The state defying Republicans' attack on democracy
The state defying Republicans' attack on democracy
An opportunity to enshrine voting rights and a very moving video
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
What do the four million children across the country that have slid back into poverty this year, the unprecedented number of voters being disenfranchised in Texas, and the women being denied their rights by a radical right-wing Supreme Court have in common? Their tragic fates were all entirely avoidable, had a handful of conservative Democrats in DC not decided to prioritize their own bank accounts (Kyrsten Sinema is shilling for crypto, smh) over passing what would have been landmark legislation.
Naturally, the Beltway political media has taken in this series of events and concluded that progressives are somehow to blame for President Biden’s precipitous drop in public opinion polls and the thwacking that Democrats are almost certain to receive in November’s elections.
None of this is surprising, but it is instructive. So long as the White House is bent on doing everything it can to embrace Republicans and the feudalist court, the best opportunities to pass progressive legislation and safeguard democracy will come at the state and local level. And given the bent of the DC media, the most viable way of rewriting national narratives is through supporting and growing independent media outlets.
That’s exactly what we’re doing here at Progressives Everywhere, including in tonight’s edition of the newsletter, which focuses on a big opportunity in one of the nation’s biggest swing states.
But first, thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: William and Donna!
Every week seems to produce a new bitter harvest of terrible voter suppression laws and gerrymanders, almost all of them the work of a Republican Party bent on installing minority rule in dozens of states across the country. It’s a dismal situation, but not an entirely bleak one, thanks to activists and lawmakers in a handful of states, including Michigan, where voters this fall will have a chance to enshrine broad voting rights into the state constitution.
The push in Michigan is being spearheaded by Promote the Vote, a coalition of nonprofits that works to harness the power of grassroots activism and the enduring appeal of both representative government and convenience to buck the troubling trend of democratic decline.
In January, Promote the Vote introduced a new amendment to the state constitution that would protect many of the rights and processes that are under direct attack by conspiracy-pushing Republicans elsewhere. The organization is now in the process of collecting signatures to get the amendment on the ballot in November after spending all of last year observing the proliferation of right-wing conspiracy theories and speaking with local voters.
“With The Big Lie and attacks on the system, you could have worried or wondered whether or not the voters in Michigan would think we need to make our system less accessible,” notes Sharon Dolente, the senior adviser at Promote the Vote. “But that is not what we found. Voters still absolutely expect that the system will be accessible, while they expect it will be secure as well.”
Promote the Vote’s amendment is a checklist of pro-democracy measures proven to expand access to the ballot box. It includes:
Nine days of early voting
Paid postage for ballot envelopes, access to ballot tracking, and state funding for drop boxes
Permanent absentee voting list, so voters don’t have to reapply for a ballot every election
Freezing the state’s limited voter ID requirements from being made more arduous
Banning political parties from involvement with election “audits”
Protects election certification processes, taking the state legislature out of the equation and ensuring that county canvassers approve vote count results
Allowing military voters more time to return their ballots
If the amendment is approved, it would give Michigan one of the most open, free, and fair elections systems in the country, a prospect that would have been almost unfathomable just a few years ago.
As recently as 2018, the state was controlled by a Republican trifecta thanks in part to egregiously gerrymandered legislative maps. The national Democratic wave that fall flipped the Michigan governor’s mansion and every other statewide office, but was hardly needed to pass a slate of progressive ballot measures. A plethora of pro-democracy policies, such as automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and an independent redistricting commission, were approved with 67% of the vote.
The new redistricting commission just completed its first set of maps, which represent a vast improvement over the preceding gerrymanders but, as Dolente acknowledges, don’t meet every criterion laid out by the 2018 amendment. The Congressional map has seven districts where a majority voted for Joe Biden and six that supported Trump in 2020, and unlike the maps drawn in many other states, a fair number of the districts are likely to be battlegrounds.
The state legislative maps offer Republicans a small but not insurmountable advantage, though 2022 is unlikely to be the year they lose control of the statehouse.
Several civil rights organizations, including some partners of Promote the Vote, filed suit over the maps’ potential dilution of Black voting power.
“I think that the process of the independent citizens redistricting commission is light years improvement over maps being drawn behind closed doors,” Dolente says, “but I think there are legitimate arguments that there's still some additional improvement needed in the maps that they drew.”
The state Supreme Court dismissed lawsuits over the maps earlier this month, likely cementing the districts in place for the decade. Still, the maps represent the end of GOP gerrymandering, which should also ultimately lead to the elimination of a quirk in Michigan law that allows the party in control of the legislature to sign ballot initiatives directly into law.
