The pageantry. The pride. The intense competition. The amazing performances. The fantastic wins and devastating losses.
… oh you thought I was talking about the Olympics? Naw. But those are totally happening, too.
And with 42 state legislatures in session this week, the statehouse action is almost as intense.
Curling (up into a corner of your jail cell): Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens has been indicted and arrested on charges related to a revenge-porn threat he used to silence a woman he’d been having an affair with before he ran for governor.
(If you’re just now tuning in, Greitens admitted he had an extramarital affair in 2015, and he’s been accused of using a nude picture he took of this girlfriend after blindfolding and restraining her to pressure her into not revealing his infidelity; he threatened to release the picture if she ever went public.)
Campaign Action
Okay, in non handcuff-related news ...
Expectations Jumping: Another week, another special election … and in this case, yet another special election red-to-blue flip for Democrats.
This is the 37th red-to-blue statehouse flip for Democrats this cycle, by the by.
- Linda Belcher’s (no joke, she’s a real human, not a cartoon one) upset victory in Kentucky House District 49 on Tuesday was plenty significant enough on its own; she won this Republican seat by a more than two-to-one margin (68-32 percent, specifically).
- But two other factors make this race remarkable:
- The size of the Democrats’ improvement over Trump’s performance in the district in 2016 (an epic 86-point swing!) and
- How this GOP-held seat got to be open in the first place.
- Once upon a time in 2016, Trump won this seat 72-23 percent, and Republican Dan Johnson ousted Belcher, the Democratic incumbent, by just 50.4-49.6 percent.
- Dan Johnson had “served” (often literally, as in illegal alcohol sales) the area as the self-styled “Pope” of the controversial Heart of Fire church for some 30 years.
- Last December, an extensive (not to mention excellent #longread worth your time) exposé brought allegations to light that Johnson had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old in his home after holding one of his infamous church parties.
- Just a day after publicly denying the accusation and refusing to resign from the legislature, he committed suicide.
- His widow, who continues to proclaim her late husband’s innocence, ran for the seat.
Despite the unusual circumstances of this contest, if Republicans can’t hold onto seats like this in deep red states like Kentucky, they’re a special kind of screwed in November—at every level of the ballot.
Roe-ing: Last week, I flagged a bill making its way through the Wisconsin Senate that would prevent the state from providing public workers with insurance plans that cover abortions.
- The only exceptions in the measure are for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother … except that the rape or incest has to be reported to the police, which most are not, so, yeah, these “exceptions” are garbage flourish on a garbage bill.
- The bill was approved by the GOP-controlled Assembly last November.
Well, I’ve got a lousy update: This terrible piece of anti-reproductive rights legislation passed the state Senate on a party-line vote and is headed to Gov. Scott Walker’s desk for his signature.
But wait, there’s more bad news! The state Senate also passed, also on a party-line vote, a bill that guts state wetlands protections to accommodate more commercial development.
- Gov. Walker is expected to sign this bill, too.
Logic Slalom: Many eyes have rightly been on the Florida statehouse this week, where students worked to transform last week’s horrific school shooting into action by marching and protesting and watching from the legislature’s galleries as the GOP-controlled House and Senate considered legislation to combat gun violence.
You know what they say: Guns don’t kill people. Porn kills people.
Wait, no, that’s not it.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with porn.
That doesn’t sound right, either.
Anyway.
Okay, back to the gun stuff.
A significant difference between this month’s shooting and the horrific Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 is timing.
- The Orlando tragedy took place during the summer, after Florida’s legislative session had adjourned.
- But more than two weeks remain in the current Florida session, and maybe, just maybe, these student survivors and activists will pressure lawmakers into actually getting something done.
- A deal is reportedly “taking shape” that would establish age limits and waiting periods for assault rifles.
- However, this same “deal” includes a proposal to arm teachers and other school personnel, which is obviously a garbage idea that I could go on about for eons but this is a newsletter about Statehouse Action and you’re obviously a Very Smart Person to be reading it and surely already understand the myriad and profound problems with such an awful notion.
Ahem.
- Proposals to arm teachers are popping up all over the place, actually, what with Republicans emboldened by Donald Trump’s clear endorsement of this terrible idea.
- In North Carolina, a state lawmaker pushing this policy derided opposition to more guns in schools as “useless hysteria.”
THIS MAN MAKES LAWS
- Legislators in Kentucky, Colorado, and Alabama are also already considering the merits of arming teachers.
- On the not-terrible side of this policy discussion, Democrats in Ohio have introduced legislation to ban the possession of assault-style rifles and require the registration of gun purchases.
- Look for Democrats in statehouses across the country to continue to push for gun safety in the wake of the Florida tragedy, even in states where they’re outnumbered by Republicans. Because you can’t win if you don’t try.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in South Carolina are trying to ban saggy pants.
Guns don’t kill people. Exposed boxers kill people.
Freestyle Spending: Turns out North Carolina Republican lawmakers’ love affair with firearms extends beyond just saying moronic things about school shootings.
