in such a way that even conservative think tanks acknowledged that it would have incentivized parents to work, especially parents with two or more children. And studies of universal basic income pilots have shown that even benefits with income requirement do not encourage low-income recipients to quit their jobs, but instead provide them the breathing room, money for childcare, and opportunity to quit crappy part-time gigs and find a full-time job with better pay.

The hope was that the Senate would take up the bill in February, when it had real bipartisan momentum. The coalition pushing the legislation specifically for the Child Tax Credit included plenty of progressive organizations, from the NAACP Leadership Conference to Moms Rising, as well as an assortment of right-wing groups.

Students for Life, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the National Association of Evangelicals were all on board, as well, a reflection of the right’s supposed interest in helping parents post-Dobbs and new populist, “pro-family” agenda.

In the end, all the conservative support netted three Republican votes, from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), and Rick Scott (R-FL). That last name was a surprise, and Aurilio figures it had something to do with the fact that the credit would have benefited roughly one million children Florida. A more cynical observer might note that Scott is running for re-election this year and had a free vote, cutting off one line of attack for his Democratic opponent.

Conspicuous in his absence was Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), the leader of this supposed new, family-centric, populist right-wing movement. He was busy campaigning as thr GOP nominee for vice president, because politics ultimately comes before principles, even the well-being of children.

“This is just really selfish politics. At the end of the day, Thom Tillis from North Carolina was putting out a flyer saying vote against this because he didn't want Joe Biden to send out checks during an election year,” Aurilio said.

🚦 💵 Michigan: Nearly six years after Republican legislators hijacked and gutted ballot initiatives intended to raise the minimum wage to $15-an-hour and institute paid sick leave, the state Supreme Court has cleared the way for them to finally take effect as activists intended.

In a 4-3 decision, the liberal-controlled court ruled that the state’s unique “adopt and amend” strategy violates the Michigan constitution, triggering what will be a sea change for low-wage workers. It’s been a long, hard fight, plagued by legal delays and made more urgent by inflation.

Back in 2018, labor and other grassroots activists collected enough signatures to qualify the two ballot amendments. Instead of campaigning against the amendments, they adopted them directly into law and then amended them to drastically slow down their implementation. Under the terms of the original wage amendment, the minimum wage would have hit $12-an-hour by 2022. Instead, it’s currently stuck at $10.33, and wouldn’t have hit $12 until 2030.

The court’s decision reinstates the original amendment, adjusting the implementation phases to maintain a similar timeline to what was initially intended. The minimum wage will now hit $12.50 on February 21st of next year, then periodically rise until it reaches $15-an-hour in 2028.

This is an even bigger win for tipped workers, who employers can currently pay $3.93-an-hour so long as their tips hit the $10.33 mark that is the starting point for everybody else. The tipped minimum will jump up to around $6-an-hour next year and increase annually until it reaches $15-an-hour and is phased out entirely in 2029.

All told, the change will boost the pay of nearly half a million Michigan workers currently making the state minimum wage of $10.33-an-hour, and likely indirectly boost the paychecks of half a million more workers.

Eliminating the tipped minimum wage in various cities and states has been a years-long battle for the restaurant workers organization One Fair Wage. The group has had to harness grassroots energy in regular battles with the deep-pocketed, well-connected state chapters of the National Restaurant Association and Chamber of Commerce, and the organizing is finally beginning to pay off.

Chicago and Washington, DC have taken the leap over the past year, and this decision in Michigan represents One Fair Wage’s biggest victory yet, as the state becomes the first in 40 years to eliminate the tipped minimum wage.

“It’s clear tipped workers don’t just need a tax exemption – they need living wages with tips on top!” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, in an email to Progress Report. “This is just the first of many more victories to come in a year in which key voter groups, especially young voters and voters of color, have named ‘the rising cost of living’ and ‘jobs with living wages’ as their top electoral priorities!”

Michigan becomes the first state since 1988 to eliminate the tipped minimum wage.

