Texas Is Trying To Kill Its Citizens
Texas Is Trying To Kill Its Citizens
Lots happening!
Welcome to the midweek edition of Progressives Every Day!
Every weekday, I fill a newsletter with headlines and analysis about activism and state/local political issues that get overlooked most everywhere else. If you want the daily newsletter delivered right to your inbox each evening, all you have to do is sign up for the premium edition of Progressives Everywhere, which comes with other perks, too.
(If you’d rather not pay a dime and just check out the Progressives Everywhere Substack homepage every evening, you can do that, too. Getting the info out there is more important to me than making money.)
Below, you’ll find some of the biggest stories featured thus far this week. A lot has been happening!
Voting vs the virus in Texas:
Everything is bigger in Texas — including the coronavirus spikes and efforts to put citizens in harm’s way.
On Wednesday, Texas announced that it saw a dramatic increase in new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday that obliterated its previous record.
On Tuesday evening, when the announced number was 2622 (still a record, mind you), GOP Gov. Greg Abbott attributed the increase to over 500 new cases being reported out of prisons in the state and more coming out of an assisted living facility near Austin. I love when elected officials shrug off a spike in terrible illnesses because it’s happening to only segments of the population!
Obviously, the increase announced after his press conference rendered much of what he said moot, but that’s not even what’s most frustrating about what’s happening down in Texas. At that same press conference on Tuesday, Abbott stood behind an executive order he signed earlier this month barring cities and counties from requiring people to wear face masks; on Wednesday, after the extent of the spike was clear, Abbott said he was fine with counties requiring businesses to enforce mask rules on employees and customers.
That’s a small concession, considering the state’s ongoing war on voting rights amid the pandemic.
Whereas many states granted voters the right to no-excuse absentee ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic and local shelter-in-place orders, Texas’s GOP leadership has spent the last few months waging an all-out war on mail-in-voting. With primary elections looming, that battle may be headed to the Supreme Court, as Texas Democrats and voting rights activists have asked the nation’s top court to step in to settle an increasingly complicated skirmish.
This has been quite the saga, so you might want to take notes or sketch out a timeline as you read what follows.
A few months back, when it was obvious that the pandemic would make showing up at polling sites risky, Democrats and civil rights activists requested that the state loosen the very restrictive laws governing absentee ballot eligibility. Right now in Texas, only people who are 65 or older, have a disability or illness, or can prove they’ll be out of their voting jurisdiction on election day can request an absentee ballot.
Long story short, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that the risk of contracting coronavirus at crowded polling locations did not qualify as a disability. Paxton also threatened to arrest anyone who applied for a ballot using the fear of coronavirus as a justification or helped someone to do so. The threat came as a state district judge ruled that Texas must expand absentee ballot eligibility, a decision that was upheld a month later by a higher state court. A few days later, in a different case, a U.S. District Court also ruled that Texas must expand the absentee ballot eligibility, which for the moment made Paxton’s threat pretty moot.
A few weeks later, the Texas Supreme Court overturned the lower state court ruling. But curiously, the court denied the Attorney General’s request that it block local officials from sending absentee ballots out to people who applied for them based on fears of the virus.
Although the court sided with Paxton's interpretation of what constitutes a disability, it indicated that it is up to voters to assess their own health and determine if they meet the state's definition.
"We agree, of course, that a voter can take into consideration aspects of his health and his health history that are physical conditions in deciding whether, under the circumstances, to apply to vote by mail because of disability," the court ruled.
Things were pretty unclear at that point, but the uncertainty didn’t last long. Just a day later, a three-judge panel from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals put a hold on the District Court ruling while Paxton readied his appeal and extended it earlier this month. Now, with early voting in the upcoming primary less than two weeks away, Democrats and voting rights advocates are trying to skip any more hearings and go straight to the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, conservative Justice Samuel Alito oversees the 5th Circuit and he has not proven particularly amenable to voting rights in the past. The primary may well be a lost cause, but with Texas now looking like a swing state, a positive ruling from Alito could be a huge boon for the general election.
I used to annoy some folks when I’d tweet that “Republicans are terrorists,” but I don’t know what else to call people who actively work to put people in harm’s way and use demagoguery and threats to shut down those who are trying to help. Texas Republicans (as well as national Republicans, Florida Republicans, Arizona Republicans, Georgia Republicans, etc.) are forcing people to risk their lives to pay rent by cutting off unemployment benefits, making it impossible for them to exercise their right to vote in any safe way, and hamstringing local officials who want to take modest steps to protect them from a vicious and deadly disease for which there is no known cure.