We reported on Republican operatives’ scheme to use that end-around to install a series of voter suppression measures back in November, when it seemed as if interrupting the petition signature-gathering process would be the best and only chance to block its enactment. The Promote the Vote amendment, however, would override anything installed by the legislature, and while it wasn’t written with that directly in mind, it makes it that much more crucial that it gets pushed over the finish line.
“I'm very confident — the amount of energy and intensity and interest is really high,” Delonte says. “I think voters in Michigan want to move the state forward and they want to stop looking backward to an election that's been over for more than a year.”
Flickers of Hope
Iowa: Republican lawmakers and wussy parents are on a rampage through public school boards right now, and in Iowa, some want to go so far as to require schools to live-stream their K-12 classes to the public every day. It’s a truly disturbing idea — only total weirdos are going to be willing to watch it every day — but given the environment, it requires true political bravery for a Republican to say as much.
Respect, then, to State Sen. Gary Mohr for his willingness to be very blunt:
“I'm all for parents being involved in the schools," Mohr said. "I'm not in favor of the parents telling the schools everything they need to do."
Mohr, too, said he believes banning books in schools is an overreach, and called out "clownish" lawmakers who introduce "crazy" bills aimed "at playing to some group, and I don't know who they're playing to."
"But that bill, like many of these bills that have been introduced, aren't going to go anywhere," Mohr said. "My point to you is we all want to keep teachers. ... But don't jump out a six-story window when you hear that some clown introduced a bill that's going to throw teachers in prisons for this or that, because I don't think that's going to go anywhere."
Will this burst of honesty wind up costing Mohr his political career? We shall see!
Arizona: More sane Republicans?!
State Sen. Tyler Pace, a Republican from Mesa, bucked his GOP colleagues and killed a vicious bill that would have blocked gender-affirming health care for teenagers. Legislative hearings are now more often than not just partisan theater before a pre-determined vote is held, but Pace’s decision to block the bill was directly influenced by the teenagers and parents who courageously testified before the committee.
"The testimonies we heard today about the many people who are using these avenues of medical treatments to save lives, to improve lives," he said. "I don't want my vote to stop those great things."
This story has made the rounds to some degree over the past week, but I haven’t seen anyone actually show any of the testimony, so I’ve made a lot of it available below:
There were also testimonies in favor of the bill, but they were honestly all somewhat unsettling and sharing them feels almost exploitative, so I’m holding off on those.
Policy Updates
Missouri: Republicans are doing absolutely everything they can to sabotage Medicaid expansion and stop 250,000 low-income residents from accessing health care. It should have about 190,000 new enrollees by now, but has just about a third of that number. Unconscionable.
Michigan: Hey, another cool ballot initiative in Michigan! This one, which just had its petition language approved, would cap payday loan interest rates at 36%, which is both still depressingly high and massively better than the 340% rate that some shady lenders charge right now.
Voting Rights and Redistricting
Arizona: The GOP continues to work to dismantle the state’s uber-popular mail voting system, making the notable exception for seniors 65+ who just so happen to lean more than a little bit Republican:
Of the 3.2 million people statewide on the early voting list, Democrats hold a slim 9,000 voter advantage. If mail-in voting were to be limited to the 970,000 voters on the early voting list who are older than 65, Republicans would find themselves with an advantage of more than 75,0000 voters.
Funny how those deep right-wing concerns about voter fraud, ballot harvesting, and electoral interference somehow don’t extend to seniors’ mail-in ballots.
Illinois: Advocates are working to get the Democratic trifecta that runs the state to pass a bill that would restore the right to vote to people serving time in prison.
This would be a significant victory for racial justice, as Illinois’ carceral system is particularly cruel to Black people, who represent a disproportionate number of inmates as compared to their overall slice of the population.
Work Sucks
Starbucks: I’ve been covering the union drive that has been spreading across Starbucks locations like wildfire over the past month over at More Perfect Union, where I work as a reporter/producer.
On Friday, I broke the news that the company was trying to force out (or fire) many of the nascent union’s most prominent and foundational organizers. Starbucks swore that they weren’t threatening people’s jobs, but lo and behold, Starbucks made its first firing in Buffalo on Sunday.
The company hopes that this has a real chilling effect on the union’s supporters in the 100 stores that have organized and the many more that want to join, but I bet it’s more likely to galvanize the workers, even more than the firings of the Memphis Seven.
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