Republicans go union, alien garbageman declares victory

Corruption galore, aliens, egg puns, and more

Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.

It’s been just over three months since I underwent open-heart surgery, and just shy of three months since I woke up from that surgery. I resumed writing while still in the hospital, because there’s just so much to cover. Now, as we careen toward the election, I’m working to find new ways to make Progress Report as useful and enjoyable as possible.

Tonight, I’m trying a new format that counts down some of the most important, strangest, and most interesting stories of the week, supplemented by analysis and reporting as well as some pop culture and silliness. The idea is to send it out on Fridays or Saturdays to paid subscribers, though I’m making it available to everybody this first time around. A sample, if you will.

For all the work going into the newsletter, we actually just had our worst month ever for new paid subscribers, as people’s payments seem to be failing for a variety of vague reasons and sign-ups have slowed. Progress Report can only survive with the support of paid subscribers, for whom I am eternally grateful, so if you want to join in, now is the time to do it!

Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Glenn, Paul, Edward, Celia, and Linda!

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1️⃣ Just Like Hash Browns: There are no circumstances in which I’d side with an employer over a group of workers seeking to organize a union, but as a longtime devotee of Robert Smith and The Cure, I do have to hand it to the proprietors of a Portland breakfast spot called Fried Egg I’m In Love.

It’s not an obvious pun but it works really well — you know what the place serves and what its vibe is going to be, and you don’t have to be a gothic new wave fan to find it fun. Workers there say they love the job and want to protect conditions as the restaurant expands, so you don’t even have to feel like a shill for celebrating the place. They’ve affiliated with the IWW, which is a shell of its former self, but let’s hope they get recognition and a contract sooner rather than later.

2️⃣ Everyone wants a union: When Washington State passed a law in 2022 that made legislative staffers eligible to unionize, Republican lawmakers were naturally opposed to the idea. The law went into effect on Wednesday, and in a triumph of karma, GOP staffers were the first to announce that they were filing for an election.

They called the effort a “defensive effort,” given the GOP’s firm minority status in the statehouse in Olympia. “We don’t want to yield to somebody else capturing our voice,” one staffer said. “The only way to prevent that is to get your own voice at the bargaining table.”

Nobody tell them this, but ensuring that they have a voice at the bargaining table is the main reason that most people unionize. The fact that GOP staffers, the truest of conservative true believers, are springing to organize when given the opportunity, indicates that a sea change really is happening.

3️⃣ On a roll in hostile territory: Progressive activists in Missouri this week submitted more than 210,000 petition signatures in support of ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage and mandate access to paid sick leave.

Assuming the Missouri Secretary of State validates at least 171,592 of them, voters will have a chance to raise the minimum wage to $13.75-an-hour in 2025 and $15-an-hour in 2026, plus guarantee workers the opportunity to earn up to seven days of paid leave per year.

The initiative campaigns are being spearheaded by the Missouri Workers Center and Stand Up KC. The latter group scored a major win last month when voters in Kansas City voted against implementing a special additional sales tax to fund a new stadium for the Royals and major renovations to Arrowhead Stadium, home of the NFL’s Chiefs.

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4️⃣ Taking out the garbage: Long live Count Binface, the populist, teletext-loving alien hero of London.

The satirical creation of a comedian named Jonathan David Harvey, Count Binface is a space warrior with a garbage can for a head, and after several election cycles spent running for office, he’s developed a not insignificant following.

Running on a platform that included £1 croissants and forcing utility company executives to swim in the Thames River, Count Binface won more than 24,00 votes in this week’s London mayoral election, which put him thousands ahead of the candidate running for Britain First, a far-right neo-fascist party. The triumph garnered nationwide coverage and prompted this victory speech:

I’ll be honest: If he makes his way to New York next year, I’ll absolutely vote for Count Binface over Eric Adams.

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5️⃣ Supreme conflicts of interest: Over the past two weeks, the Supreme Court’s reactionaries have made it clear that they are nothing more than depraved ideological terrorists who will bend any law or principle to find in favor of corporations, billionaires, theocrats, and flatulent criminals.

It just so happens that those corporations, billionaires, and theocrats are also some of their biggest financial patrons and associates, who influence and profit from the court’s decisions far more frequently than previously thought. They’ve been able to hide in the shadows for years now, protected by an increasingly dense web of front groups, lobbying activity, and private contracts. The amount of money and scope of the scam are staggering, but bit by bit, starting to come into focus.

Three progressive groups recently launched a new website that identifies the conflicts of interest in every case heard by the Supreme Court this term. Along with direct relationships between a justice and litigant in any given case, it also includes the relevant connections of right-wing organizations and individuals who have filed amicus briefs on particular cases or stand to profit from decisions made by justices on their payroll.

