"There’s not a voice like mine in Congress"
"There’s not a voice like mine in Congress"
A critical voice in Florida sets sights on DC
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
We’re now in the nexus of back-to-back American holidays, the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day, so I’m going to keep tonight’s newsletter nice and tidy. No meandering opening here — let’s jump right to our main story, featuring a trailblazing progressive lawmaker bidding to make history in Congress.
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Whenever she’s faced with a vote on an important piece of legislation, Florida State Rep. Michele Rayner thinks back to a conversation she had back in 2018.
A civil rights attorney, Rayner was representing the family of Markeis McGlockton, a 28-year old Black man who was shot to death in front of his family over a parking space in Clearwater by a white man. McGlockton was murdered in cold blood, but his assailant had been allowed to leave the scene of the crime by police.
“I will never forget when Mr. McGlockton, Markeis’s dad, who I still talk to to this day, he looks at me and he says, ‘You know, Miss Rayner, I knew about Trayvon Martin, I’d heard about Stand Your Ground. I just never thought it would visit my house,’” Rayner reflects. “And when you’re voting, you’re not voting yes or no arbitrarily. Your vote has a real consequence on people’s lives.”
Rayner’s co-counsel on the case reminded her of the conversation when a St. Petersburg-area seat in the Florida legislature opened up the next year, encouraging her to pursue the opportunity to represent District 70.
At first, it didn’t seem like a viable option to Rayner. “I always thought that someone like me — I'm a black, queer woman, like, ain't always gonna vote for me,” she recalls.
As a public defender and then civil rights attorney, Rayner has had to have a crusader’s sense of justice and the mettle to survive reckoning every day with a society that all too often fails to provide it. Running for office would allow her to fight on behalf of more people, and so after conversations with friends, family, and State Sen. Shevrin Jones, the first Black LGBTQ legislator in Florida history, Rayner decided to go for it. She’d beaten the odds before — Markeis McGlockton’s killer was sentenced to 20 years in prison a year after the shooting.
Now in her second year as a Democratic state representative, Rayner has become a leading voice of resistance to one of the most aggressive and cruel Republican regimes in the country. And now, with a deeper understanding of how power works and how she can best help her community, Rayner is running for Congress in Florida’s 13th district.
Under the auspices of the uniquely cruel and ambitious Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has become a war zone, as the GOP trifecta in state government has launched a multi-front attack on anyone that is not a wealthy, cis straight white man.
In 2021, the legislature passed a massive voter suppression law, gifted massive tax giveaways to corporations, authorized the mowing down of Black protestors, stopped trans kids from participating in school sports, and put a ban on schools teaching “critical race theory” (aka an honest accounting of history). This year is shaping up to be an even more vicious session, with the legislature in the process of enacting a draconian abortion ban and doubling down on its attack on teachers.
Not only do Republicans want to all but silence any conversation about race in the classroom, they’re also on the verge of passing what’s become known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit most discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms. It would allow parents to sue teachers over any conversation in classrooms, which would essentially force many educators back into the closet and render children all alone during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
As a Black lesbian, Rayner herself is essentially in the crosshairs. Not one to back down from a righteous fight, Rayner has led rallies and protests against the various proposals, made TV appearances to thrash DeSantis and his bigoted cronies, and used the amendment process to expose their most craven intentions.
“Because he's running for president, this has been deliberate. It’s clear that if you do not think like him, look like him, love like him, or are affiliated with the same party, that he really does not care how you feel,” Rayner says. “All of this is this the Republican playbook, and it really is a playbook to really disenfranchise the most marginalized of in our community.”
With so many problems plaguing Florida, why is Rayner running for Congress right now? Why head up to DC when Tallahassee is such a swamp of corruption and Florida has become one of the worst states for income inequality in the country?
For Rayner and the community members that convinced her to run for Congress, it’s clear that so many of the problems plaguing the St. Petersburg area and the state at large stem from federal inaction.
In November, when she ran a food drive in partnership with a local Publix, it was inundated with folks that she did not expect to see showing up at a food drive, a phenomenon that a friend who works at a food pantry told her was a regular occurrence. At the same time, Democrats in DC were bickering over how little help they should offer working Americans in a bill that has now been stalled inevitably.
“What's so frustrating is that… we keep electing folks who do not take into consideration the people living in their communities,” Rayner says. “We have the opportunity to pass these types of landmark legislation that will actually give people real relief immediately, and what are we doing? It’s not the lack of resources, it’s a lack of political will.”
Rayner wants to push Congress to have the political will to codify Roe v. Wade, insist that states use relief funds to help families and not fuel tax giveaways, and protect students everywhere. And given her career representing low-income residents, history as a community organizer, and tireless grassroots work, Rayner has a deep understanding of how government can best assist and empower her constituents.
