Red states are trying to get kids killed

And take away democracy, too

Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.

As of tomorrow I will officially be two months removed from undergoing that gigantic open-heart surgery. I’d say I’m about 90% healed physically, but lagging a bit behind in the mental recovery. More than anything else, it’s writing that has me flailing a bit, and it’s taking me longer to properly focus and get things done.

For instance, it took a bit longer than anticipated to write this newsletter, so I’ve super-sized it with more news and analysis. We’ve got a lot to dig through tonight, with stories ranging from health care and gun control to voting rights and insane Republicans. Let’s get to it.

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HOW WE LIVE NOW:

Red and blue states continue to forge very different paths when it comes to access to health care and the right to control one’s own body. The way that Republican governors continue to make life miserable for children and families should be a national scandal, but that would require nuance in the media. Meanwhile, Medicaid unwinding, one of my long-time obsessions, is emerging as key issues that could help determine who wins in November.

🙄 GOP F-UP IVF: Republican leadership in the Kansas state Senate refused to hold a hearing on a bill that would have established protections for in-vitro fertilization treatment in the event that they pass legislation intended to limit or even criminalize abortion.

GOP leaders angrily insisted that they simply objected to the process by which the bill was proposed, but until they vote to approve IVF protections and send it to Gov. Laura Kelly, Republicans should be made to own this. And as we saw in Alabama this week, it is not a winning issue for them.

😡 Unwound: Many families in Florida with chronically ill children are facing a nightmare this Easter, with the state due to kick them off of Medicaid. While the state claims that they are no longer eligible for the program, most say that they weren’t given a chance to prove their eligibility. As a result, kids with some of the most complicated diseases and disabilities are facing dire consequences.

"For kids like this, regular insurance — employer or marketplace — just doesn't begin to cover the extent of their medical needs," Miriam Harmatz, the founder of the Florida Health Justice Project, told local news media. "These children cannot go a single day without coverage. Some of them have feeding tubes, very expensive medications, and many or most have 24/7 nursing.”

States were allowed to start removing people from Medicaid program last April, upon the expiration of the pandemic-induced national state of emergency. Florida has already kicked 1.3 million people off of Medicaid, including 460,000 children.

🏥 Wind back up: In an effort to mitigate the damage of the unwinding, the Biden administration announced that people who have been kicked off of Medicaid will have an additional four months to enroll in an Obamacare market plan.

More than 19 million working people have lost their Medicaid health insurance since last April. Only 2.4 million of them have enrolled in an ACA plan despite the significant subsidies currently available. I covered this very frequently last year, including in this piece for More Perfect Union:

The Biden administration’s new rule follows months and months of HHS secretary Xavier Becerra appealing to states to minimize the number of people they kick off Medicaid, with little to show for it.

⬆️ Mind the gap: Lawmakers in Vermont are taking it upon themselves to cover working class residents who may have lost their insurance over the past year.

The state House this week approved a proposal to provide subsidies and expand state plans to a number of different vulnerable demographics. Now it’s up to the state Senate to consider the bill, which would:

• Boost subsidies for people who transition from Medicaid to Medicare and can’t afford the sudden monthly premiums;

• Expand Dr. Dynasaur, the state’s Medicaid program for young people (yes, that’s really its name), to cover residents up to 21 years of age.

• Raise the income limits for pregnant women seeking to enroll in Medicaid.

Most Medicaid expansion cuts off at 138% of the federal poverty line, while Vermont’s program is available to kids from families who make up to 317% of the poverty rate, or $7,925 per month.

🔄 Eh-xpansion: On the other hand, the state with the highest uninsured rate is doing even less than the bare minimum.

Republicans in the Mississippi state Senate voted to approve a modest and conditional expansion of Medicaid. So modest and conditional, in fact, that the federal government wouldn’t even consider it an expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

In February, the state House authorized a typical Medicaid expansion, which would provide insurance to 200,000 poor residents. The Senate cut that down to just 40,000 potential beneficiaries, and conditioned even that on the federal government approving a 120 hour-per-month work requirement.

It’s a tremendously stupid idea, as well as an expensive one — the Senate’s plan would not qualify the state for extra federal funds, thereby costing Mississippi about $1.2 billion in revenue per year while doing little to save endangered local hospitals.

THESE PEOPLE ARE DERANGED:

😵‍💫 Party of Child Murder: Lawmakers in GOP-dominated Wyoming voted late last week to allow people to carry concealed guns into public schools and government meetings. Gov. Mark Gordon vetoed the bill days later, saving Wyoming from becoming the eighth state to allow concealed firearms in K-12 schools.

Gordon’s objection was mostly a response to the bureaucracy the bill would have created, with the legislature having to pass a new law every time an individual school system asked for the right to prohibit guns from places where children congregate.

The governor did, however, sign a bunch of other ridiculous gun bills, including a ban on red flag laws. These people are just begging for massacres.

🎓 Tennessee Ten: The Republican supermajority really can’t help but single out and boot Black people from positions of power.

This week, Tennessee House voted to fire every member of the board of directors at Tennessee State University, a Historically Black University in Nashville.

The GOP lawmakers cited allegations of financial mismanagement at the public university, though an audit turned up no purposeful wrongdoing. Instead, the study found that the school had been under-funded by the state to the tune of $2.1 billion over the past 30 years. Now Gov. Bill Lee, a white man, will have an opportunity to name an entire new board to a Black college.

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DEMOCRACY ON THE BRINK:

It was a truly mixed bag of a week for people who believe in the virtues of representative government. There were triumphs and defeats, surprises and frustrations, and while there are still lingering questions, the past few days brought us a fair bit closer to finalizing the ground rules and what the terrain will look like come November.

