"Democracy is dying but hey, we did the bare minimum!"
Planning my vacation to Bruce Lee, Florida
Welcome to a premium Tuesday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
It’s been a very past few days, so I’ll get right to the news, but first I want to note real quick that we’ve raised nearly $4K for LUCHA and the Primary Sinema PAC (which just so happens to be directing its first round of donations to LUCHA) over the past 48 hours. Not too shabby! I’ll soon have another Sinema-focused fund for you to support, but if you want to pitch in to help out the tireless folks at LUCHA, who have been doggedly trying to even get acknowledged by the senator they helped elect, you can donate below:
OK, on to the news!
The less I can say about what’s happening in Washington and the Democrats’ self-inflicted infrastructure disaster the better, but there’s one element of the idiotic debt ceiling stand-off that I want to address.
When Democrats took control of the Senate last January, we had visions of fundamentally transforming government, freeing our politics from the chokehold of neoliberalism, and rewriting the social contract to address the carnage of the past 40 years. The American Rescue Plan looked like a good start, even if eight Democrats weaseled out of raising the minimum wage, but the filibuster and the immovability of its two most staunch supporters soon ground all Democratic ambitions to a halt.
The Senate accomplished virtually nothing during the six months that followed, leaving us here, with a stand-off on Biden’s broadly popular social spending agenda, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema even more dug in on ruining everything, and Democrats making pathetic attempts to milk political capital out of Republicans’ refusal to extend the debt ceiling.
The public debt ceiling pressure is a remarkably stupid strategy cooked up by old men who have lived in the same bubble for the past 30 years. The debt ceiling is an arcane invention of government that half of Congress probably doesn’t fully understand. There are Republicans across the country trying to overturn elections and encouraging people to die from Covid, so the idea that these same Republicans will be shamed into raising the debt limit — or that a single swing voter will be swayed by a banking kerfuffle — is laughable and maddening.
The obvious answer is for Democrats to just use their power to push through an extension, but unless they stick it in reconciliation and clog up that process even further, it will require that they at least make an exception to the filibuster rule. Manchin and Sinema (presumably, since she doesn’t talk anymore) are obviously against it, and it’ll take a brutal caucus tug of war to get them to agree to the one-time change. If it happens, it’ll help avert a crisis, but it shouldn’t be something for Democratic voters to celebrate.
Raising the debt ceiling should be an automatic, not something that requires a brutal intraparty slugfest. In a sane world, it wouldn’t have been an issue at all, even with Republicans’ full-on resistance. Instead, it has consumed countless debates and a month of media coverage, turning a technicality into something that Democrats are going to undoubtedly try to tout as an accomplishment to dissatisfied activists next month and voters more broadly next year.
Running on extending the debt ceiling is like ignoring the registry entirely and bragging about giving someone a glass of water as a wedding present. The goal posts have moved so far right that we’re going to be asked to thank Democrats for not allowing a world economic meltdown. Never mind that they haven’t passed voting rights bill, though protecting their most loyal voters’ right to put them in office should have also been a no-brainer, or the fact that immigration reform looks to have been killed by the all-powerful Senate parliamentarian.
This is how ambition gets thwarted and movements get blunted and disarmed in politics. Progressives are likely to do no better than a $2.2 trillion reconciliation bill, which is just a third of what they had initially seen as a compromise, and it’s likely to cost them just about all the clout they have this session of Congress. I’m proud that they were able to make this stand, especially given the way the Democratic caucus has historically operated, but the debt ceiling fight illustrates just how much of a structural disadvantage we still face in DC.
We’re going to be asked to be grateful for whatever gets passed in these reconciliation negotiations and then donate and volunteer for the same lawmakers who quietly killed most of their promises next year. We must answer with primary campaigns before we sign on to anything else.
Heroes
Lee County, Florida: Activists in the southwestern Gulf Coast county are taking a new approach to ameliorating this country’s addiction to honoring historic losers. A petition started last month seeks to officially change the namesake of Lee County from failed Confederate general Robert E. Lee to martial arts superstar Bruce Lee. And why not? Neither Lee ever visited the area, it wouldn’t require any bureaucratic changes, and Bruce would have wrecked Bobby in a fight.
Villains
Florida Bar Association: Alas, for all the well-intentioned activists in Florida, the state continues to be run by some of the most corrupt numbskulls in the world. Right now, the Florida Bar Association, which oversees the state’s lawyers and is ostensibly charged with ensuring that they are practicing in good faith, is working to give immunity to Republicans like Attorney General Pam Bondy that attempted to thwart the constitution and stop Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House. Not even Texas is is doing this!
WTF?
NYC: This may shock you, but it seems as if the people protesting vaccine mandates are not doing so because they’re worried about conflicting scientific reports and bodily autonomy.