While obviously engaged with the high-profile issues that make cable news headlines, Rayner is almost more comfortable ticking off the local problems that only someone steeped in the community would identify. The gypsum stacks at Pitney Point that fuel deadly red tide swells, or the fossil fuel plant next to the elementary school, or the housing price surge that has led to a spike in eviction notices in St. Petersburg — these are what keeps Rayner up at night.
As we’ve been documenting for the past two years, Florida’s decline has run parallel with the collapse of the state Democratic Party. Rayner, like Reps. Anna Eskamani and Carlos Smith, has been fighting hard to remake the party, and this election offers an opportunity to make significant progress in that effort. In a district that is very likely to stay blue, Rayner is running against several other Democrats that hew closer to the party establishment. Two candidates have raised more money, in large part thanks to their embrace of corporate donations, but Rayner is confident that she’ll have more than enough to supplement what has been a very bottoms-up movement campaign.
That approach, Rayner says, is the difference between her local, people-powered approach to politics and what the state party, and indeed much of the national leadership, has pursued over the past decade.
“I think Virginia really was the tipping point, we as Democrats keep nominating the same kind of people and thinking we're going to do the same thing and get different results, but people don't turn out because they're not excited, because we're not giving people something to vote for,” Rayner says.
“There’s not a voice like mine in Congress,” she adds. “I would be the first out black lesbian woman to ever be elected to Congress and standing up the intersections of those identities. You legislate on your lived experience. I’m thinking about how policy is going to affect LGBTQ folks, women, how it's going to affect black folks and brown folks and minorities and other marginalized groups. I come from a working family. So I'm going to think about those things. It is the right time for someone like myself to step into this.”
Here are some quick updates on important stories playing out across the country. Want more regular, detailed updates on these stories and more throughout the week? Want to help us report out more original stories? Become a premium subscriber!
And now on to the news…
Voting Rights and Redistricting
Missouri: The State Supreme Court ruled late last week that the Republican Secretary of State had created illegal hurdles for citizens who sought to change state laws via ballot initiative.
In 2019, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft ran down the clock on the tight 90-day window that activists had to collect the requisite signatures to qualify an initiative that would overturn an extreme abortion ban passed earlier that year. The Missouri Supreme Court has been particularly active over the past years in tossing out GOP attempts to limit citizens’ democratic freedoms and disregard their votes.
In 2020, the court tossed out the Republican’ strict voter ID requirement, which the party is now seeking to revive.
Ohio: Third time is… probably not going to be a charm. Republicans still show no sign of backing down and producing the balanced legislative and Congressional maps ordered by the State Supreme Court. They’ve been given a deadline of this coming Thursday to get it done, not that they’ve seemed that eager to comply with court orders or laws to this point.
It goes without saying that the high court elections in Ohio will be hard-fought and very expensive this year, as the three races will decide the balance of power in a state that may finally experience a semblance of democracy this year. Stay tuned for more on those races in the next few months.
New Mexico: Meanwhile, in a Democratic state, an expansion of voting rights is on the march, though there have been a few bumps in the road of late.
Last week, the State Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a new voting rights bill that is, unfortunately, far less ambitious than what was initially proposed — important provisions like automatic voter registration have been stripped out, while others have been watered down. Still, there’s a lot to admire in the bill:
The bill would restore felons’ right to vote upon their release, allow voters to receive an absentee ballot for every election without having to request one each time, automatically register qualified people to vote after they complete a transaction at the Motor Vehicle Division or another qualified state agency and allow New Mexicans without a state-issued ID to register to vote online with a Social Security number. The bill also would allow 17-year-olds to vote in local elections, but only if they turn 18 by the next general election, among other provisions.
Unfortunately — and this may sound familiar — Republicans are using a procedural maneuver to block the bill at the moment, and with a week left in the legislative session, things may get messy.
Labor and Working Families
Starbucks: I’ve spent a sizable chunk of the past six months at my day job as a reporter/producer at More Perfect Union covering the ongoing Starbucks unionization campaign. The movement has spread like wildfire since workers in two stores in Buffalo won their NLRB elections in December, which has only led to the company engaging in more heavy-handed union-busting.
On Tuesday, I broke the news that Starbucks had fired seven unionizing workers in Memphis, and stayed on the story for days after that. It’s been incredible to watch a network of young barista-organizers taking the reins and standing up to a gigantic multinational corporation with all the resources in the world. It’s very much been an organic movement, driven by text messages and ad hoc Zoom calls, but much of the success of the campaign rests on the shoulders of a 24-year-old barista named Jay Brisnack, who is as humble and soft-spoken as she is brave.
The South: Jaz is from Mississippi, where she got her start organizing by working on a UAW campaign that was crushed by a brutal union-busting offensive commissioned by Mitsubishi. As this piece notes, the racist, pro-business owner tradition of the south continues to live on, making it even harder for unions to run successful campaigns in the region even if workers continue to indicate interest.
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