- At least four GOP state lawmakers have spent hundreds of their campaign donors’ dollars over the past few years on NRA memberships.
- At least two legislators have recently used campaign money to buy guns: one for “protection,” the other as a raffle prize at a fundraising event.
BothSides™-lon: False equivalency could really have its own set of olympic-level events. As Pennsylvania Republicans continue to up their rhetoric surrounding the potential impeachment of state Supreme Court justices because of the court’s ruling against the GOP’s gerrymandered congressional map (sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate joined in this week), some observers have claimed that Democrats would be responding similarly if the shoe were on the other partisan foot and the court had rejected Democratic maps.
This is malarkey.
Almost a decade of evidence supports the fact that undermining, eliminating, defunding, and otherwise attacking judges and agencies that defy Republicans is an established GOP modus operandi.
I’ve already discussed the creative work of Wisconsin and Arizona GOP lawmakers in this space (getting rid of the Government Accountability Board and trying to eliminate the Independent Redistricting Commission, respectively). Both are bad enough to deserve quick recapping, though:
Arizona: In 2011, the Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) drew a new congressional map that failed to give sufficient advantage to Republicans because their criteria explicitly included competitiveness.
- GOP. Gov. Jan Brewer proceeded to fire the head of the IRC for this affront.
- The Arizona Supreme Court reinstated her.
- The “offending” maps were approved by the IRC and went into effect for the 2012 elections.
- But after failing the control the IRC, Arizona Republicans tried to get rid of it.
- The legislature’s GOP majority sued to have the IRC declared unconstitutional, saying it unlawfully removed power over redistricting from the lawmakers themselves.
- The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, and Arizona Republicans were forced to let the IRC remain in existence.
- Arizona Republicans then tried to get the maps themselves declared unconstitutional, but that didn’t go their way, either.
- And now Arizona Republicans are still trying to twist the IRC into something they can control: Republican lawmakers are currently pushing a measure that would completely remake the IRC and undermine its bipartisan redistricting work by effectively taking redistricting authority away from the IRC and placing it back in state legislators’ hands.
Wisconsin: In 2015, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature disbanded the state’s nonpartisan elections and ethics oversight agency, the Government Accountability Board (GAB).
- Almost all of the GAB's critics over the eight years of its existence were Republicans, and their ire was largely motivated by a GAB investigation into possible (and illegal) coordination between GOP Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and conservative groups during the 2012 recall election.
- Democrats lacked the numbers in the legislature to halt the GOP’s bill to dismantle the GAB, and in 2016, the board was officially dissolved and split into a separate ethics commission and an elections oversight commission.
- Commission members are now selected by legislative leaders or the governor—the very same partisan officeholders the commissioners are supposed to oversee.
But courts remain Republicans’ favorite target.
- In 2015, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling finding the state’s method of funding public schools both inadequate and unfairly distributed.
- This upset the Republican-controlled legislature, which responded with a pair of retaliatory laws that created a catch-22 of sorts for state courts.
- The first law stripped the state Supreme Court of administrative power over lower courts; the second stripped the state’s entire court system of funding if a court struck down any part of the previous law.
- That first law removing the court’s authority was at least pretty straightforwardly unconstitutional, and the Kansas Supreme Court ruled thusly.
- But that triggered the law that eliminated the state court system’s financing.
- This didn’t last too long, though; it’s hard to run for re-election after you’ve destroyed the judicial system and your state’s become a lawless hellscape, after all. A few weeks later, the legislature blinked and passed a bill restoring the courts’ funding.
- But Republicans weren’t going to let this perceived affront go without a further fight.
- Proposals surfaced to broaden the grounds for judicial impeachment, to give the governor and the legislature complete power over judicial selection, and to begin electing judges to state courts.
- The efforts stalled in 2016, but there’s no reason to think Republicans are giving up. Already this year, they’ve denied the state judicial branch’s request for a budget increase.
But no conversation about GOP legislative overreach can exclude North Carolina.
- In 2016, the state’s Republican legislators, occupying comfortable, veto-proof supermajorities in both the state House and Senate—obtained through gerrymanders that have since been ruled unconstitutional by the courts—were positively incensed that a Democrat had the temerity to win the governorship.
- So the GOP set about removing as much power from the executive branch as they conceivably could.
- So, presented with some judicial rulings they didn’t like, Republican lawmakers set about messing with North Carolina’s court system itself.
- Now North Carolina Republicans want to redraw the state’s judicial districts for the first time in 50 years, and they’ve proposed a gerrymandered map designed to elect Republican judges to 70 percent of lower court seats.
- They’re even proposing having the legislature appoint appellate judges instead of holding elections and having the governor fill any vacancies, meaning their legislative district gerrymanders would determine the partisan composition of the courts that rule on … gerrymandering.
Now let’s look at the list of comparable things Democratic lawmakers have done to undermine judges or agencies or other branches of government.
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OH WAIT RIGHT THERE’S NOTHING
It’s an okay competition to place last in tbh
That’s enough snowboredom for one week. I luge you all!