Diners, Drive-in Tolls, and Dives

Some strange and outrageous twists in NY's latest scandals. Plus, ballot initiatives and more.

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

First, thank you to everyone who has reached out with kind words about the passing of my sister-in-law. It’s a heartbreaking loss for such a wide array of people, including the students who loved her and spoken over the past few days about how she changed their lives. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sweet obituary about Celia today and I hope that she knew — and somewhere, can continue to see — how many lives she touched and how many people loved her.

Tonight we’re following up on a few big, ongoing stories and looking at some new ones, focused on elections, the Supreme Court, housing, and more. As a reminder, I’m with family for the next bunch of days, so there will be no newsletter this weekend. We’ll pick back up by Tuesday. Thank you again for the understanding.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free, no questions asked. Every paid subscription makes it sustainable for me to do this.

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🚨 📰 Karma police: Former Rep. Mondaire Jones is experiencing an extended Find Out phase after his ill-fated decision to fuck around and endorse George Latimer against former ally Jamaal Bowman in the heated NY-16 primary.

On Thursday, the Working Families Parties announced that it would no longer provide material support to Jones in his general election race against GOP Rep. Mike Lawler, marking the second cycle in a row that the group has been forced to withdraw its support from the one-time progressive.

There’s an interesting symmetry here: Back in 2022, the WFP abandoned ship after Jones, then a member of Congress, decided to run in a district spanning lower Manhattan and Brooklyn that was 36 miles from his home in the Hudson Valley. At the time, we were all led to believe that Jones was forced into running elsewhere after then-DCCC chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, had big-footed him out of his home district of NY-17.

According to a new bombshell report, however, that narrative was a work of fiction.

On Friday, City and State NY reported that when New York’s new Congressional map dropped in 2022, Maloney, whose home was drawn into NY-17, quickly called Jones and offered to let him run as the district’s incumbent. But Jones, the report says, was worried about NY-17’s rightward lean and decided to look elsewhere, so he told Maloney to run in his stead… then proceeded to publicly blame his exodus on his fellow Democrat.

Jones, in a statement to the NY Post, denied the report as a rumor started by “disgruntled, anti-Israel extremists.”

While Jones’s flinging an ad hominem attack in the NY Post doesn’t do much to burnish his credibility, the City and State NY report confirmed some of what I reported here at Progress Report on Wednesday: Jones initially wanted to carpetbag a bit closer to home and run a primary against Bowman in the summer of 2022, but he commissioned a poll that showed him getting walloped, leading him to play spoiler in NYC instead.

🏜️ ⚖️ Border ballot battle: Activists in Arizona filed suit against the state legislature this week after its GOP majority voted to send an anti-immigrant proposal to the November ballot.

Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, alleges in its lawsuit that the “Secure the Border Act” should be disqualified for containing several different kinds of policies, which violates the state’s single-subject requirement for initiatives. Specifically, the proposal would “enhance sentencing for fentanyl dealing, strengthen verifications of employment eligibility, and make it a state crime to enter Arizona from a foreign nation somewhere other than a port of entry.”

That final part mimics a recently passed Texas law, which in and of itself is patently unconstitutional. The GOP nonetheless has pursued the initiative both because it could goose conservative turnout in November and because the current unhinged Supreme Court could very well could decide that states can deport people now.

LUCHA, by the way, is the non-profit advocacy group that formed in the backlash of Arizona’s “Show Me Your Papers” law and helped to transform the state’s politics. Now it’s facing an even more extreme Republican Party seeking to reinstate xenophobia as the law of the land.

🌁 🏘️ Housing activism: Here’s a much more promising story about immigrant-led activism and ballot initiatives, courtesy of organizers in California.

Hispanic activists are leading the way in the fight to put rent control in front of voters in several cities in the Bay Area, where housing prices continue to soar year over year. The initiative they’re pushing would cap annual rent increases at either 5% overall or 60% of inflation, as measured by growth in the consumer price index. The initiative has already been qualified in Redwood City, which is just south of San Francisco and home to more than 80,000 people.

The median rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Redwood City is $3,935. More than half of all renters there qualify as rent-burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income toward housing.

Right now, California law caps rent increases at 9.2%, but only for corporate-owned single family homes or multi-family homes were built before 1995. The latter provision is part of a law called the Costa-Hawkins Act, which voters could rescind via ballot initiative this fall.

🚘 🗽 Total car crash: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to pull the emergency break on the Manhattan congestion pricing plan has gone from car crash to a ten-car pile-up.

