BREAKING: Infamous GOP gerrymander struck down

Democracy returns to Wisconsin

Dec 22, 2023

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

Just minutes ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the GOP’s historic gerrymander of the state’s legislative maps and ordered brand new fair maps to be drawn as soon as possible. After more than a dozen years under unbreakable Republican control sustained by a corrupt conservative high court, democracy is returning to the people of Wisconsin.

Talk about timing: The monumental decision came down less than two hours after I sent the original version of this email, which included the liberal flip of the Wisconsin Supreme Court among the very best progressive news developments of 2023. The prospect of this decision was a fundamental part of why it ranked so high.

Now that I’ve given away the top item, it’s time for The Best Political News of 2023: Part 2. You can find part one right here.

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Minnesota goes populist

When Democrats finally flipped the Minnesota state Senate in 2022, it didn’t matter that they only secured a one seat advantage. After four years of having their agenda largely stymied by a bare Republican majority in the upper chamber, Democrats had a long to-do list and were eager to get started.

By the end of October, Gov. Tim Walz had his name on more new progressive laws than any other governor in the nation. Some of the laws caught Minnesota up with more solidly blue states, but in a number of cases, the legislature set a new populist standard for other states to follow. Some of the most significant new laws include:

Paid family and medical leave: Starting in 2026, workers will be granted up to 12 straight weeks off from work for either medical or caregiving reasons, and up to 20 weeks overall. Lower income workers will earn up to 90% of their normal pay; higher earners will get 53% of their pay.

Paid sick leave: Most employers will be required to provide up to 48 work hours — or six full days — of paid sick leave to workers.

Free school meals for all K-12 students: Minnesota now provides every child in every public school in the state is offered free breakfast and lunch.
Abortion protections: The legislature officially codified reproductive rights, which were only guaranteed by a state Supreme Court decision.
Gun control: Minnesota instituted a red flag law and imposed background check requirements on all gun purchases.
Voting rights expansion: A package of laws instituted automatic voter registration, a permanent absentee voter list, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, sample ballots in many languages, voter intimidation ban, and automatic rights restoration for felons once they leave prison.
Recreational marijuana legalization: That one speaks for itself, I think.
Free college tuition: Students from families making $80,000 per year or less will get free tuition to any state university or community college.
Green energy utilities: By 2040, all utility companies must provide 100% carbon-free energy from renewable sources.
New pro-worker labor laws: Minnesota banned non-compete clauses and captive audience meetings, goals of the FTC and NLRB.

They did this all with a one vote majority in a swing state. Whew.

States begin embracing free school meals

Minnesota wasn’t the only state to embrace free school meals this year. After pandemic-era federal subsidies dried up, legislators in Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Vermont all passed bills that guarantee free meals to all public school students, regardless of income; voters in Colorado approved a ballot initiative that does the same. Maine and California both launched their programs during the 2022-23 school year.

Legislators and local leaders are calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul to back a similar measure in New York after she left it out of her budget last year. Good luck with that!

Most other states have at least seen a free meal bill introduced in their legislatures. The federal program only guarantees free lunch to kids from families earning up to 130% of the federal poverty line.

Blue states expand and codify voting rights

Minnesota stood out this year for the sheer breadth of legislation that its Democratic trifecta was able to pass into law, but was the case with school meals, it was joined by several other Democratic states in passing crucial voting rights bills.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, nearly half of all states passed at least one law that made it easier to vote. Some states did more than others, of course. Here are some of the highlights:

Michigan passed a package that extended early voting to nine full days, simplified vote-by-mail, and increased access to drop boxes.
New Mexico enacted automatic voter registration, restored voting rights to former felons who are on probation and parole, created a permanent vote-by-mail list, and expanded vote-by-mail options for Native Americans living on reservations.
Connecticut added two weeks of early voting and created protections for minority communities.
New York finally established no-excuse vote-by-mail.
Arkansas (!) made it easier to vote early and by mail.

It was hardly all rosy, though, as Republican-run states were nearly as active in putting up barriers to voting. There were more restrictive voter ID laws passed in Idaho and Indiana, while Ohio’s omnibus voter repression law included ID restrictions alongside reducing drop boxes to one per county, eliminating early voting the day before the election, and cutting down the days to request an absentee ballot.

Arkansas and Alabama just straight up banned drop boxes, as did the Wisconsin Supreme Court — but more on that one to come.

Supreme Court preserves Section Two of the Voting Rights Act

In what was by far the most surprising decision of last term, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to require Alabama to scrap a racially gerrymandered Congressional map and draw a second Black-majority district.