You’ll notice that the cops did little to stop them, probably because the NYPD is filled with vaccine hold-outs. Incidentally, the NYPD got its own house flipped upside down by the FBI today, leading to the resignation of one of the biggest assholes in the city.
Wonkish
Voting Rights: Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced a retooled version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in the Senate today. Democrats will proceed to hype it up and then let it die when Manchin and Sinema refuse to move on the filibuster.
Policy Stuff
Michigan: Socialism, it can work! A new study finds that low-income Michiganders are seeing better health outcomes since the state expanded Medicaid in 2014, with the most pronounced improvements amongst low-income people of color. The numbers are amazing:
Before they got coverage, only 49% of the study population said they had a regular doctor’s office where they could get care, 23% regularly relied on walk-in care options including ERs, and more than 25% said they had no regular source of care. Black and Latino respondents were much more likely to use walk-in care locations, and white and Arab-American/Chaldean Michiganders were more likely to lack any regular source of care.
By 2018, 83% of Healthy Michigan Plan enrollees said they had a regular doctor’s office to go to. The percentage of Black Michiganders who said this had more than doubled, and the percentage of white, Latino and Arab-American/Chaldean respondents who said this had grown by double digits.
That twelve states have not expanded Medicaid yet are run by racist murderers.
Mississippi: Speak of the devil! Because the GOP Supreme Court killed the entire ballot initiative process because they hate both democracy and weed, Medicaid expansion advocates now have to find some other way of getting help for 230,000 people in the poorest, most unhealthy state in the nation. The Mississippi State Medical Association is working on it.
Pennsylvania: Republicans in PA have resisted Gov. Tom Wolf’s calls for them to legalize weed for years, but that resistance may be… going up in smoke. State Sen. Mike Regan, a Republican and a former US Marshal, is trying to get colleagues to sign on to upcoming legalization legislation. He posted an open letter about the effort on his website.
Elections
Arizona: Famed geriatric racist Joe Arpaio announced today that he is running for mayor of Fountain Hills, a quiet suburb of Tucson that he insists has a terrible problem with undocumented immigrants and crime. He will be 90 years old on Election Day next year and is only able to run because Donald Trump, a slightly less geriatric racist, pardoned him before leaving office.
Texas: Democrat Mike Collier is running for Lt. Governor. Right now his chief rival in the Democratic primary is Matthew Dowd, the former Bush speechwriter who became one of those #NeverTrump Republicans. Collier lost to the cold-hearted incumbent, Lt. Dan Patrick, by less than five points in 2018. I wish it were State Rep. Nicole Collier running — she helped lead the quorum break over the voter suppression bill this past summer and is an awesome Black woman who would electrify the race.
Voting Rights and Redistricting
Texas: Having narrowly retained their legislative majorities in 2020 in a state rapidly turning blue, Republicans in Texas have decided that instead of shifting their politics to match their constituents, it’s easier to just gerrymander their way to another decade of complete control in Austin.
One might think that the fact that people of color were responsible astonishing 95% of the state’s population boom over the past decade would complicate their task, but with the Voting Rights Act gutted and their sense of shame fully long since excised, Republicans are going full-on racist to keep their advantages in both the state house and Congress. It’s especially egregious in Tarrant County, home to Dallas-Fort Worth, but no region was spared. Here’s a sickening breakdown of the latest state House districts:
The number of districts with Hispanic majority electorates in Hunter’s map proposal would drop from 33 to 30, while the number of districts with Black residents that make up a majority of eligible voters would shrink from seven to four. Districts in which white residents make up a majority of eligible voters, meanwhile, would increase by six, going from 83 under the current map to 89 with Hunter’s draft.
If it helps to visualize it:
It’s just as bad on the Congressional map, where Republicans redrew what were swing districts in 2020 into safe GOP seats, demographics be damned:
Republican House candidates won 53 percent of the statewide vote in 2020 but would hold a projected 65 percent of seats under the new lines, which were approved by the state Senate redistricting committee on Monday. The number of safe GOP seats would double, from 11 to 22, while the number of competitive districts would fall from 12 to just one. Nine Texas House Republicans currently hold seats in districts won by Biden or where Trump won by five points or less, but they’re all drawn into districts that Trump would have carried by double digits.
The House GOP also today passed a bill that would authorize election audits in every county, in case they somehow get so awful that even their hands-chosen voters wind up rejecting them in a future election.
North Carolina: Seeing democracy die is a bummer, so here’s a positive story to change things up a bit. If and when the North Carolina State Supreme Court overturns the racist law that bans many returning citizens from voting, it will be in large part thanks to the hard work of Dennis Gaddy, the founder of the Community Success Initiative. Hero.
Kansas: After the GOP legislature put a terrible chill on nonpartisan civic activism with a bill that broadly criminalizes people for running voter registration drives, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly is using the power of her office (imagine that!) to counteract the law that was enacted over her veto. Now a number of state agencies will provide opportunities for people to register and update their registration.
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