Voting and workers’ rights are quietly in the crosshairs
Judges keep churning out decisions
Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.
As you no doubt know by now, former President Jimmy Carter died today at the age of 100. Faced with soaring inflation and a stagnant economy, Carter used his presidency to the transition away from the New Deal order and begin the rise of neoliberalism, then spent his nearly five decades out of the White House working to ease the impact of those decisions on Americans and vulnerable people abroad as well. Unlike other former presidents, he was willing to admit to his mistakes, which now seems heroic.
It’s a bit of a slow news week, to say the least, but we’ll catch up on a few stories and jump into some wild lawsuits and judicial decisions.
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Here’s an update on the MAGA immigrant worker visa imbroglio: Everyone involved is still out of their minds and reprehensible in complementary ways.
And here’s another update on the MAGA immigrant worker visa imbroglio: Donald Trump, who tried to block H-1B visa holders during Covid but backed it over the summer, came out in favor of the program yesterday in an interview with the New York Post. As Trump noted, he has long used foreign worker visas on his properties, though he mostly has made use of H-2B visas for low-wage seasonal work, which is ironically likely far more offensive to his base voters.
Trump chose to side with his financial benefactors, but not before the Silicon Valley billionaire wing of the MAGA movement’s fight with the original nativist base got nasty enough to leave some scars.
Elon Musk called the racists who opposed the program “contemptible fools” who “must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem,” an ironic statement considering his own record of white nationalism and recent support for the rising neo-Nazi party in Germany.
Musk also humiliated himself in a Twitter Spaces live audio session, when he got baited into all but revealing that he has been operating a burner account that regularly praises him and his fathering skills. And in the end, he backtracked on the program anyway, acknowledging that it is abused by employers.
The weeklong saga has been both mind-numbing and instructive. Democrats were abandoned by many groups of voters this year because they did not offer any cohesive or believable worldview beyond Trump Is Not Normal, and now we’re seeing Republicans beginning to experience consequences for betraying their own warped populism.
Democrats who have spent the past six weeks cozying up to Elon Musk and/or promising to work with Trump would be smart to take stock of this ordeal and recognize that they’re hitching their wagons to two guys who voters will soon begin to hate again. It should go without saying, but they should take some time to come up with some principles and stick to them, because that’s how you win elections and create a durable majority.
Supreme Court: A coalition of 20 state attorneys general filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold Louisiana’s proposed new Congressional map.
Produced by the state legislature after a federal court ruled that its prior map was likely an illegal racial gerrymander, the new map contained two Black majority districts; that led to a lawsuit by aggrieved “non-African American” residents who claimed that it violated the Equal Protection Clause (essentially calling it “reverse-racism”).
A second federal court put the new map on hold, and now it’s up to the Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, to sort out exactly what should happen next. The attorneys general argue that ruling against the new map would violate states’ rights to craft their own districts and the traditional leeway they’ve been given to comply with court orders.
There’s also the broader issue of whether the court wants to uphold the remaining shreds of the Voting Rights Act or all but finish it off by ruling either that racial gerrymandering is not in the purview of federal courts or that states cannot consider race while drawing districts.
North Carolina: The outgoing and incoming governors of the Tar Heel State have sued the GOP-controlled legislature over a new law that strips the executive branch of its control of the state Board of Elections.
Republicans made national news when they stuffed a bill that was supposed to be dedicated to Hurricane Helene relief funding with a series of power grabs, then overriding Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto. Cooper and Attorney General Jeff Stein argue that giving the state auditor power to appoint members the Board of Elections prevents the governor from faithfully executing the laws and also violates North Carolina’s Separation of Powers clause. The state auditor also has been granted the power to appoint the chairs of all 100 county boards of education.
(Why did Republicans decide to give that task to the state auditor, whose role has nothing to do with election administration? It probably has something to do with the fact that the incoming state auditor is a Republican.)
Republicans also stripped the governor’s office of some constitutional responsibilities before Cooper took the helm, and last year, passed a law that assigned Board of Elections oversight to the Secretary of State. It was blocked by a panel of superior court judges, and instead of waiting on their appeal, Republicans just tried again with the auditor.
Workers’ rights: A federal appeals court on Friday affirmed a 2022 NLRB decision that found Starbucks guilty of illegally firing two baristas for trying to unionize. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Starbucks could not challenge the agency’s administrative law judges, who preside over cases pertaining to the National Labor Relations Act.
The Supreme Court’s ongoing war on the administrative state has encouraged corporations to challenge the constitutionality of federal regulators; Starbucks, Trader Joes, Amazon, and SpaceX have all filed lawsuits challenging the authority of the NLRB’s judges.
Friday’s decision represents a setback to those companies’ efforts to totally gut the labor board, but they did come away with a partial victory: citing the Supreme Court’s decision SEC v. Jarkesy, the court ruled that the NLRB exceeded its authority by awarding the fired baristas additional financial compensation beyond backpay.
That reverses, for now at least, a 2022 NLRB decision that companies could be found liable and forced to pay for a variety of expenses related to unemployment — the cost of clothing for job interviews, for example, or the costs incurred during an eviction battle.
It’s cool to poison people now: In the Free State of Florida, residents are no longer guaranteed the right to clean water.
A state appellate court ruled late last week that despite overwhelming support for a local ballot initiative that established the right to clean water, it was incompatible with a 2020 state preemption law that prevents local governments from assigning legal rights to bodies of water, plants, and animals.
It’s a stupid technicality: Residents in Titusville approved the measure with 83% of the vote, but because the law allows them to sue polluters on behalf of the “Waters of Titusville,” the three-judge panel found that the preemption law renders it moot.
Ballot initiatives: With housing increasingly sparse and expensive in Nebraska’s capital city, a coalition of civic and political organizations have launched a new initiative to end discrimination against residents who receive financial assistance to pay rent.
According to the nonprofit Collective Impact Lincoln, a third of Lincolnites who receive federal housing vouchers are unable to use them because landlords won’t accept them, a practice currently banned in 22 states. The goal is to get the initiative on the 2025 city election ballot.
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