What else is that, other than terrorism?
The SCOTUS decision on LGBTQ rights is already creating ripples:
First and foremost, the Supreme Court’s decision to affirm civil rights workplace protections for LGBTQ people is a great and seminal victory. On the other, it represents the judiciary effectively catching up to where most of the American public has been for years now. Sadly, many states still have a long way to catch up with the conservative Supreme Court.
Take Michigan, for example. A campaign called Fair and Equal Michigan was given a 69-day extension last week to collect enough signatures to qualify a ballot initiative that would expand the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to include LGBTQ protections. Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel said on Monday that the historic SCOTUS ruling would not technically impact state law, leaving a sizable gap in the legal rights of Michigan’s LGBTQ community.
Nessel isn’t being obstinant; with Democrats in office, the state has been processing complaints about discrimination filed by LGBTQ Michiganders, a change from when the state was under GOP control. The SCOTUS decision focuses on employment discrimination, but given both the sheer number of areas in which people can be discriminated and the possibility that Republicans could win office again, it would be preferable to get LGBTQ protections on the ballot nonetheless:
Since 2018, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission has processed complaints based on sexual orientation and gender identity after releasing an interpretive statement that said such discrimination is a form of sex discrimination. State Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, told the panel last year it was not bound by her Republican predecessor's opinion that Michigan law does not ban LGBT discrimination and that it would be up to legislators to change the statute to include such protections.
“We are gratified that, at least in the area of employment, the court has now ruled that the same interpretation applies to federal law,” said Stacie Clayton, chairwoman of the commission. She noted that the Trump administration on Friday overturned Obama-era protections for transgender people against sex discrimination in health care.
“Until courts at all levels recognize and affirm the rights of LGBTQ individuals to be free of discrimination in every aspect of their lives, we have work to do,” Clayton said.
The conundrum is not just limited to Michigan. In Florida, lawmakers have been trying for years to get non-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people enshrined in law, and the SCOTUS decision on Monday gave politicians, businesses, and editorial boards a rallying point to encourage the passage.
Democratic State Rep. Jennifer Webb, the first openly lesbian lawmaker elected in Florida, celebrated the decision but called on the state to go further, including ratifying the bipartisan Competitive Workforce Act, which she co-sponsored this year:
“This 6-3 Supreme Court ruling makes discrimination against LGBTQ workers illegal across the entire nation. I am grateful to those at the federal, state, and local levels who fought to make this victory possible. And, in my house we are celebrating,” Webb said.
“Yet, we know it can take a real effort in the wake of winning a SCOTUS battle to ensure that the impacted community is actually protected. So, while I am fortified by this victory, I am also redoubling my commitment to make explicit in Florida law what the Supreme Court has made clear: Discrimination against the LGBTQ community is illegal.”
Georgia’s Secretary of State announces some election fixes:
After being embarrassed by the debacle that was last week’s primary election (and then likely frustrated that turnout surged nonetheless), Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger proposed some modest tweaks to the system ahead of November’s general election.
Raffnsperger called for technicians to be placed in every polling place, and with over 2600 statewide, that’d mark a big increase over the mere 175 that were available last week. He also requested more polling places to be opened up, though there were numbers on that. Voters were forced to wait in lines that stretched up to six hours in precincts across Georgia last Tuesday, due in part to problems with the faulty new $110 million voting machines as well as the reduced number of polling places available to voters.
He also asked for the state legislature to pass a law that would give his office the ability to intervene in troubled county elections, which sounds like a reasonable request until you remember that it was Raffensperger’s office that left county election offices hanging out to dry this month, with little training on the new machines being foisted on them.
On the flip side, Raffensperger will not send absentee ballot applications to voters this time around, but instead will set up a website where voters can apply for them online. Georgia’s handling of absentee ballot requests was disastrous during the primary period, as tens of thousands of people either receiving their applications too late or not at all. That added to the confusion on election day, as voters who had applied for ballots but did not get them showed up at polling places, throwing off the untrained poll workers.