A new report in Rolling Stone, meanwhile, uncovered for the first time some of the deep-pocketed clients that have hired the consultancy firm run by Leonard Leo, the thin-skinned bigot and GOP judicial Svengali who is at the center of many of these financial schemes. Leo has made a fortune from this consultancy over the last number of years, which spurred an ongoing investigation by the district attorney of Washington, DC, who is looking into improprieties in how Leo runs his manifold “nonprofit” organizations and for-profit business. Clients include Eli Lilly, the Koch network, and other conservative organizations, which are engaging in some pretty gross self-dealing.

The names were exposed through a slip-up on a conservative online jobs bank, which left job applications from people who had worked for the firm visible to the public. Whoever included clients in their application materials may way to find a new line of work, because Leo is notoriously secretive. He’s defied a long-overdue subpoena issued to him by the Senate Judiciary Committee with a petulance that’s been met with a shrug by Sen. Dick Durbin, the committee chair who took months to send the subpoena in the first place.

Durbin’s weak request that Clarence Thomas recuse himself from the Trump immunity case was also blown off, with disastrous results likely pending. Democrats desperately need to make sure that every American understands how corrupt and illegitimate this Supreme Court has become, and really only have a few months to do so. This kind of information, if amplified relentlessly, can play a vital role in pressuring cautious officials into actually taking action.

6️⃣ Aiding and abetting: Texas Rep. Henry Cueller and his wife were indicted on corruption charges on Friday for allegedly taking $600K from Azerbaijan-owned gas and oil companies in exchange for working as agents of the state. The most conservative member of the Democratic caucus, Cuellar’s indictment could cost the party a House seat this November — and control of South Texas for a generation.

He is in some ways the House’s answer to NJ Sen. Bob Menendez, both in alleged crimes (Menendez took millions from Egypt) and how he was enabled by Democratic leaders. In fact, the national institutional support given to Cuellar was arguably even more egregious than what Menendez received; NJ party bosses were always firmly behind their meal ticket, but national backing really only became public after a hung jury allowed him to slither away from his first corruption trial in 2017. And by then, they’d squashed any viable primary opponents.

The FBI raided Cuellar’s home in January 2022 when he faced a second primary challenge from Jessica Cisneros, a progressive former staffer in his DC office who had the backing of Justice Democrats. She was everything that Cuellar isn’t: pro-choice, pro-gun control, and not awash in foreign money. Yet even knowing that Cuellar was likely to get popped at some point, Democratic House leadership was so afraid of a young progressive toppling one of its guys that it went all-in to save him; House Majority Whip James Clyburn even flew down to Texas to rally with Cuellar.

AIPAC also threw down $2 million to help Cuellar because it is a Republican front group.

Cueller won by less than a point, 50.3-49.7%, and Cisneros declined to run a third time against Cuellar and the national machine, which left him alone on this past March’s primary ballot. Now, his legal problems could lead to defeat in what’s becoming a swing district, imperiling Democrats’ hopes of taking back the House — though it’s become abundantly clear that Democratic leadership prioritizes bashing the left over anything else.

In other news, AIPAC just dropped $1.7 million, through a new PAC allegedly devoted to being “pro-science,” in an attempt to prevent Susheela Jayapal, sister of Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, from winning a Portland Congressional primary.

7️⃣ Woof: Has there ever been a more bizarre political self-immolation than the one that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is inflicting upon herself right now? After spending the week trying to post through the heavy, bewildered backlash to her admission that she executed her family puppy and dumped its body in a gravel pit because she found it annoying, Noem went on Fox News to bash the poor pup, changing the story once again and adding dog character assassination to her rap sheet.

The closest competitor I can think of is Sen. Gary Hart, who was so infamously thirsty that he got caught meeting up with his mistress after having invited the media to follow him in an attempt to prove that he wasn’t having an affair. But Noem’s self-destruction exceeds Hart’s, I think, because while Hart was responding to a rumor, Noem’s canine homicide only surfaced because she admitted to it in a new memoir that was presumably published to enhance her chances of being named Donald Trump’s running mate.

To be fair, Trump does truly hate dogs, but I still don’t think this is going to help Noem’s odds.

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8️⃣ The Great Abandonment: As states wind down their Medicaid unwindings, the impact of the purges is starting to come into focus.

As of December — these numbers take forever to sift through — there were 4.16 million fewer children enrolled in Medicaid, with one million of them living in Texas. Florida kicked 600K kids off their health plans, which ranked second in the nation, and Georgia earned the bronze with 300K purged children.

More sparsely populated states were no kinder to their low-income children. Eight states (MT, ID, SD, AR, NH, UT, AK, CO) have fewer kids enrolled in Medicaid now than they did before the pandemic.

The silver lining here is that many of these kids could be enrolled in private or other subsidized health insurance programs, but experts think that it’s likely that many are just uninsured.

9️⃣ Learn your math: Whenever a Republican lawmaker offers up a price estimate for private school vouchers, reporters should triple it and publish that number.

Case in point: North Carolina Republicans passed what was supposed to be a limited voucher scam last year and are now discussing the possibility of giving vouchers to all the applicants who weren’t accepted, which would add up to at least $284 million siphoned away from public schools.

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