A decade after declaring open season on the Voting Rights Act with a majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder that declared racism in America mostly solved, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Allen v. Milligan that upheld Section 2 of the VRA, which bans racial discrimination in election law and redistricting. To do so, Roberts managed to convince an obviously reluctant Brett Kavanaugh to join him in voting with the court’s three liberals.

The decision had an instant ripple effect, including on a similar case in Louisiana, where Republicans, as much as they clearly hate it, must draw another Black-majority district before the upcoming election. And now that North Carolina’s newly conservative state Supreme Court has blessed partisan gerrymandering, new lawsuits against the state’s egregiously GOP-warped maps are focused on the way they crack and pack and dilute the power of minority communities.

It would be naive to argue that this decision represented some fundamental shift in philosophy or moral awakening for either Roberts, who has otherwise spent the entirety of his legal career working to dismantle the VRA, or Kavanaugh, who wrote a partially concurring decision in which he insisted that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

Instead, it is far more likely that the decision was a product of smart legal representation for the civil rights groups that initially sued, arrogance on the part of Alabama’s lawyers, and Roberts’s supposed interest in public perception. Unlike the rabid, anti-freedom foot soldiers to his right, whose contact with the public is limited to whoever shows up to the Koch summer camp for billionaire boys, Roberts wants the Supreme Court to maintain some legitimacy with the public.

That concern has pushed him to bite his tongue and save Obamacare and legalize same-sex marriage, and since the Dobbs decision, he’s seen the facade of objectivity fully crumble. Saving the VRA was at least to some degree a concession to public outrage.

Lower courts have continued their attacks on the Voting Rights Act with specious rulings, and it’s unclear whether Roberts could turn them all away, given the Supreme Court’s ultraconservative supermajority. The Milligan decision should therefore be understood not as a sign of a rational and even-handed court but instead as a stay of execution and opportunity to begin a vital course correction.

Statewide efforts to codify voting rights and prevent gerrymandering must continue in order to inoculate as many people as possible from neo-Confederates in the judiciary and GOP leadership. The onus is also on us to also dial up the pressure on the Supreme Court, using every means possible to discredit and marginalize the irredeemably corrupt justices who would end representative government altogether given half a chance.

Unions win big contracts — and public support

If 2021 and 2022 mostly belonged to upstart unions and their fights for the right to organize, 2023 was all about well-known unions flexing their muscles and winning big for workers across the country. More than half a million workers went out on strike over the first 11 months of the year, which was the busiest for work stoppages since 2013.

Both the Teamsters and UAW, under the leadership of fiery men named Sean and Shawn, respectively, scored huge new contracts that corrected for past concessions and set new standards in their respective industries.

The Teamsters spent the summer holding practice picket lines and saber-rattling before UPS coughed up big raises and position adjustments for 350,000+ workers. A month later, the UAW began a six-week strike that ultimately forced the Big Three automakers into agreeing to contracts far more generous than anticipated for 145,000+ workers.

Each union’s success led to a spike in interest from workers at non-union companies: The UPS deal helped Teamsters-represented DHL workers in Kentucky to earn an improved new contract after 12 days on strike and has stoked the union’s organizing of Amazon delivery drivers, while the UAW is finding hot shops across the auto manufacturing sector and now has more places to organize than organizers to do the work.

Some non-union automakers are already preemptively raising wages, including Tesla, as the famously skinflint Elon Musk just blessed a 10% pay bump for workers at the Gigafactory in Nevada.

Public support for the unions played a significant role in forcing corporate capitulation, and when it came to the showbiz strikes, even the presence of Hollywood elite, delays to upcoming movies and late night shows devoid of gags and guests weren’t enough to break the antipathy for the C-suite types.

Actors and writers were on the picket lines for four and five months respectively, using their platforms to beat up Hollywood executives who made one dumb comment after another. Each union won significant improvements to their contracts after fights that introduced the labor movement to broad swaths of the public.

Plenty of other unions won big new contracts this year, including 40,000 casino workers in Las Vegas, where they authorized a strike; 1700 hotel workers in Los Angeles, where they spent months on the picket line; 85,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente; and 10,000 pilots at some of biggest airlines in the nation, including Southwest, where the union won 50% pay raises.

And this week, Wells Fargo became the first megabank with any unionized white collar staff when a branch in New Mexico voted to join the CWA. It’s a development that I have been tracking since first reporting on the effort around 16 months ago.

Ohioans vote en masse to protect abortion rights and legalize weed

Republican leaders in Ohio are some of the most shameless cheaters and scumbags in all of politics.

