This year is off to a blistering start for workers and sociopaths

Another year of two Americas

Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.

It’s been quite a busy weekend of writing, researching, and editing here in New York, with a big Liverpool win thrown in for good measure. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s jump right in.

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Michigan: Democratic state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet announced on Thursday that she is running for Congress in the state’s 8th district, which is currently represented by the retiring Rep. Dan Kildee. In her first term in the state’s upper chamber, McDonald Rivet previous served on the Bay City commission, worked as an education lobbyist, and held various roles as a staffer and adviser in the state Capitol.

A mother of six, McDonald Rivet has a reputation as a center-left moderate, but also proved quite effective and willing to take on special interests during her first year as a state legislator. She sponsored an expansion of the state’s child tax credit and new gun laws, and is also the lead sponsor of a bill that would create a state drug pricing affordability board. I interviewed McDonald Rivet about that bill, how it would work, and its prospects for passage this fall:

As she notes, the state House is a bit of a mess, and Democrats now won’t have a majority until the spring again, but the hope is that they can push it through using the concept’s sheer popularity against Republicans.

MI-8 was drawn to be a very competitive district, especially now that it won’t have an incumbent. Pamela Pugh, the president of the Michigan Board of Education and a longtime environmental justice activist, is also running for the Democratic nomination.

At this point, the policies that impact us most come from the state level, and unfortunately, that stuff generally gets buried or ignored by most media outlets. To actually keep you updated, I’m introducing a weekly review of the most important and dramatic state policy fights and lawsuits.

It’ll usually come on Fridays, but given all the news that broke late last week, this first one is coming out on Sunday evening. With legislative and court sessions having just kicked off across the country, there’s a whole lot to review, including news on abortion, labor, education, big business, and the environment. Some of it is quite encouraging, while other bits are absolute madness.

Maybe this is redundant, but when you look through enough of these proposals and the impact that they’d have, it really does feel as if we live in two separate countries.