Texas Latinos wait for the the Department of Justice to step up for voting rights
That, sadly, may take a while.
Welcome to a Monday edition of Progress Report.
I am back in New York after a grinding work retreat across the Midwest, semi-caught up on sleep and already focused in on new projects and stories. Tonight we are going to focus on important news about democracy, voting rights, ballot initiatives, and gerrymandering, leading off with a bit of original reporting.
Tomorrow, I’ll have a full feature on some of the most important races happening in Arizona, the swing state that is teetering on the edge between fascism and freedom.
But briefly: Since I moved to Substack in 2019, a whole lot has changed. The platform has become saturated by news outlets funded by big money, run by long-time and brand-name political pundits, and featuring far-right grifters with awful audiences.
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This newsletter, which I run in the late night hours, is holding at #116. Not bad, but there a lot of monsters to overcome. Adding more subscribers, free and paid, will push us higher in Substack’s rankings, which equals more promotion. It’s all in service of counteracting a deluge of hateful disinformation and giving people reliable facts about the biggest stories as well as stories they won’t see anywhere else.
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1️⃣ Texas: LULAC chair Domingo Garcia tells me that leaders of the Latino advocacy group have yet to hear back from the Department of Justice more than a week after meeting in DC with agency officials about a potential lawsuit against Texas AG Ken Paxton.
During the meeting, LULAC leaders discussed the possibility of the DOJ filing a civil rights lawsuit against the Texas attorney general, who spent the summer making wild and baseless allegations against Hispanic voting groups.
Whether the DOJ is even interested in pursuing a lawsuit, Garcia told me this weekend, was “hard to tell.” Not exactly a promising sign given Paxton’s rampant abuses of the legal system.
“We're looking to get an injunction against the Attorney General from conducting other raids, or trying to suppress the Latino vote and have a chilling effect on our voters and volunteers,” Garcia told me in late August.
LULAC was joined in its call for an injunction against Paxton by Democratic members of the Texas legislature and national Democratic lawmakers, who also want investigations into the state’s purge of over one million registered voters.
Jolt, another Latino-serving civic nonprofit based in Texas, filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking a restraining order against Paxton’s attempts to curtail its voter registration efforts. On August 31st, Paxton sent Jolt a request for several sets of documents, including receipts for every voter that it registered this year.
Paxton had no legal order or standing to do so, but refusing to comply could nonetheless lead to a suspension of the organization’s operations in the state. Whether the attorney general best known for being indicted for most of his time in office (and then escaping trial) will face any actual repercussions, however, remains to be seen.
Right now, Paxton is still on the warpath, having sued both Bexar and Harris counties, the two most densely populated and blue in Texas, for sending residents voter registration forms.
Will US Attorney General Merrick Garland do anything about it? Well, the late great Norm Macdonald liked to say that he viewed the perfect joke as one in which the set-up was exactly the same as the punchline.
2️⃣ Humiliating: Just when you didn’t think Sen. Dick Durbin could get any more pitiful, the New York Times reveals that the 18 months he spent haplessly begging John Roberts to do something about Supreme Court corruption actually gave the chief justice cover to protect Trump and insurrectionists.
In fact, Roberts’s only reaction when he found out that Sam Alito’s wife was hanging Jan. 6 flags from their flagpole consisted of taking an opinion from his bitter colleague and giving himself the honor of turning Trump into a king. A failure of truly historic proportions.
3️⃣ Nebraska: The state Supreme Court green-lit a ballot initiative that would defund a school privatization scheme passed on the last day of this year’s legislative session. This is great news for children, teachers, rural communities, secularism, and me, as I’ve been working for several months on a story about this initiative for More Perfect Union.
More on this to come, but now that the repeal is officially on the ballot, expect millions of dollars to begin pouring into the campaign — most of which will be deployed in a desperate attempt to prevent Nebraskans from stopping the voucher program before it can begin to consume the state budget.
Cash will flow in from the DeVos family, which poured considerable money into Nebraska’s elections in order to pass the voucher program in the first place. Pro-voucher donations could also come from the family of Sen. Pete Ricketts, whose father, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, is an investor in his own chain of private and charter schools.
Critically, more than half of Nebraska’s counties do not have a private or charter school, which means that the program simply defunds education in those places.