Over the past dozen years, they have enacted some of the worst gerrymanders in the country, used that supermajority to enrich themselves, and defied voter-approved constitutional amendments intended to ban gerrymandering. But no matter how many dirty tricks they tried, Republicans couldn’t fool Ohioans into surrendering their rights this year.

In late 2022, activists launched a campaign aimed at codifying reproductive freedoms in the Ohio state constitution. Terrified of the issue’s political salience and the explosive energy around the amendment, Republicans spent the first half of the year scheming up ways to sabotage the vote.

With the abortion rights amendment — by then known as Issue 1 — scheduled for the November ballot, the GOP decided to intercede with their own amendment in August. Their proposal, which they also called Issue 1, sought to require 60% support to pass all future constitutional amendments. This, they said, would be a safeguard against “out-of-state billionaires” trying to influence Ohio’s elections.

Naturally, it was far-right activist Dick Uihlein, an out-of-state billionaire, who financed the entire effort. It’s always projection with these people.

Ohio voters saw right through their lies and rejected the proposed amendment, 57% to 43%. Secretary of State Frank LaRose then tried to poison the reproductive rights amendment with coarse and misleading language, but once again, Ohioans would not be deterred; buoyed by a huge grassroots movement and national support, the pro-choice amendment won with 57% of the vote. They also green-lit recreational marijuana by a slightly higher percentage.

Not only do these victories improve the lives of millions of people in Ohio, they also provide some important lessons applicable to organizers and progressive candidates in many other states.

In 2022, the Ohio GOP ran the table in statewide races, including three state Supreme Court elections that had what should have been fairly clear consequences for abortion rights. The vote on abortion rights, on the other hand, was a nonpartisan election, driven by volunteers and fueled by foundations and small donors. It was thus unencumbered by state party bureaucracy and the toxicity of the Democratic Party brand in Ohio.

As Dems try to win back voters in states like Ohio, they’d be best served by incessantly using the word “independent” and obsessively focusing on populist issues that emphasize freedom and unite people across party lines. I’ve been making this argument since 2022 and I’ll take any validation I can get.

After this year’s success, Ohioans are now collecting signatures to qualify another anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment for next November. Whereas Republicans were able to hijack the previous two anti-gerrymandering amendments by placing their own rigged proposal on the ballot, this one is coming from the activists themselves. Specifically, it will call for an independent redistricting process, which should be the point of emphasis during the campaign.

All that being said, avoiding overemphasis on partisanship doesn’t mean ignoring it, especially when it comes to recruitment. Democrats have filed to run in every state Senate district and for all but four state House seats, showing that this November’s successes have already woken up a dormant voter base.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court finally flips

After more than half a dozen years of organizing and more than a few setbacks, Democrats in Wisconsin took control of the state Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years with a landslide victory in an election held last April.

Like Ohio, Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin during the 2011 redistricting cycle. Even though voters in Wisconsin, a historically more progressive state, have elected Democrats to most statewide offices since 2018, the GOP gerrymanders have been so thorough, and the conservative state Supreme Court so rigged, that to this day Republicans have a legislative supermajority.

Without the possibility of a ballot initiative to change the redistricting process, Wisconsin Democrats zeroed in on flipping the state Supreme Court as the only realistic path to securing fair legislative and Congressional elections. They poured countless millions into the effort and put themselves within one seat of taking back control of the court.

Last April’s election was one of the most expensive state court races in history, but it wasn’t even close: Janet Protasiewicz won it by 11 points. Crucially, she won because she was unambiguously opposed to the many ways in which Republicans had robbed people of their freedom and political agency in Wisconsin.

Both her Republican opponent — an appointee of former Gov. Scott Walker with an ultraconservative record and politically outspoken himself — and then the GOP legislature tried to turn Protasiewicz’s positions into a scandal, as if 55% of Wisconsinites hadn’t just voted for her based on those positions. Threats to impeach her were met with defiance and derision before being rescinded.

The next few months will be very busy. The court has already heard arguments over the GOP gerrymanders and seem certain to overturn them and order fair new maps. The state’s abortion ban, passed in 1849 and now the subject of much debate and litigation, is likely to be struck down. Act 10, the anti-union law pushed through by Scott Walker, is on the chopping block.

Democracy is being resurrected in Wisconsin by popular demand, through painstaking planning, organizing, and savvy political execution. The state Democratic Party ostensibly led the charge, but this was only possible thanks to the defiance of a citizenry who refused to acquiesce to minority rule, even when it seemed so entrenched. There are no shortcuts to turning the tide, but Wisconsin, like Michigan last year, proved that it can be done.

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