And we're off to the races in 2025

File those bills...

Jan 12, 2025

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

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News round up tonight. We’re starting to see action again in the states, which are pulling in very different directions.

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Voters get what they pay for

State legislatures are gaveling back into session, largely controlled by the same parties that held majorities when they finished up their work last year. It’s going largely how you’d expect: In the early going, red state lawmakers are doubling down on their culture war agenda, introducing dodo bird ideas, and plotting to nullify the will of voters wherever possible, while blue state leaders are taking a variety of tacts.

Legislators in Texas began pre-filing bills shortly after the election, a function of their biannual session and eagerness to do bad things to people. Included among their early proposals are three further restrictions on abortion, including two bills that would make it even more difficult to obtain abortion medication.

Who cares what the voters think?

Legislators in Missouri are also scheming to make abortion difficult to access, though unlike Texas, the state no longer has a near-total abortion ban on the books. Voters in November enshrined reproductive rights in the Missouri constitution, but Republicans want to redefine established medical science in pursuit of gutting those protections.

“The amendment says that it should be regulated after fetal viability. I think one of the things we could do is define what that is,” said GOP Rep. Jon Patterson, who is likely to become the House speaker. “I think we could address the issue of what is a medical provider. I think we could address the issues of seeking damages if you have something go wrong.”

Fetal viability is universally accepted to be around 20-25 weeks, though everybody is different. Republicans have for years conflated the faintest electrical current in a fetus, which arrives at around six weeks in gestation, when many people don’t yet know they’re pregnant, with an actual heartbeat, which they’ve portrayed as viable.

In Idaho, Republicans are trying to do what Missouri lawmakers failed to do last year: raise the threshold needed to pass a constitutional amendment via ballot initiative after passing an unpopular conservative policy.

Lawmakers will give passing a school privatization scheme yet another shot this year, as GOP leaders hope that an even redder legislature will nudge it over the line after several years of failing. It’d be a limited program, with income caps and a $5k tax credit, but all voucher programs start that way before mushrooming in cost. Republicans built on their supermajority by winning two Democratic seats in November; the caucus got more conservative after Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch poured cash into successful primaries against rural Republicans last May.

Meanwhile, Republican legislators have already introduced HB 2, which would increase the threshold needed to pass ballot initiatives from 50% to 60%, which would be almost impossible to achieve for the progressive initiatives passed in the state recently.

In Michigan, the restaurant lobby is losing its mind over the impending rise in compensation for low-wage employees, though they really should have seen this coming.

Six years ago, the GOP legislature adopted and gutted an initiative to increase to the minimum wage and institute mandatory paid leave, a maneuver that the state Supreme Court just ruled unconstitutional. The court ordered that businesses with 10 or more employees offer 72 hours of sick leave and the minimum wage be phased up to $15-an-hour by 2029, which would also see the end of the tipped minimum wage by 2030. Both wages rose slightly on Jan. 1st and are due to rise again next month.

Republicans last month boycotted the rest of the legislative session over the lack of action taken to pare down the court order, and now that they control the state House, they have made punishing working people their highest priority.

Right now, the GOP wants to add a year to time it takes to get the wage to $15, keep the tipped minimum wage at 38% of the regular minimum, and raise the number of workers a business must have to be required to offer sick leave. Democrats, who control the state Senate, have offered to move the $15 phase-in up a year but keep the tipped minimum at 60%. They also want to reduce the amount of paid sick leave required of businesses.

None of what’s in the impending law is ridiculous; nearby Illinois already has a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and inflation will only cut into its value over the next three years. Why Democrats would be on the side of reducing pay raises for working people is just baffling.

Watch out for the scam…

The crypto industry spent a reported $135 million on federal elections, an enormous sum that is probably far lower than its actual spend. There’s been no full picture of what its billionaire scammers donated to state lawmakers, but they clearly held a lot of sway, because there are now five states — PA, TX, OH, NH, and ND — with bills that would create a statewide “strategic bitcoin reserve.”

The bills have been pushed by a pro-crypto group called the Satoshi Action Fund, and the idea is that states would start buying up bitcoin and sitting on them. That would in turn send the price of the asset even higher while also handing this invented currency based on absolutely nothing some kind of legitimacy.

The Satoshi Action Fund is a pro-crypto industry group that spent $384,685 on lobbying legislators in 2023 and donated money to the same major crypto PACs as Ross Stevens, a hedge fund guy who pulled $100 million from Penn over pro-Palestinian student protests while allegedly ripping off his own employees.

A pleasant surprise…

While an increasing number of Democrats in DC are surrendering their principles and voting for unconstitutional GOP immigration bills and signaling support for Trump’s dangerous fringe maniac nominees, there have been some more encouraging developments on the state level, including in… New York?

Gov. Kathy Hochul has genuinely surprised me over the past week or so with a series of uncharacteristic proposals for the upcoming, all-important state budget. Her proposed budget includes a call to triple the maximum size of the state child tax credit to $1000 for children 0-4 and $500 for kids 5-16. It would benefit somewhere between 1.6 million and 2.7 million kids, and it comes on top of the “inflation relief” checks that she had already called for to be distributed to a large swath of New Yorkers.

“From groceries to strollers to kids’ clothes, the cost of living and raising a family is still too damn high — and that’s why we’re proposing a massive increase in New York’s child tax credit to put up to $1,000 per kid back in the pockets of hardworking families,” Hochul said, sounding far more populist than I can ever previously remember. “As New York’s first mom governor, I know how hard it can be for parents to make ends meet — and I’ll never stop fighting to make New York more affordable for every family.”

Hochul also proposed a number of measures that would limit private equity and hedge funds’ ownership of single-family homes, a growing epidemic that is warping the housing market and contributing to the dearth of available units and sky-high prices.

This is a particularly surprising turn of events for the governor, whose main constituencies include real estate and private equity, but it’s becoming an increasingly common issue for Democrats to address (Kamala Harris proposed a much softer and less consequential regulation of the practice during her run for president).

For Hochul, it also represents a more modest housing initiative after her big attempt to spur new homebuilding crashed and burned in 2023. Housing prices continue to rise in New York, part of a larger cost of life crisis that is driving some people out of the state and causing something of a political realignment in some places.

So what’s gotten into the famously centrist, largely politically clueless governor? The policies that Hochul has laid out thus far are all easy to understand and either put money directly in people’s pockets or pick a fight with powerful interests — exactly the kind of approach that I’d recommend to a Democratic politician who is running for re-election in a state where the price of living tends to trump everything else, especially after they nearly got ousted over inflation during the last election.

Houchul’s big housing plan would have created binding goals for new affordable housing builds in towns and cities all over the state, and while she failed to pass it after a suburban lawmaker revolt, her counterpart in New Jersey was able to get a similar plan over the line last year.

The law outraged residents and leaders in some of Jersey’s wealthier towns, 26 of which banded together in a lawsuit seeking to have the law overturned. On Friday, a state appeals court denied their request for an emergency injunction, bringing the courts one step away from dismissing it altogether.

First congestion pricing, now having to welcome less wealthy people into their communities. Rough week over in Jersey.

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