All told, Raffensperger’s proposals fall far short of what we were told was necessary by Sara Tindall Ghazal, the GA Democratic Party’s former Voter Protection Director who is now running for state legislature.
Ex-felon voting rights in Iowa:
We’ve been following the twists and turns of Florida’s ex-felon disenfranchisement law over the last few years, from the successful ballot initiative to overturn it to the passage of the Republicans’ Jim Crow law and the ongoing litigation that has followed. But Florida is not the only state dealing with racist and draconian laws governing the voting rights of people who have completed their prison sentences. In fact, it’s even worse in Iowa, where the formerly incarcerated cannot get their voting rights restored without express permission from the governor.
Republican Governor Kim Reynolds campaigned on overturning the ban and has for the last few years publicly wrestled with keeping her promise. With the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the country once again, she has been facing real pressure to actually pull the trigger on some kind of remedy — in 2016, a study found that nearly 1 in 10 African American adults were barred from voting in the state. In total, 60,000 Iowans are barred from voting.
On Monday afternoon, Reynolds gave a vague promise to sign an executive order restoring those Iowans’ right to vote, but there’s reason to be skeptical.
First, the GOP is clearly none too interested in seeing voting rights extended. Reynolds ran into a brick wall in the GOP-controlled legislature, which on Sunday gave up on considering even a weak constitutional amendment that would have required voter affirmation in 2022. Even if that amendment passed, it would have mirrored Florida’s Jim Crow law, necessitating would-be voters pay a load of fines and fees that are often impossible to even ascertain.
The governor now needs to stand up and do the right thing, GOP colleagues be damned. All it’ll take is her signing an executive order that would immediately restore the rights of those 60,000 Iowans. It’s not at all unprecedented — Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack did it for 115,000 Iowan voters.
On Friday, Reynolds met with Black Lives Matter and other activists, who told the Des Moines Register that she was open to signing the order, but wouldn’t commit to it. They met again on Monday, with Reynolds promising to show them a draft of her proposed order.
Instead, Reynolds brought little to the table beyond her vague promise; she dissembled and gave this mealy-mouthed statement: “We are sitting down with various groups, listening to what they think is important what is contained in that executive order. And then I've got my legal team working on it."
Remember, this is no novel legal maneuver; Gov. Vilsack did it over a decade ago, for double the number of people. Instead, it seems more likely that she’s just kicking the can as far down the road as she can.
As Daniel Nichanian over at The Appeal points out, the longer it takes to actually restore these rights, the less time people will have to go register to vote. This story in The Appeal describes how COVID-19 has made it far more difficult for activists in Kentucky, where Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear restored the rights of 140,000 ex-felons this winter, to register all the eligible new voters. Reynolds may ultimately do the right thing, but it’ll be an empty gesture if people don’t have enough time to take advantage of it.
Things are just nuts in Oklahoma right now:
Donald Trump is relaunching his Klan rallies on June 20th in Tulsa (after backing off the explicit Juneteenth hate speech plan). Ten days later, Oklahomans will go to the polls to vote in their party primaries. A ballot initiative to expand Medicaid will also be put to voters that day. As in Missouri, the Governor of Oklahoma placed the question on the primary ballot because these elections generally see a much lower-turnout, which the GOP believes will lower its chances of passing.
Complicating that calculus, however, is the fact that coronavirus cases continue to rise in the state — Oklahoma hit record numbers of new COVID-19 cases over the weekend. And Oklahomans have been teased for years with Republican promises of expanding healthcare, only to see its most frothy right-wing legislators sabotage each and every proposed plan; Gov. Kevin Stitt actually vetoed his own Medicaid expansion bill just this month because he would have had to increase payments to hospitals.
Now, as in Utah and a number of other red states in 2018, voters have a chance to bypass the State House and install the damn thing themselves.
A note about our crowdfunding campaign: Progressives Everywhere will always be a free newsletter. Together we've raised over $1 million for progressives candidates and causes and over $1.3 million for bail funds and grassroots community groups! We’ve grown so much that it costs $100 just to send this email, and there are other costs as well.
We’re now sending out premium mid-week editions of the newsletter, filled with important news, undercovered stories, electoral analysis, and everything else you need to stay ahead of the curve in this intense time. It costs just $5 a month.
To help support the cause, you can also make donations at GoFundMe (you’ll be thanked in future public editions of the newsletter).