Winners & Losers: Minnesotans rise up and NV Governor admits he's a loser
It's been a very busy week
Welcome to a Saturday evening edition of Progress Report.
We’re battening down the hatches here in NYC, where we’re evidently in line for another major blizzard. The cold has been especially deadly in the city this winter, so I’m hoping this is the grand finale. My three-year-old son loves kicking snow, though, and he was bummed when the giant piles of dirty snow finally melted last week, so at least he’ll be excited by any big accumulation.
A quick programming note: I’ll be hosting a live stream interview with Patrick Roath, who is running a strong primary against septuagenarian Rep. Stephen Lynch in Massachusetts’ 8th Congressional district on Tuesday evening at 8pm EST. Link will go out earlier on Tuesday; keep an eye out for your invite.
Also, I’m making tonight’s newsletter free because I hate gatekeeping good news in these dark times. Your support, either in buying a subscription or donating, makes a world of difference.
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Winners: Operation Metro Surge may be over, but the devastating damage wrought by the months-long federal occupation of the Twin Cities remains. Businesses were shuttered, people were too terrified to go to work, and now eviction notices are starting to pile up. So once again, everyday people in Minnesota are banding together to demand their leaders take action while helping one another with mass mutual aid.
There are neighborhood organizations all across the Twin Cities that are collecting donations to distribute to vulnerable families (find some here). On a larger scale, the nonprofit Wilson Foundation is matching up to $1.5 million in donations that will go directly to families unable to face rent and facing eviction.
Loser: House Speaker Mike Johnson denied the late Rev. Jesse Jackson the right to lie in state at the Capitol building, rejecting a request made directly by the family of the iconic civil rights leader.
CNN ran interference for the speaker, reporting that the decision was not political, with unnamed sources revealing that Johnson also rejected Charlie Kirk and former Vice President Dick Cheney — as if a young bigot and a war criminal were at all comparable to the most impactful civil rights leader of the past 50 years.
Winners: Nevada debuted its new public option health insurance plan, providing a cheaper alternative to residents in a state that has struggled with above average uninsured rates.
Losers: Jared Moskowitz and Josh Gottheimer have promised to vote against the War Powers resolution seeking to prevent President Trump from unilaterally attacking Iran. The pair are the only Democrats who plan on giving Trump carte blanche to start yet another war to be overseen by a drunk rapist with no clear plan or endgame. What’s especially frustrating is that they are doing this at the behest of Israel’s far-right government, which they’ve framed as fighting antisemitism instead of stoking it.
Winners: Democrats netted two big legal victories in the ongoing fight to redraw Congressional maps ahead of the midterm elections. On Thursday, an appeals court in New York ordered a redraw of the state’s 11th Congressional district, ruling that the current configuration discriminates against Black and Latino voters.
Right now, the district includes Staten Island and the more conservative fringes of southern Brooklyn, making for a relatively safe perch for GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. Any redraw would likely merge Staten Island and parts of lower Manhattan, which would turn it into a toss-up district in a year likely to favor Democrats. Speculation has been that Rep. Dan Goldman, who currently represents NY-10, would wind up running in a redrawn 11th district, opening up his seat for Brad Lander, the Brooklyn-based former comptroller.
And on Friday evening, the Utah Supreme Court turned down the GOP legislature’s request to put a pause on the state’s newly redrawn Congressional map. Republicans are running out of chances to block the new map, which was enacted by a judge who found that the previous gerrymander violated a voter-approved amendment that banned gerrymandering.
They’re freaked because the new map creates what is a likely safe blue district around Salt Lake County, which is why the conservative movement has also gone all-in on trying to trick voters into signing petitions (or maybe just forging their names) to qualify a repeal referendum in November.
Losers: The people of Tennessee are living under a police state.
Several Republican lawmakers, led by state Rep. Jody Barrett, are trying to pass a bill that would protect life “from fertilization to natural death,” updating the criminal code to turn abortion — already illegal in Tennessee — into homicide.
When not trying to criminalize women and doctors, lawmakers have been plotting to subject residents in every corner of the state to a federal immigration crackdown. The House voted this week to advance a slate of bills designed to strengthen the relationship between feds and municipal governments — whether local officials want to or not. Most prominent is House Bill 2219, which would require local governments to enter into 287(g) agreements with federal law enforcement.
