Big wins for voting rights and working class kids
The week's big headlines were pretty miserable, so you may have missed these big wins and positive developments
Welcome to a Saturday evening edition of Progress Report.
I’m not going to lie: recovery from heart surgery is taking far longer than I’d like. I’ve been through this several times before, and I probably should have remembered just how immensely sore the body becomes, but our brains are built to sand off the roughest edges of the worst of our traumas. That’s probably for the best, though.
Anyway! It’s borderline impossible right now to read the news and not experience an acute sense of panic and despair. Massacres in Gaza, conservatives warping Democratic primaries, a far-right Supreme Court rigging the election for fascists — the list goes on and on, but it doesn’t tell the entire story of this week in our politics.
It may be hard to believe, but there were also plenty of positives to come out of this week, covering a wide range of federal, state, and local wins. Tonight we’ll dive into some of them, so reality won’t seem quite so bleak.
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Reproductive Rights
🧑⚖️ 🏥 A state judge in Montana ruled that three laws that would curtail abortion access violate the state constitution.
The ruling maintains an injunction on the laws, which ban abortion after 20 weeks, made it illegal to prescribe abortion medication via telehealth, and implemented a 24-hour wait period to obtain an abortion. That third law also required medical professionals to give the pregnant person the option to view an ultrasound or listen to fetal heart activity.
There are several other anti-abortion laws that are in the midst of being challenged in Montana, including one that bans the most common way to end a pregnancy after 15 weeks.
👶 😰 GOP-controlled legislatures are scrambling to protect IVF as Republicans in Congress make clowns of themselves in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling.
Lawmakers in Alabama on Thursday passed a bill that would shield IVF clinics and providers from lawsuits over “damage to or death of an embryo.” The bill past unanimously in the state Senate and 94-6 in the state House, though there were several lawmakers who tried to tack on amendments that would have again severely limited patients and clinics.
The new bill doesn’t address the state Supreme Court’s ruling that any embryo, even those in a frozen petri dish, is considered a living person. Without that underlying issue fixed, this will linger over would-be parents in Alabama and Republican politicians, who are trying to pretend that they support IVF despite years of voting for bills that would make it all but impossible to practice.
I don’t think IVF will be an issue that moves a lot of voters in and of itself, but it bolsters the very real narrative that Republicans want full control over women’s bodies. As I’ve written a million times, Democrats should focus on reclaiming the concept of freedom, and this is a perfect example of an opportunity to do so.
Getting Schooled
📚 🗳️ A groundbreaking education proposal is now one step away from qualifying for the ballot in Arkansas.
State attorney general Tim Griffin has finally approved the ballot language for a proposed constitutional amendment that would send shockwaves through Arkansas’s troubled and increasingly privatized education system. The amendment, which we covered in depth earlier this week, would guarantee every student a quality education, regardless of their family’s income, by mandating access to voluntary pre-K, summer programs, special ed, and financial assistance.
Politically, its most potent component is the provision that requires private and charter schools that receive state vouchers meet the same standards as public schools instead of being free to rip off the state and ruin kids’ education. It took months of submissions and consulting with the AG’s office for activists to receive the ballot language approval, which was greeted with great displeasure by the Arkansas board of education.
The next step for the Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment of 2024 is a race to collect a little over 90,000 petition signatures by the July 5th deadline. Activists will learn next week whether they need to collect those signatures from a minimum of 15 or 50 counties when a county judge issues a ruling on a law passed by Republicans in 2022 intended to make it harder to qualify amendments. Voters in Arkansas rejected the change in 2020, but the GOP went and implemented it anyway.
🌽 📓 In Nebraska, meanwhile, a ballot initiative that would repeal a new school privatization law will remain on the ballot.
Secretary of state Bob Evnen declined to remove the initiative at the request of GOP lawmakers, who last year passed a law that gives Nebraskans tax breaks for donating to private and religious schools. It’s not exactly a school voucher program, but it works on the same principle, surrendering tax money to parents who then decide which schools receive the funds.
The Nebraska Education Association is behind the initiative to repeal the law. The initiative had already qualified for the ballot with over 117,000 signatures.
The Rent is Too Damn High
🏔️ 🏘️ Lawmakers in Colorado moved forward on a bill that would cap rent increases at 10% in places where the governor has officially declared a state of emergency.
The bill is aimed at preventing rent gouging when there’s a sudden shortage of housing due to natural disasters or other emergencies. It was inspired by a massive fire in Boulder County in 2021, which wrecked over 1000 homes and led to a spike in housing costs.
With one of the hottest and increasingly unaffordable housing markets in the state, efforts to taper skyrocketing home prices have been at the top of Colorado legislators’ to-do list over the past few years. Up to this point, they’ve largely worked on increasing supply and nibbling around the edges on eviction protections, and failed last year to pass a law allowing for rent control.
🤖 ❌ FTC chair Lina Khan announced that the use of algorithms to price rent is a violation of antitrust law.
The announcement was accompanied by a brief authored by the FTC and Justice Department that sought to address the growing trend of rent surge pricing for tens of millions of rental homes nationwide.
Voting Rights
🏜️ 🗳️ A federal judge blocked several provisions of two voter suppression laws in Arizona for creating undue burden on Latino and Native voters.
The provisions required voters to include their birthplace on their registration forms and mandated that county officials investigate the citizenship of naturalized citizens. It wasn’t all good news, though, as the judge allowed a provision that requires proof of citizenship to vote.
Democrats in Tennessee are asking the Department of Justice to investigate the state’s voting rights restoration law.
The new law requires former felons to get their gun rights back before recovering their right to vote, which essentially makes it a dead-end that disenfranchises people for life.
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