Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott humiliated themselves

And that's good news for public schools, public health, and public drag

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

I was going to send this issue out last night, but it took longer than anticipated because there’s a lot of news to discuss and this newsletter just doesn’t do simple bullet points or contextless capsules. You deserve much more than that.

This is the third newsletter I’ve written this week, and the next issue, scheduled for Sunday, will include a big reported feature story.

One more thing: George Santos is a clown who should have never made it to Congress, but his coming expulsion is a great example of DC’s selective morality. Santos is not nearly the biggest crook in Washington — he’s just the sloppiest and most expendable.

I’m not all defending the guy, who clearly doesn’t concern himself with the law or the truth, but tell me which is worse:

1. Indirectly tricking ultra-rich donors into paying for Botox and a bit of consensual porn, or…

2. Collecting millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies, insurers, weapons-makers, fast food chains, gunmakers, and oil companies, then doing their bidding against the best interests of the American people.

Sort of depressing to think about! But don’t worry, this will be a mostly uplifting newsletter.

Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep Progress Report afloat and sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you. Please help us fight the good fight.

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The War on Education

Make sure to pay careful attention to where each of these stories takes place, because otherwise, you might run the risk of transposing them in your mind.

📚🤣 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott got clowned this evening when House lawmakers voted to strip funding for private school vouchers from a major education funding bill.

The bill, which would have provided up to 40,000 kids a maximum of $10,500 apiece to attend a private or charter school, passed the state Senate earlier this month and seemed to be heading for a potential breakthrough in the lower chamber.

Instead, the latest attempt to create “education savings accounts” in Texas was killed by an unlikely but rock solid coalition of House Democrats and 21 mostly rural Republicans. The amendment to drop the voucher program passed by a robust 84-63 margin.

For Abbott, the loss comes with a Texas-sized serving of humble pie, smashed right into his face. The governor made no secret of his desperate desire to bring the right-wing scam to the Lone Star State, so that he could keep up with the likes of Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Arkansas. Almost immediately after failing to get the job done earlier this fall, Abbott called a fourth special session and demanded that the House GOP bend to his will. Clearly, they did not comply.

The increasingly bitter rivalries within the Texas GOP and between legislative leaders didn’t exactly help negotiations, but it was ultimately a mix of economics and cultural considerations that sunk Abbott’s plan. A study conducted by the Texas Legislative Budget Board projected that the voucher scheme would cost the state $2 billion per year by 2028.

Though the bill contained some modest increases for public schools and teacher salaries, it was clear that school privatization would inevitably siphon off vast sums of money from public education. Abbott only begrudgingly agreed to bless raises for teachers, and even then, it was contingent on passing the more expensive voucher program.

For rural Republicans, that prospect was simply unacceptable. Public schools are often the biggest employers in rural towns, and they also serve as the focal point of the community, especially during football season. Voucher programs are already running far over-budget — likely by design — in Arizona, Iowa, and Florida, underscoring the danger they present to public schools.

Private and charter schools are also unaccountable to the state and often use troublesome curriculum, while public schools, as one member of the Texas House recently made quite clear, do a very solid job of teaching biology.

“Once you have a voucher, regardless of how small it is, you have vouchers,” State Rep. Ernest Bailes said earlier this month. “You can’t be just a little bit pregnant. Either you are or not. That’s as simple as it gets.” 

🍎😤 New York City Mayor Eric Adams is reducing public school funding by hundreds of millions of dollars and shutter public libraries on the weekends.

The cuts, part of a larger austerity package introduced by Adams on Thursday, will disproportionately impact low-income New Yorkers. The Department of Education is being forced to slash $547 million from its budget; according to the United Federation of Teachers, 43% of the city’s schools would be impacted by the cuts.

Some $120 million is being taken from what was once a universal pre-K and 3-K program, which comes on the heels of Adams’ canceling the planned expansion of the city’s program for three-year-olds. The cuts will eliminate 37,000 supposedly unfilled seats right as the end of federal subsidies is due to plunge the city (and country) into an enormous childcare crisis.

NYC’s Summer Rising program, which provides summer school and neighborhood summer camp for elementary and middle school kids, is going to have to let out at 4pm each day instead of 6pm and end Friday service altogether. Again, working class families get screwed.

Adams is blaming the giant cuts on the city’s migrant crisis, a claim many eye with skepticism. There is at the very least no way to verify it, because as one source told me this week, City Hall is evidently not filing the proper documentation or going through the correct channels. Much more on this to come… provided Adams hasn’t either been arrested or absconded to Turkey beforehand.

RX Bandits

With Congress barely able to keep the basics of government functioning, it’s fallen to state legislatures to find creative ways to rein in the increasingly outrageous price of prescription drugs.

💊🧢 In Massachusetts, lawmakers are making progress on an omnibus drug-pricing bill that would cap the cost of generics and co-pays.

The state Senate on Wednesday approved the eloquently titled bill, “An Act relative to Pharmaceutical Access, Cost and Transparency,” thereby sending it to the state House for consideration. The legislation, colloquially known as PACT 3.0 — yes, they went through all that effort just to produce that weird acronym — contains a number of critical provisions. It would, among other things:

• Require insurers to cover the entire cost of generic medications

• Limit co-pays for brand-name drugs to $25

• Create a trust fund to subsidize prescriptions that treat chronic illnesses that are disproportionately suffered by people of color

• Create a licensing process for pharmacy benefit managers

• Compel PBM and pharmaceutical company executives to explain the rising cost of medicine in an annual public hearing.

