Caring for kids is a moral and political winner

Polls and rival census.

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

We’ve got a lot to talk about tonight, so I’m going to skip the long intro and get right to it. The only thing I want to mention is the small shift laid out below:

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Healthy Ideas

👶🏻🏥 Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey wants to automatically guarantee every child health care through Medicaid from birth through their 18th birthday.

Families with private insurance wouldn’t be required to actually utilize the Medicaid coverage, but it would be a transformative for millions of families across the country. Entering this year, there were four million children without any health insurance in the United States, and since April, that number has increased by at least 50% due to the Medicaid unwinding. That means two million additional kids have lost their health insurance, and with it, access to doctors, medicine, and in some cases, more intensive care.

That number will continue to increase for at least another six months, at least in part due to the dearth of families enrolling in ACA marketplace plans, even when eligible for subsidies. It’s unconscionable for anyone to go without health coverage, but to prevent children from receiving medical care is especially egregious.

Casey spent the weekend selling the plan in Pennsylvania, where over 125,000 kids are uninsured:

There are administrative efforts being made to prevent states from tossing more kids off of Medicaid under flimsy pretenses, including a recent rule issued by HHS that dictates any new enrollee under the age of 18 is entitled to a full, uninterrupted year of coverage.

But that doesn’t do anything to make more kids eligible to for Medicaid in the first place, and as has become increasingly clear, administrative hurdles make it difficult for many parents to parse through all the standards and steps to enroll their kids.

Republicans made a big deal of doing more to support mother and children after the Supreme Court threw out Roe v Wade and red states banned abortion, but the GOP House has shown no interest in actually following through. If they cared, the US wouldn’t have just experienced its biggest uptick in infant mortality in two decades. Casey’s bill won’t go anywhere in the current Congress, but it’s the sort of universally popular proposal that Democrats need to run on next year instead of just touting legislation that has only had a piecemeal effect while broad Covid-era benefits expired.

🌾🩺 After five years of political frustration, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is drafting voters into her long-running effort to expand Medicaid.

A new poll released last week found that 70% of Kansans approve of expanding the health care program, including more than half of Republicans. Some GOP lawmakers have begun to see the light, too, but Republican leadership in the legislature continues to refuse to even consider the idea.

“I have principles, and my principle says no to Medicaid expansion for a lot of reasons,” GOP House Speaker Dan Hawkins told the local NPR station.

Hawkins didn’t expand on those principles, but Senate President Ty Masterson was more willing to identify himself as a heartless trickle down goon.

“It is creating an expansion of the welfare state to able-bodied adults at a time when we need more people working,” he said.

Kelly has promised to visit a new community every week to talk up Medicaid expansion and urge residents to demand that their representatives show an ounce of humanity and back the policy.

😒 Expanding Medicaid in Tennessee would provide health coverage to 151,000 people, according to a new study, which would result in an immediate 27% reduction in the state’s uninsured population.

Around 10% of Tennesseans are without any health coverage, a number that is likely to grow due to the Medicaid unwinding.

🛑 A Missouri judge on Monday tossed out summaries written by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft to describe several abortion rights initiatives vying for space on the 2024 ballot.

Ashcroft, who is running for governor next year, loaded up the petitions with what circuit court judge Jon Beetem deemed overly aggressive and misleading language. Despite just having 100 words per initiative, Ashcroft loaded them up with lies and biased terminology, including assertions that they’d permit “dangerous, unregulated and unrestricted abortions,” including abortions that he very erroneously claims happen at birth.

Judge Beetem rewrote all six initiatives, though the state is expected to appeal the ruling. Activists have to collect at least 170,000 valid signatures in support of each initiative by May of next year.

Elections and Dark Money

👨‍⚖️ A late rush of money is transforming next week’s Pennsylvania state Supreme Court election from a relatively sleepy race into a high-stakes battle with major implications for 2024.

Pennsylvania Republican mega-donor and school voucher fetishist Jeffrey Yaas’s Commonwealth Leadership Fund has poured $4 million into propping up conservative Montgomery County Judge Carolyn Carluccio, who has also benefited from nearly $800K in attack ads against her Democratic opponent courtesy of the nationally ubiquitous conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein. Carluccio has also enjoyed financial support from the Chamber of Commerce

Statewide Appellate Court Judge Dan McCaffery, the Democrat in the race, has received backing from the classic coalition of unions, trial lawyers, and the ACLU, which has thrown $1 million at the race.