One Fair Wage is waiting for a judge to rule on Restaurant Association-sponsored challenges to their ballot initiative petitions in Arizona, where they hope to raise the overall wage and phase out the tipped minimum in November.

💸 😠 Seattle: Unfortunately, it’s not all positive momentum. In the once-reliably liberal Emerald City, the newly conservative city council is weighing a bill that would keep the two-tier wage system in place after more than a decade of progress.

An ordinance passed all the way back in 2014 set a course for a decade-long, variable-filled phase-out of the tipped minimum wage. Right now, the minimum wage for tipped workers at businesses with 500 or fewer employees is is $17.25-an-hour; it’s due to pull even with the standard city minimum, which is $19.97 at the moment but will rise next year with inflation.

Last week, Councilwoman Joy Hollingsworth, a new business-backed member, proposed a bill that would have stopped the phase-out and kept the tipped minimum for some workers at $17.25-an-hour, adjusted annually for inflation. The proposal faced so much blowback that Hollingsworth, a moderate who took over from a popular leftist in the most progressive district in the city, pulled the bill today while promising to continue pursuing the idea.

Now, she plans to take “the next few weeks to focus on working with stakeholders, including small business owners, labor unions, and our Mayor’s Office to find a balanced solution.”

The battle is just getting started…

🎒 🤑 School privatization blitz: Earlier this year, the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council launched a new program that aims to further accelerate the school voucher movement’s takeover of the public education system. This week, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has been named the “Education Freedom Alliance,” which is seeking to more than double the number of states that offer private school vouchers over the next year.

Republican legislatures have rushed to enact programs that funnel money to private schools over the past few years, seizing on a rare fracture in support for public schools following Covid-era school closures, freak-outs over CRT, and several Supreme Court decisions that loosened restrictions on public money for religious education. There are currently 12 states with broad programs that offer families money to pay for their children’s private schools or home-schooling supplies, including Iowa, Florida, and Arizona.

As anticipated, it’s been wealthy families who already send their kids to private schools that have largely benefited from the state largesse. Activists, led by the state teacher’s union, are working to pass a ballot initiative that would repeal Nebraska’s new voucher program, but by and large, the momentum has been with conservatives in most states.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott fell just short of passing a voucher program last year and sponsored primaries against the GOP lawmakers who squashed it. It’s the same tactic that Reynolds took after failing to push vouchers through after several tries in Iowa.

“I was either going to sit on the sidelines and continue to be an enabler and not get this done, or I was going to really get in the fight and really make sure that we had (enough votes),” Reynolds told ALEC’s annual convention. “Because I was hearing it from the parents and from families as I traveled the state, they wanted that opportunity to choose. And a lot of times they would choose a public school, but they wanted that choice, especially after COVID.”

A poll last year found that 62% of Iowa families oppose using public money to subsidize private and religious schools. Last year, when the program was available to families making up to 300% of the poverty level, Iowa spent $23 million more than anticipated. It will become available to all families in 2025-26.

👎 🔎 Cheating freaks: Republicans may be trying to project a kind of moderation on abortion, but their ongoing war on all reproductive rights tell a different story.

The latest wrinkle is a rise in lawmakers talking about activating the nuclear option: passing legislation that declares that unborn fetuses and even fertilized eggs are people. Doing so would turn abortion and other reproductive health decisions into the legal equivalent of murder.

It’s already on the table in Missouri, where conservative GOP Rep. Brian Seitz says he plans to introduce a fetal personhood bill in January, even if voters in the state approve a ballot amendment to protect abortion rights.

“If it does get to the Supreme Court, due to the makeup of the court right now, I think they would see this commonsense legislation is, in fact, truth,” Seitz told Stateline.

As the story indicates, this isn’t a sudden awakening of a dormant movement. States have been increasingly hearing and passing laws that codify some forms of fetal personhood, and while they experienced a freeze after the Alabama Supreme Court experienced so much backlash for outlawing IVF, conservatives are gearing up to take them to the next level again in 2025.

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