Major credit to the lawmaker who came up with the idea of forcing pharma executives to justify their vampirism in a public forum every single year.

I’m always wary of provisions that apply only to people who have insurance, given that the price burden falls most on people who aren’t insured, but at least Massachusetts’s uninsured rate of 2.4% (as of 2021) is the lowest uninsured rate in the nation.

💉🕰️ Michigan Democrats’ main pharmaceutical price control bill is likely going to have to wait until at least the spring to reach Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desk.

The bill, which would create a Prescription Drug Affordability Board and empower it to reduce the cost of unfairly expensive medications, passed in the state Senate last month. The House, however, has been a nest of infighting and legislative delays, to the point that the bill’s lead sponsor, state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, told me that she had no real idea whether it would be added to the chamber’s schedule by the early November deadline.

Here’s a piece that I made about the innovative bill:

Alas, the legislation did not make the cut, in large part because the chamber had to ensure that it got other things done before Democrats lose their majority. At the moment, the party has a two-seat House majority, and rather inconveniently, two members won their local mayoral elections; upon their resignation, the House will be split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans until the state holds special elections.

Both districts are very blue, so the issue isn’t so much whether Democrat will win back those seats, but when. Gov. Whitmer has the ultimate authority to call special elections, but she’s got to contend with local election clerks who are begging her to put them off for as long as possible. The state’s new voting rights law requires them to provide nine days of in-person early voting and longer absentee voting periods, which requires them to hire more manpower or work longer hours themselves.

The election clerks want Whitmer to call for special election primaries in February to coincide with the presidential primaries but hold off on a general election until August, when Michigan holds its statewide primaries.

If Whitmer were to honor their request, two districts would be without representatives for at least eight months next year, while Democrats would have virtually zero chance of passing any meaningful legislation in an election year.

It’s more likely that Whitmer will call for a February primary and then May special general election, giving her party a few months to get things passed.

Karma and Chaos in the Florida Swamp

For a guy whose PAC is named Never Back Down, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sure seems to do a lot of losing these days.

The Supreme Court refused to rescue DeSantis’s signature anti-drag law late Thursday afternoon, keeping in place a statewide injunction issued by a circuit court judge back in June. The law sought to ban drag artists from performing in front of minors, or in places where minors could conceivably catch a glimpse of their performances.

Instead of the challenging the injunction’s claim that the law violated the First Amendment, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody asked the high court to narrow the injunction’s application to the restaurant that initially sued the state.

It wasn’t a flawless victory: Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito voted to let the law go into effect because their collective judicial philosophy boils down to the belief that they are entitled to imposing their intolerant ideologies on Americans.

Good vibes from a minority of bigots won’t do much to brighten the outlook for DeSantis, who continues to see his pointless, pernicious agenda get smacked down in court. Not that it’s stopping the Republican legislature, which now functions as an assembly line for unhinged ideas and violations of human decency.

This week in particular has produced some of the worst Florida GOP bills in years. One of the far-right fantasy bills would roll child labor laws even farther back than a bill filed earlier this fall, while another would enact one of the most vicious attacks on free speech in modern memory.

I’ll explain the details of those bills below, but first we should track back and review more of DeSantis’s recent legal losses and personal abasements.

Back in June, DeSantis suffered a double dose of humiliation when two of his attempts to ban gender-affirming care were blocked by a federal judge in short order. In early June, Judge Robert Hinckle stopped the state from preventing minors from being prescribed puberty blockers when deemed appropriate by their doctors; weeks later, Judge Hinckle blocked DeSantis’s directive that would have prohibited the state’s Medicaid program from paying for gender-affirming care.

History will remember that Ron DeSantis was thoroughly defeated by drag queens and trans kids long before he got trounced in a GOP presidential caucus or primary.

In late October, the DeSantis administration explicitly backed down when it agreed to resume posting Covid data on a state website and pay the significant legal fees of the non-profit that sued the state over the lack of transparency. During the legal proceedings, DeSantis’s Department of Health was forced to hand over two years’ worth of Covid-related data that the administration claimed did not exist.

An investigation by the Miami Herald found that by not reporting daily Covid numbers and trends, DeSantis was able to make it appear as if infections were on the decline in Florida, which for a time became a key part of his miserable failure of a presidential campaign.

A primary campaign doesn’t have to end in victory to be a success, especially for a first-time presidential candidate, but DeSantis has been so thoroughly unappealing that polls of Republican voters in New Hampshire now have him behind Chris Christie, a guy who spends every debate yelling at Republicans.

The downside of DeSantis’s national face-plant is that he’ll have more time to focus on making Florida worse, which Republican legislators are always eager to facilitate.

They introduced several morally repugnant bills this week alone. The first bill, a supplement to the GOP’s attempt to roll back child labor laws, would permit teens to work dangerous roofing and construction jobs.

The other would crack down even further on campus free speech by requiring Florida public colleges to refer foreign students who participate in pro-Palestinian rallies to the federal Department of Homeland Security for deportation. It’s something DeSantis proposed during the most recent GOP debate. The version proposed by the legislature would also make school prohibitively expensive for any in-state Floridan student who participates in such a protest.

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