Winners: This is a tenuous one, in that the Supreme Court could unleash chaos with its Louisiana v. Callais decision at any moment, but anything that makes it easier to vote — or prevents the government from disenfranchising people — is worth celebrating.
I’ll start locally, where the legislatures in both New York and New Jersey are taking steps toward fortifying the right to vote against any potential attempts at interference by the Trump administration.
Here in New York, the legislature is moving forward with a package of election protections that would upgrade the automatic voter registration system, better protect election workers, and offer sustainable funding to county election boards.
Across the river in New Jersey, lawmakers in the Assembly advanced a more substantial package, the John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act. According to the New Jersey Monitor, the law would give state courts “broad powers to rewrite discriminatory election rules, redraw voting districts, expand governing bodies, and reschedule elections if the original date would have disproportionately prevented members of a protected class from voting.”
The power to redraw discriminatory voting districts is especially important right now, as the Supreme Court could soon revoke federal judges’ ability to order new maps based on racial gerrymanders. The bill would also require more municipalities to provide ballots in foreign languages and assistance to voters who don’t speak English.
Should it pass, the state Treasury would create a new division with purview over voting rights, with the power to launch investigations, issue subpoenas, and write new rules.
Down in Alabama, the state Senate moved forward with a bill that would make it easier for formerly incarcerated people to reclaim their voting rights after being released from prison. The bill, which passed the Senate unanimously, would require the Alabama Board of Pardons and Secretary of State to build a website that includes explicit instructions for rights restoration. The website would also have to publish a list of formerly incarcerated people who are eligible to have their right to vote restored.
Something similar happened in Kentucky, where lawmakers in the state Senate voted to advance a constitutional amendment that would automatically restore the right to vote for former felons unless they were convicted of crimes involving “treason, election bribery or fraud, a crime against a child or violent or sexual offenses. Gov Andy Beshear used an executive action to restore the right to vote to some former felons, so this would expand that order and codify it in the state constitution. If it passes the House, it would go before voters in November.
And finally, a judge in Missouri ruled against the GOP’s effort to fool voters into giving away their right to amend the constitution:
Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green ordered the first three bullet points of the summary voters will see on the ballot to be removed, saying they were misleading because they tout provisions already in state law — such as a ban on foreign campaign contributions and penalties for signature fraud.
It isn’t until the fourth bullet point that voters learn the proposal’s main purpose, which is to require constitutional amendments put on the ballot by voters to obtain both a simple majority statewide and a majority in all eight congressional districts to pass. Currently, constitutional amendments only require a simple majority statewide.
Republicans have been desperately trying to restrict direct democracy in Missouri after being embarrassed on ballot referendums for nearly a decade now: Missourians have voted to repeal the legislature’s “right to work” law (2018), expand Medicaid (2022), and legalize abortion (2024), among other things, even while voting increasingly conservative in partisan elections. Grassroots activists are now organizing a referendum to protect ballot referendums, directly competing with the GOP’s proposed amendment.
Losers: Right-wing activists in multiple states are organizing ballot initiatives designed to make life difficult for trans children.
In Colorado, a misleadingly named group called Protect Kids Colorado just submitted signatures for an initiative that would ban trans kids from school sports and prohibit them from undergoing gender-affirming surgery. Neither of the major hospitals that treat trans kids in Colorado provide surgeries to minors; banning it anyway is the first step toward banning adults from undergoing such procedures, too.
An even more cynical effort is afoot in Nevada, where Gov. Joe Lombardo wants to use an anti-trans ballot measure as key to motivating voters in what is expected to be a rough year for Republicans. That’s not conjecture: Lombardo, who is up for re-election, was recorded saying that he needs this measure, which would restrict trans kids’ participation in sports, because “I am not enough of a motivator as a governor candidate to get them off the couch.” At least he told the truth!
Winner: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who got a lot of press for needling Trump after his big loss in the Supreme Court’s tariff decision.
Alas, this may be the closest we get to any restitution for a year of jacked up prices.
Loser: OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who thinks robots who will take your job are a better investment than feeding children.
“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model,” he moaned at a recent conference. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”
These are the people who are buying our elected officials and influencing our elections.
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“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model,” he moaned at a recent conference. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”
These people are absolute freaks.
Keep this good stuff coming!