The coming crackdown on conservative cruelty

A huge health win for working families; the Ohio GOP lights up outrage

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

There is a whole lot of news to discuss tonight, but before we begin, I just want to draw your attention to one of the juiciest labor fights I’ve seen in a long while.

Pilots at NetJets, the private charter plane company, are beginning to play hardball with owner Berkshire Hathaway and its chair, Warren Buffett. This week, they’ve taken out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to demand NetJets meet their very modest demands.

One of the world’s most valuable companies, led by one of the world’s richest men, pays on average only 60% of what commercial airlines pay. Hundreds of pilots have left NetJets in the past year. I’m not sure why the world’s elite would want to be flown around in a metal box by exhausted and demoralized pilots, but they’ll soon be finding out that their safety is often at the mercy of Buffett’s behemoth. If they miss the story in the WSJ, perhaps they’ll be confronted by it at Art Basel in Miami later this month.

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This Will Save Lives

🏥 ⏏️ The federal government announced a new rule on Monday aimed at stopping some states’ rampant abuse of the Medicaid unwinding.

(Not for nothing, but this was the central demand of this past Sunday’s edition of the newsletter.)

CMS now has the authority to impose fines and reduce funding to states that kick too many eligible beneficiaries off of Medicaid, rush redeterminations, and do not comply with federal reporting standards.

This is an absolutely gigantic win for millions of low-income Americans, advocates, and the US health care system.

Some context: When the national pandemic emergency ended in April, states were allowed to begin checking whether beneficiaries were still eligible for Medicaid. As soon as they got the green light, conservative states began turning what was supposed to be a deliberate process into a wild torching of the social safety net.

Of the more than 11 million people removed from Medicaid thus far, more than 70% of them have been kicked off their health care not because they were ineligible, but because they didn’t complete state paperwork — paperwork that many of them never received.

The fines from CMS can reach up to $100,000 a day, while states could lose up to .25% of matching federal funds for their Medicaid program each quarter. CMS can also pause states’ unwinding process and demand a corrective action plan that will get them in compliance with the law and ease the hurdles for re-enrollment.

I’ve been covering this story obsessively since even before the unwinding began in April (see above), even when few were paying attention. I genuinely can’t think of more than a handful of policy changes that have the potential to help as many people as this rule — should it be properly implemented and courageously pursued.

Democracy Works… Sometimes

🌿 😡 Ohio Republicans have finally proposed changes to the marijuana legalization law that voters passed via ballot initiative in November. The state Senate and House have very different approaches to the law, with the far more drastic changes coming in the Senate’s proposal.

The Senate’s proposed changes, released Monday, include:

• Banning home growth of marijuana plants

• Increasing supplemental sales tax on weed from 10% to 15%, while also adding on a 15% tax on growers

• Diverting the tax money earned from marijuana sales from social justice-minded funds to the Ohio general fund and law enforcement.

• Reducing the THC levels allowed in legal marijuana

• Creating a public smoking ban and permit landlords to ban weed consumption in their buildings

• Permitting employers to fire workers for marijuana usage outside of work hours

The House bill, which was introduced with bipartisan support, is far more modest. It would allow for the same level of home grow but include measures to ensure cultivators are not selling what they grow in private residences; give municipalities a bit more control of the tax money generated by authorized sales; and put guardrails on advertising.

Gov. Mike DeWine hasn’t commented on the bills but has indicated support for a lighter touch akin to the House’s approach. With the voter-approved rules going into effect on Thursday, Republicans want to figure out a compromise as quickly as possible. On the other hand, they could just light up, kick back, and enjoy life for once.

😂 ⚖️ A coalition of labor unions in Wisconsin has filed a legal challenge against former Gov. Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10, sending the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board into a spiral.

Act 10 all but disabled most public sector unions in a state that was so historically pro-labor that even some Republican legislators objected to the bill. Proposed in 2011, at the start of Walker’s first term, it drew outrage from across the state and nation, with opponents staging Capitol building sit-ins and holding mass protests.

Walker and his Republican allies illegally changed legislative rules to jam the law through, and after it was struck down by one state court for being blatantly unconstitutional — among other things, it targets some unions and exempted police and firefighters — the very conservative state Supreme Court reinstated it. This spring’s election of Janet Protasiewicz gave liberals a majority on the court, setting the table for a long-awaited reversal.

