UPDATE: Minimum wage sabotage and swing state voting chaos

With a note, from me to you

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

Well, sort of, anyway.

I’ve received a few notes about last night’s edition of the newsletter and the myriad grammatical and/or typographical errors that it contained. Looking back on the text, I’m disappointed in the lackluster copyediting that preceded its late-night publication.

Writing Progress Report is both a privilege and a grind. Reader support allows me to pursue the stories that interest me and hopefully contribute to structural and cultural change in this country, but that support doesn’t yet cover costs for a second employee, so it means that I’m also singularly responsible for making sure that it gets published regularly.

Some people may use a newsletter as easy side money, viewing the paying subscribers as personal patrons, but I see each subscription as an act of faith that I’m determined to honor. Which can lead to occasional stupidity. I’ve been under the weather the past few days and underwent a medical procedure early this morning, so I probably should have just rested. Instead, the newsletter was sloppy, which is a net negative for readers, who deserve a top-notch product.

I apologize for not sending my best last night. I’ve cleaned up the newsletter and added some new stories, including a significant scoop. This edition is open to everybody.

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. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Arizona: Some mixed news this week out of the desert, where democracy is on the edge and the cost of living is driving battles on the ballot and in the state house.

We’ll start with a scoop: The worker-driven nonprofit One Fair Wage is withdrawing its proposed initiative to change the state’s minimum wage laws from the November ballot. The organization collected over 100K more petition signatures than is required to qualify this year, but a lawsuit by the Arizona Restaurant Association and the state’s regressive and arbitrary sampling rules around verification made actually getting on the ballot a difficult and dauntingly expensive task.

The ballot initiative would have raised the minimum wage in Arizona to $18-an-hour and phased out the lower tipped minimum wage for service workers. Instead of barging forward, OFW is going to spend the money it’d have used on an uphill lawsuit for a multi-pronged campaign over the next 10 months.

First, the group is going all-in to stop a competing ballot measure that would lower the tipped minimum wage in Arizona. That one was pushed by the Arizona Restaurant Association and put directly on the ballot by the pliant GOP-controlled legislature. It’s deceptively titled the “Protect Tipped Workers Act,” a cynical and nefarious name that OFW is suing to have changed.

Given how hard it is to get on the ballot with unfriendly courts and deep-pocketed opponents in Arizona, OFW will instead multiple campaigns to get its proposal on a number of city ballots in next May’s municipal elections. It also plans on investing big time in several legislative elections in hopes of flipping a few seats — Republicans hold the slimmest of margins in both chambers in Arizona — and having their proposal passed into state law at the capitol.

OK, now for some better news: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a major part of the GOP’s controversial voter suppression law, which was passed while Gov. Doug Ducey was still in office.

The appeals court ruled that the law is onerous and violates peoples’ rights. Its ruling means that voters no longer need to prove that they are citizens to cast a ballot; those without proper ID will simply have to swear under penalty of law that they are eligible to vote.

Georgia: Republican extremists, cynics, and deranged election deniers continue to attack the state’s election system from all angles.

Last week, it was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger introducing a tool that makes it easy for people to impersonate Georgians and cancel their voter registrations — a crime made even easier by the accidental, temporary upload of a file with every voter’s personal information.

Yesterday, the Republican majority on the state Board of Elections approved a new rule that will make it easier for partisans, cheats, conspiracy theorists, and reality deniers to intervene in vote counting and certification, which all evidence indicates is likely to be a huge problem.

Each county now must hold a “reasonable inquiry” into any potential mistakes or voter fraud before certifying election results, a sop to the fringe maniacs who took over many of Georgia’s county election boards after the 2020 election.

”The proposed rule changes will give authority to local election officials to halt the counting of votes and slow down, or even outright refuse certification if they contend there are any irregularities, essentially making the certification of election results discretionary,” said Democratic House Minority Whip Sam Park. “The key word there is discretionary. This would essentially give partisan county board of elections personal control over Georgia’s election results, allowing them to uphold certifying the election if they disagree with the results.”

Some officials have already tried to delay certification of primary elections, and now they’ll have the legal cover to mess with results in November.

These inquiries can create a conspiracy-driven time loop that continues in perpetuity. For example, in Fulton County, the state’s biggest and bluest enclave, the same partisan Board of Elections this week ordered yet another inquiry info a screw-up that led to the double-counting of 3,000 votes. Conspiracy theories abound, yet multiple prior investigations have failed to turn up any evidence of fraud. Ironically, it may actually be illegal for Republicans to go through with this.

It’s not all bleak news from psychopath conservative activists, though: The Cobb County election board this week rejected challenges to 2500 voters’ registrations that had been lodged by a local far-right activist. The names were flagged by EagleAI, the enormously inaccurate and algorithmically racist software that conservatives like to pretend can identify ineligible voters.

There’s more where that came from: Georgia has been plagued by election conspiracy theorists who constantly push to have people removed from the rolls, and since 2020, there been more than 350,000 challenged registrations. Georgia Republicans just passed a law to make it even easier to mass-challenges registrations, too.

Missouri: Rep. Cori Bush was defeated in a hotly contested primary by St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell on Tuesday night, becoming the second member of The Squad to be ousted by Democratic voters this summer.

Like NY Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who lost in June to a conservative tax cheat in Westchester, Bush could not withstand the tidal wave of cash unleashed against her by AIPAC and several other pro-Netanyahu organizations. All told, AIPAC’s campaign spending arm, the anodyne-sounding United Democracy Project, pumped at least $8.4 million into trashing a civil rights activist who has been one of the fiercest advocates for poor and working class families since she arrived in Congress in 2021 — with virtually zero pushback from Democratic leaders.