4️⃣ Ohio: The hacks on the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court took yet another hatchet to democracy and its own legitimacy on Monday evening by affirming the egregiously misleading ballot summary on a proposed constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering.
It’s truly outrageous and cynical stuff. The language, proposed by Secretary of State (and failed Senate candidate) Frank LaRose, says that the amendment would require an independent redistricting commission to gerrymander districts. The logic here is so tortured that the Hague ought to be called in:
The court said “the fact that the proposed amendment announces that it would ‘ban partisan gerrymandering,’ … is of little assistance in ascertaining whether the ballot language’s use of the word ‘gerrymander’ is improper.”
The court explored various definitions of “gerrymandering” in coming to its decision, finding that the requirement the amendment uses to dictate the drawing of Statehouse and congressional maps “falls within the meaning of ‘gerrymander.'”
“Because the board’s use of the term ‘gerrymander’ is consistent with dictionary definitions and how the United States Supreme Court has used the term, it does not mislead, deceive or defraud voters,” the decision stated.
Ohioans have twice voted overwhelmingly in favor of banning partisan gerrymandering over the past two decades, only to see the legislature ignore them — and then the state high court — on multiple occasions.
This new iteration of the state Supreme Court finally blessed the GOP legislature’s workaround in early 2023 and has now ended any illusion whatsoever that it’s anything but a bunch of toadies. Democrats have an outside of flipping the court back in November.
5️⃣ Tennessee: It is so hard for a former felon to regain their right to vote in Tennessee that most don’t even bother trying to do so. Put it this way: the state is so backward that the election officials recently decided that to have their voting rights restored, people must first have their right to own a gun restored, and that takes years and years to do.
No doubt, that’s exactly how the GOP leaders of the state like it — there wouldn’t be nearly half a million disenfranchised people, including 200,000 Black residents, otherwise — but after being thoroughly humiliated by the NYT last week, it seems as if lawmakers there are at least giving lip service to reforms.
Previously, it was Gov. Bill Lee who begrudgingly said that he would be willing to listen to ideas for reforms to a system that prevents 10% of adults from voting. Today, it was Republican state Rep. Bud Hulsey, the chair of the House Criminal Justice Committee, who said that he’s begun to hold conversations about ways to simplify the process.
Without more details, it’s a bit like saying he’s held discussions about making it a bit easier to split the atom, so there’s only so much reason for hope, but it seems as if these people know when to at least pretend to feel shame, and that’s not nothing.
6️⃣ Oklahoma: Gov. Ken Stitt used an unconventional power granted to him by the state constitution to delay a popular initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15-an-hour by two years, setting it up for a more difficult path to becoming law.
In late August, the state Supreme Court certified over 150,000 petition signatures collected by activists in support of the initiative, which just about everyone assumed would get it on the ballot this November. But Stitt, citing the recommendations of a state election board that he controls, instead sent it to the June 2026 primary ballot.
A representative for the governor told the press that it would simply be more cost-effective for the state to run the election in June, but it’s a bit hard to trust their math — now, more than 300,000 people will have to wait another two years for a raise that could take them out of poverty.
Scheduling popular progressive initiatives is a favorite trick of Republicans, who hope to doom initiatives on traditionally lower turnout days. They tried it with Medicaid expansion in Missouri in 2022 and raising the bar for constitutional amendments in Ohio in 2023, but failed to sabotage the public will in both instances.
7️⃣ Polls: OK, need to end on a positive note? Things are looking up for Democrats in a number of swing states, both at the top of the ballot and in races that will decide control of Congress.
A poll of Pennsylvania, conducted entirely after last week’s debate, finds Vice President Kamala Harris up on Donald Trump by three points, 49% to 46%, with leads in Northampton County and Erie County, blue collar bellwether counties in the northern part of the state. Harris’s lead among women reaches upwards of 20 points, which mitigate Trump’s ten-point advantage among men.
Democratic candidates are also either winning or within the margin of error in a number of prominent midwestern Congressional districts.
Top-tier candidates like non-profit leader and waitress Rebecca Cooke (WI-3) and military vet Lanon Baccam (IA-3) have put well-regarded Republicans on the defensive. A gold standard poll from the Des Moines Register out earlier today found Harris within just four points of Trump in Iowa, suggesting that the now-reliably red state may be heading back toward purple-ish territory, however temporarily.
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Great column enjoy reading