After receiving some initial support from NYC Mayor Eric Adams and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Hochul has since been inundated with criticism from across the political and ideological spectrum. Her sudden reversal on Wednesday earned the ire of progressives, transit advocates, many mainstream city and federal lawmakers, a number of MTA board members who have votes on the matter, and much of the city’s business lobby.

Congestion pricing was projected to bring in $1 billion in annual revenue, which was earmarked for desperately needed repairs and updates to the region’s public transportation system. Hochul initially floated a new payroll tax on workers and employers across the state to make up for the lost revenue, but it was unsurprisingly dead on arrival. Democrats in the legislature had all of two days until the end of session to come up with an alternative, and with so many other things to get done and no real appetite for bailing out a governor who has killed so many of their ambitions, they wound up punting. For many legislators, it’s congestion pricing or bust.

Now, the MTA board chair, who had been one of the governor’s big supporters, has glumly begun to downsize the agency’s plans for wildly overdue repairs and upgrades to the subways and busses. This is going to land right at the feet of the governor, who did herself no favors by offering up a series of stupid excuses when she finally spoke to the press on Friday.

To be fair, Hochul does seem to like diners.

Most notably, she noted that the owners of her favorite Midtown diners are pleased with this decision because of the huge number of customers they get from New Jersey.

True story: the town in NJ where I went to high school, which was just outside NYC, had so many diners that one was sent to Germany and is now on display in Disneyland Paris. New Jersey has the highest number of diners per capita in the US. Also, look at this map of large and notable diners right outside Manhattan:

I could talk about diners for an entire newsletter (or start a newsletter about diners, even), but I’ll hold off for the moment.

So why did Hochul actually make this disastrous decision?

There’s been suggestions that she was urged to do so by House Democrats from the Hudson Valley and Long Island, who fear that voters will blame them for the toll that they will have to pay on the odd occasion that they decide to drive into Midtown Manhattan during peak hours. Because the New York Democratic Party is incompetent, this is possible, though it shouldn’t have actually worked.

New polling also indicates that Hochul is wildly unpopular among New Yorkers, dating back to when she nominated a conservative to be chief justice of the state’s highest court. That she thought that raising everybody’s taxes would fix that, I could not tell you, but it’s worth noting that she has been steadfastly against raising taxes on the richest New Yorkers.

This debacle is a perfect example of why I have long called Kathy Hochul the Worst Governor in the Nation™. No, she’s not evil in the way that Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and many other GOP governors are evil, but effectiveness isn’t a question of morality. Those ghouls deliver on the horrible things that they promise and their voters seem to demand, while Hochul has repeatedly found ways to piss off everybody and boasts zero signature achievements despite Democrats holding a supermajority in the legislature.

New York could be a national leader in leader in modeling bold new change for the rest of the country, which is part of what made so many advocates so excited about congestion pricing. But instead, New York is falling behind Midwestern states like Minnesota, where Democrats have minuscule majorities yet have passed universal childcare and a wealth tax.

This is in part because while Hochul is not the first instinctively conservative and donor-captured governor of New York, she’s an absolutist who does not know how to play politics, build coalitions, or choose some progressive policies to champion.

😒 🐢 Supreme embarrassment: What many Democratic leaders don’t seem to understand is that cowardly inaction on their part doesn’t just preserve whatever horrible status quo they refuse to challenge, it inevitably emboldens and invites Republicans to fill the void, reverse the political polarity, make things worse, and eventually even put action-oriented Democrats on the defensive for what were popular ideas.

We’re seeing it with the Biden-led circumspection over Trump’s newly minted felony status, as I wrote last weekend, and now we’re seeing it happen to Senate Democrats amid Dick Durbin’s stupefying, self-imposed impotence when it comes to investigating the Supreme Court’s array of ethics scandals.

Because Durbin has outright refused to hold any hearings or even ask any questions about Samuel Alito’s insurrectionist flag collection, the impetus fell to the architect of this far-right court, Mitch McConnell, who rubbed Democrats’ face in false outrage.

In a speech on the Senate floor late this week, McConnell called for the Supreme Court to discipline Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Richard Blumenthal for asking Chief Justice John Roberts to ensure that Alito recused himself from cases concerning Donald Trump and the Jan. 6th insurrection.

An open letter to an indifferent chief justice was less than the bare minimum that Democrats should be doing right now, but because Durbin had them surrender at that point, McConnell was able to cast it as a scandal. In his speech, McConnell said that the two Democrats were “potentially engaged in unethical professional conduct before the court,” a preposterous accusation that nonetheless made headlines and now has Democrats trying to justify even the most ineffectual half-effort.

This is how power works. It’s hard not to conclude that many Democrats just don’t want the responsibility of wielding it.

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