The cryptocurrency lobby, which has been just as active during this primary season, spent $1.5 million to promote Bell’s campaign. A PAC funded by billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman kicked in $1.4 million.

Bush was highly critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians and the belligerence it has shown in trying to bait nearby Arab countries into a regional war. Bell, who went back on his promise Bush that he would not primary her once AIPAC came knocking, did not criticize Israel. He instead largely echoed the insincere attacks on her legislative record that AIPAC paid to have aired continuously on local television.

It was essentially the same playbook they ran against Bowman, who was pilloried for voting against the bipartisan infrastructure bill in protest of conservative Democrats’ spiking what would have been historic investments in childcare, higher education, and other key priorities shared by President Joe Biden and most members of the party. That it works — Bush was up 15% in January before the big investments kicked in, and lost by 5% this week — gives you an idea of how little most people pay attention to politics.

As a community activist in a deeply segregated city, and as somebody who took sometimes combative stances on difficult issues, Bush was a lightning rod for criticism. Having risen to prominence during the protests over the police murder of Michael Brown, Bush is one of the few Democrats who have continued to promote the Defund the Police demand, and she’s never had the best approval rating, but this primary does not happen with $10+ million from conservative groups.

The timing of this primary election is sobering: Kamala Harris deserves full credit for leaning into populism over centrism in her choice for VP, but there should be no illusion that the Democratic Party has fully inoculated itself against the cynical machinations of wealthy conservative donors.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has stood idly by while his long-time allies at AIPAC have poured unprecedented sums into overwhelming progressive incumbents and all notions of democratic fairness. The DCCC supposedly exists to protect incumbents, but it appears as if there’s an exception made for Black progressives. At the very least, leadership should recognize that the only way to push the nation to the left and even simply what party leaders want to achieve is by having some uncompromising leftist members who can demand more and then take a compromise.

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The Great Abandonment: The yearlong Medicaid unwinding is finally over, and the numbers are just about as bad as one would expect from a process that kicked more than 25 million mostly low-income people off of their health insurance.

The unwinding began last April, when states were permitted to re-evaluate and redetermine eligibility for Medicaid, a process that was paused for several years during the pandemic. A fair number of the people kicked off no longer needed the insurance, either because they got health care through a family member or from an employer; many more got redirected to the health care markets.

But neither of those paths were universal, and two million people fell uninsured. Overall, the number of Americans who have lost their insurance jumped up to 28 million people, bringing the uninsured rate up from 7.7% to 8.2%.

Florida: Few states booted as many kids off of Medicaid as the dreary Sunshine State, which removed 1.8 million people from the overall list. Of those 1.8 million disenrollees, nearly were nearly 500,000 of them were children, and many of the kids who were canceled were long-term patients with special treatment violates .

Lo and behold, it turns out that many of them were kicked off illegally, a dramatic situation that can come to a resolution without our input. A federal judge just suggested that both sides drop their pride and come up with a solution on their own, because otherwise, any settlement or smarting enforced by the court is not going to make them happy.

Unfortunately, Florida continues to kick kids off of Medicaid early even after the federal government this spring ordered states to keep people under the age of 18 on their benefits for a full and uninterrupted 12 months.

Housing: Buoyed by the executive order they convinced President Biden to sign and now riding high on a huge rent control plan proposed by Biden and supported by Kamala Harris, the folks behind the Kansas City housing movement are working with other tenants unions to form a national organization.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healy just signed a new law that will put around $5 billion toward housing, including $2 billion toward affordable housing owned by the state.

Gun control: A ban on assault rifles passed by Maryland in 2013 has been upheld in a split decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Unlike the US Supreme Court, the judges in this case were able to recognize how guns that can kill hundreds of people within a minute or two differ from the muskets employed by soldiers during the Revolutionary War.

“Assault weapons at issue fall outside the ambit of protection offered by the Second Amendment because, in essence, they are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense,” Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in his majority opinion.

“Moreover, the Maryland law fits comfortably within our nation’s tradition of firearms regulation. It is but another example of a state regulating excessively dangerous weapons once their incompatibility with a lawful and safe society becomes apparent, while nonetheless preserving avenues for armed self-defense,” Wilkinson added.

The point about tradition is an important nod to the legal theory invented whole cloth by conservatives on the US Supreme Court in order to justify overturning gun control laws.

Buoyed by the decision, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee says that he will include an assault rifle ban in his annual budget next year, giving it a better chance to pass after several years of legislative inaction. The president of the State Senate, Sen. Dominick Ruggerio, is an avid supporter of gun rights. Rhode Island is a blue state, but that means that conservatives run as Democrats because it’s the only way to get elected. We’ve seen a lot of that in New York, as well.

Here’s a quick rundown of the latest on a few key initiatives and amendments.

Arizona: The far-right Arizona Supreme Court justice who once compared abortion to genocide says that he will not recuse himself pending case looking to get on the ballot, which has been a disaster a progressives in the ‘90s cycles.

There is more news from Arizona and its horrible election boards come tomorrow, and I’ll have the exclusive for you tomorrow night.

Denver: The city took a big step toward handling its bevy of homeless people, but nothing will truly alleviate the problem until there is lot more housing built. Denver is hoping to fix that problem by getting permission from residents to raise the sales tax by $0.50 put the money raised toward building a new suite plucky teens if possible.

Colorado: More broadly, the bigots who wanted to restrict LGBTQ+ people from fully participating in life in Colorado this spring could not even muster the signatures to get on the ballot. Total losers.

Arkansas: Abortion rights advocates are accusing Secretary of State John Thurston of pulling a bait and switch on their campaign to qualify a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It’s been more than a month since they submitted far more signatures than necessary to qualify the amendment, but Thurston is dragging his heels on counting them under the cover of obviously false accusations. The case is now with the state Supreme Court.

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