The self-righteous bloviators that make up the Wall Street Journal editorial board blew a gasket over both this lawsuit and the in-progress challenge to the outrageously gerrymandered maps that have given Republicans a legislative supermajority and a disproportionate number of Congressional districts for much of the past decade. The paper actually printed these words:

These lawsuits underscore that the left is counting on the result of a single Supreme Court election to overturn huge swathes of public policy passed by the political branches. This would mean that a dozen years of elections for Governor and the Legislature don’t matter. If a mere four Justices do this, it will be one of the largest usurpations of democracy in Wisconsin, and maybe American, history.

These are claims so willfully idiotic that they debase the talented reporters who work for the Journal’s news side. Both Act 10 and the GOP gerrymanders widely regarded as unconstitutional and have only remained in effect thanks to a far-right majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Now, a liberal justice who explicitly ran on these issues and won in an absolute landslide is poised to overturn the rulings of the conservative majority she toppled. That’s not an usurpation of democracy — it’s exactly how democracy is supposed to work.

New York Mess

👩‍⚖️ 👏 New York’s top court has recently issued a series of progressive decisions in criminal justice cases that once seemed far-fetched to even the most optimistic reform advocates.

Associate Judge Caitlin Halligan was something of an unknown when she was confirmed to the court earlier this year. She’d clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and was nominated for a federal judgeship by Barack Obama; instead of serving, went on to corporate law, where she defended Chevron in lawsuits that nobody reading this newsletter probably would have wanted the oil company to win.

Halligan has been excellent on criminal justice issues in particular; among other rulings, she’s voted against police who conducted busted into a defendant’s home without a warrant, and in favor of a retrial for a defendant after prosecutors improperly biased the jury.

I bring this up because Halligan wasn’t actually supposed to be on the court in the first place — she was only been nominated after Gov. Kathy Hochul was forced to try again by activists and lawmakers who angrily rejected her conservative initial picks. It was a story that we covered closely here at Progress Report last year, and it shows just how important it is to hold elected officials accountable, especially those on your ostensible side of the aisle.

🗽😤 Westchester County Executive George Latimer has officially launched a primary challenge against Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

AIPAC recruited Latimer and has already signaled that it will spend big to support the behind the 70-year-old local lawmaker, who is generally known as a conservative crank and ally of the corrupt New York Democratic Party leaders.

In 2021, when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo was being hit with one allegation of sexual harassment after another, Latimer compared calls for Cuomo’s resignation to the mob lynching of Emmett Till.

That’s the sort of statement that should be career-ending, but Latimer is firmly in support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal war on Palestinian civilians, so he’ll get millions from AIPAC and the support of more than a few lawmakers across New York. The state party will officially stay neutral despite virtually always backing incumbents, including Democratic turncoats in the state Senate who caucused with Republicans.

The party is also likely to pick former Rep. Tom Suozzi, who tried to primary Kathy Hochul from the right in 2022, as the Democratic candidate in the special election to replace former Rep. George Santos, whose is now making a fortune on Cameo. Suozzi held that seat before resigning to make his noxious, crime-obsessed primary bid.

Education Quick Hits

😵‍💫 🫣 Nebraska Republicans want to improve school safety by… allowing more people to carry guns in schools.

The state already allows armed security guards on school grounds, so for the most of the proposals have focused on allowing off-duty police or volunteers to tote firearms around hundreds of children in small, enclosed spaces.

🐊 ⬇️ Students in Florida last year ranked 46th in SAT performance, dropping 17 points from the year prior to produce an average score of 966. Maybe banning books was a bad idea?

Things are likely only going to get worse, too. Next year, the state’s voucher program will start paying families to send their kids to unvetted, unqualified schools that teach alternate versions of reality.

📚 🥇 The newly appointed president of the de-radicalized Central Bucks school board in Pennsylvania was sworn in on a pile of banned books.

Flipping the Central Bucks school board and wresting it from the Moms for Liberty maniacs was one of the biggest achievements of the overwhelming success in last month’s school board elections. We went in depth on the hard-won flip of another right-wing school board in Pennsylvania, this one in the Central York district, a few weeks back.

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