⬆️ New Jersey: A federal judge on Friday struck down the state’s infamous “county line” ballot format, which for decades gave an almost insurmountable advantage to candidates endorsed by county party bosses.

Activists tried for years to rid NJ of the uniquely undemocratic system, but it took national attention and a lawsuit led by Rep. Andy Kim to move the needle. Kim, who announced his candidacy for Senate after incumbent Sen. Bob Menendez was indicted on corruption charges. Despite early success, the race increasingly seemed rigged for First Lady Tammy Murphy, who entered the race months later and immediately began racking up endorsements from local party bosses.

Kim refused to accept what many pundits and party insiders loudly declared the inevitable, instead seeking an injunction against the county line while also fighting to win county conventions. Increasingly under fire and an inexperienced campaigner, Murphy and shocked the political world by dropping out earlier this week.

My hunch is that Murphy dropped out in part as an attempt to save the county line system, as her exit essentially guaranteed Kim top placement on every ballot. The attorneys for the county clerks sued in the case made that very argument, but this wasn’t even really about that particular race so much as it was about fair elections.

U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi’s ruling today will only impact this year’s primary, and must survive a potential appeal, but it essentially ensures the county line’s demise, heralding a sea change in the state’s politics.

⬇️ Pennsylvania: The latest voting rights news across the border in Pennsylvania isn’t nearly as exciting. A panel of federal appeals court judges ruled this week that residents who vote by mail must write the date of postage on the outside of the ballot envelope, and that failure to do so would lead to their vote being invalidated and tossed aside. Republicans celebrated the panel’s decision, which could feasibly tip a close election in the swing state.

⬆️ Minnesota: The state Senate gave approval to a state-level voting rights act, which would protect Minnesotans of color from state and local policies designed to make it more difficult for them to vote.

Crucially, the bill would also grant individuals and other private actors the ability to file lawsuits over alleged civil rights violations, a right that has been off-limits to them since far-right judges from the Eighth Circuit US Court of Appeals decided out of nowhere November that only the US Attorney general could do so.

The ruling, which is being appealed, applies to the seven states in the court’s jurisdiction, essentially cutting off civil rights groups from suing over racial gerrymandering and voter suppression laws.

⬇️ Gerrymandering: The Supreme Court didn’t release any decisions this week, but that doesn’t mean its shameless conservative supermajority didn’t wind up inflicting serious damage to American democracy.

First, a panel of three federal district court judges said that they had no choice but to permit South Carolina to use what the judges deemed an illegally gerrymandered Congressional map in this year’s election. As absurd as it sounds, it’s actually technically true.

The panel ruled all the way back January 2023 that the state had violated the Voting Rights Act by carving 30,000 Black voters out of a once-competitive district to make it a safe space for Rep. Nancy Mace. The Supreme Court heard an appeal of the decision in October, and was asked by both the ACLU and the state of South Carolina to issue a decision by January 1st so they each could prepare for this year’s primary.

It shouldn’t take very long to recognize that district as a gerrymander!

Instead, the justices evidently decided that Black voters didn’t deserve to have their voices heard, so they stayed silent for six months, running out the clock until the ballots had to be printed. That map will remain in use for the 2024 cycle, which could help Republicans hold on to their small majority in Congress this fall.

Did the court simply forget about this case? Was it so complicated that members just kept changing their votes? Was it too tight a turnaround? It certainly doesn’t take long for the justices to hear and decide cases that could bail out Donald Trump (always a yes) or deliberate over whether to grant a stay of execution to a prisoner whose conviction was based on discredited evidence (always a no).

This has become a pattern over the past few years. The Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use Republicans’ racially gerrymandered Congressional map during the 2022 election, only to finally overturn it and order new districts drawn last summer. In the meantime, that one extra GOP district is now the difference in the Republican’s single-seat House majority.

Federal courts also allowed Georgia and Louisiana to use racially gerrymandered maps, only to order redraws after another election (and Georgia just found another way to dilute the Black vote, anyway). A thematically similar situation played out in Ohio, where Republicans in the legislature simply refused to pass fair new legislative maps in 2022 after the state Supreme Court ruled that the existing ones egregiously violated the terms of a voter-approved anti-gerrymandering amendment to the state constitution.

Republicans in Ohio the foresight to hide a trap door in the amendment that allowed them to use the maps anyway, and after conservatives solidified their majority on the state Supreme Court that fall, the suit was dismissed. Now citizens there are mounting a campaign to replace it with a much stronger anti-gerrymandering amendment, which has a strong chance of success — if the Republicans allow it on the ballot.

Meanwhile, a different of federal judges ruled that North Carolina could proceed this election cycle with a comically illegal state Senate map. The 4th circuit panel suggested that the map was unlikely to be found in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and that an injunction at this point would violate the Purcell principle, which discourages material changes to voting laws and maps as an election draws anti.

The case got to them in January, giving them two months before the state’s primary to make a decision, but they had cover: the Supreme Court has frequently cited and abused Purcell, itself the product of a conservative court looking for an excuse to keep a racist Arizona voter ID law in place before the 2006 election. The high court sets the standard for lower courts, especially now that both the Supreme Court and federal circuit and appeals courts have been stocked with Leonard Leo’s most devoted ideological maniacs.

⬆️ A SANE SUPREME COURT: The Montana Supreme Court threw out a package of voter suppression laws passed in 2021 violate the state constitution. The decision, which affirmed a lower court ruling, overturned laws that:

• Banned same-day voter registration;

• Removed student IDs from the list of acceptable forms of voter identification;

• Prohibited third parties from paying signature collectors for ballot initiatives,

• Prevented counties from sending ballots to 17-year-olds who would turn 18 by election day.

Republicans are big mad about it, and with two seats on the Montana high court on the ballot this fall, expect a very tough campaign.

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