Democrats currently hold a 5-2 advantage on the state high court and have sought to make the election an explicit referendum on abortion rights and other freedoms currently being rolled back by the U.S. Supreme Court. Carluccio is backed by two anti-abortion groups yet claims to respect Pennsylvania’s current laws, which protect reproductive rights up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Thankfully, Susan Collins doesn’t get a vote in this election.

🤑 Corporate and conservative PACs are in government acquisition mode, with Seattle’s city council at the top of their list of targets.

The tech-gentrified city has hosted some of the highest-stakes local elections of the past half-decade, as longtime residents have regularly pushed back against Seattle’s slide toward being unlivable for middle class residents.

This year, the real estate industry and development is trying to knock off several key council members and win a few open seats, using astroturf PACs such as the Affordable Housing Council to fool voters and steer $1.1 million into those races.

💸 Michigan’s minimum wage law saga continues to rumble on.

Wage the Raise Michigan, the umbrella group of activists working to raise the state’s minimum to $15-an-hour, is asking the state Supreme Court to reinstate their ballot proposal for the 2024 election. Last month, the Michigan Board of State Canvassers tossed the proposal due to disrepancies between the language in the summary and description on the petitions being collected.

Ironically, the big change to the petition is an exemption for businesses with fewer than 21 employees, which account for a vast majority of businesses in Michigan.

Goblins and Ghouls

🧟‍♀️ Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is a Halloween hater. The independent former Democrat told a reporter on Tuesday that not only was she not participating in the day’s holiday festivities on the Hill, she straight up thinks that “adults wearing Halloween costumes is creepy.”

Given Sinema’s penchant for wearing pink wigs and loud colors on the Senate floor, the diss took many by surprise, but to be fair, Sinema dropped her mask nearly three years ago now.

Whether she’s just naturally gifted at alienating people or carefully pursues new ways of maximizing her moral repugnance (the timing of her embrace of AIPAC was no accident), it’s becoming increasingly clear that Sinema’s approach to public service and public relations has been a resounding failure.

Last month, Sinema’s team pitched a re-election strategy to potential donors that was predicated on peeling away moderate voters from both sides of the aisle. The prospectus, which was “leaked” to NBC News, laid out a path to victory that included winning the support of 25-35% of Republicans and 60-70% of independents.

A new poll commissioned by the NRSC suggests that while Sinema could indeed peel away a significant numbers of GOP voters, she’s become so toxic to everyone else that she’d still come in a distant third in a three-way general election and throw the race to Rep. Ruben Gallego, the presumptive Democrat nominee.

The NRSC likely commissioned the poll to show members that they have to get behind Kari Lake, the far-right Mar-a-Lago regular who is now running for Senate despite still refusing to acknowledge defeat in last year’s gubernatorial election. Perhaps the campaign committee also wanted to nudge Sinema to drop out of the race, but while she claims to be in position to do whatever she wants outside of the Senate, you just don’t sell out that hard for donor money without at least trying to get re-elected.

👢 Speaking of costumes, Ron DeSantis’s absurd platform cowboy boots are finally spurring widespread mockery.

As certified DeSantis trolls, my friends and I have been laughing about Ron’s penchant for wearing lifts in his shoes, so it’s been gratifying to see social media pick up on the manifestation of the Nazi-coddling Governor’s vast insecurities. A new story by Derek Guy, a menswear expert and the only good recent addition to Twitter, all but confirms the obvious in a very authoritative way.

The boots are an affectation of his desperation to be president, which has overtaken being governor of Florida as his full-time job. Maybe that’s for the best, because he’s done such a bad job running the state that he’s now one of the most unpopular governors in the country.

🤡 Go figure: Joe Manchin is one of the most unpopular senators in the nation.

Manchin, of course, was Sinema’s partner in the unholy and anti-democratic alliance that preserved the filibuster and killed federal investment in working-class Americans. Like Sinema, he sacrificed his standing with his base of Democratic voters to chase a slight uptick in approval from Republicans who will ultimately just vote against him in a general election.

Now, no matter how much corporate cash and dark money PAC assistance they receive, both are staring down major election defeats.

Every other Democratic senator should take note.

Workers’ Rights

Teamsters

NLRB and OSHA

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-and-osha-announce-new-mou-to-strengthen-health-and-safety-protections

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