On Friday, Governor Tim Walz visited Webster Elementary School in Minneapolis and signed a bill that will provide Minnesota students free breakfast and lunch.
Community activists, youth leaders and lawmakers attended the news conference in northeast Minneapolis on Friday afternoon.
“If this were easy, this would have been done a long time ago," said Gov. Walz before signing the bill into law.
Gov. Walz says Minnesota is the fourth state to make meals free at schools joining California, Colorado and Maine.
"I was 1 in 6 of those Minnesota children who experienced hunger. I'm one of the children who grew up with a different colored lunch ticket because my family utilized free and reduced-priced lunch," Flanagan shared. "There were nights where I ate, and my mom said she simply wasn't hungry. It wasn't until I was an adult and I was a parent that I realized she was lying to protect me from the reality of our food insecurity... that she was hungry."
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"Being hungry makes learning almost impossible," Democratic Sen. Heather Gustafson, of Vadnais Heights, the lead author, who is also a teacher, said earlier this week. "This is a bill that will ensure every student, K through 12, in Minnesota is going to get the food they need while they're at school."
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Gustafson said roughly one in six children are considered "food insecure," meaning they don't know when they will get their next meal.
Around 18.5% of Minnesota students likely qualify for free or reduced meals but don't get them, she added, often because of instability within their families. And for families that are just over the poverty line or need a break, she said, guaranteed meals will mean one less thing to worry about.
Drazkowski has made appearances on our blogs several times over the years, including when he took to Twitter to joke about global warming and when he tried to bully fellow representatives in the Minnesota House.
Well, Steve Drazkowski is a Minnesota state senator now. And this week, he’s making national news headlines for his insensitive comments about a bill to provide universal school meals for students.
Many — but not all — students in Minnesota qualify for free and reduced meals. That program is based on household income, and if families are below a certain threshold their students can receive school meals for free or for a reduced price.
There’s also a law in Minnesota requiring schools to provide identical meals to all students, even if their families are experiencing financial difficulties. It’s supposed to prevent ‘lunch shaming’ practices where children are denied food or given substitutes that indicate their family is struggling financially.
But even with these measures, there are still families who do not qualify for free and reduced meals but who struggle to pay for food. In many districts this year, that has meant mounting school lunch debts in the tens of thousands of dollars because there are families who don’t qualify for free lunch programs but aren’t able to pay.
That bill apparently passed: Sick and safe leave | Minnesota Department of Labor and IndustryUnder this new bill, workers can accrue up to 48 hours a year of earned sick and safe time for when they need to recover from an illness, go to a medical appointment, or care for a child during a school closure.
Additionally, the legislation spells out a distinct “safe time” category that can be used by victims of stalking or sexual assault that need to take time off work to see medical attention, or relocate to ensure their safety.
Last week, you signed an executive order guaranteeing that gender-affirming care would remain available in Minnesota. Reading through that executive order, it doesn't change any existing laws in Minnesota, Minnesota is a blue state. So, why did you view it as necessary to take that step?
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I think the step was is because our trans neighbors, our children are feeling the pressure. We see states that are using state power as an apparatus of cruelty, quite honestly. And we know that these are communities that are always under risk. We know they have some of the highest suicide rates, attacks of hate crimes against them.
And I think, in Minnesota, reaffirming through the executive order that, whether it be making sure our insurance companies are paying for what they need to pay for, or making it clear that, if you come to Minnesota, we will protect your rights — we are not going to extradite you or cooperate with states that are really trying to take away basic and, in many cases, lifesaving health care.
In her State of the State address this year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had something no other Democratic governor has had since the early 1980s – a legislature willing to pass her agenda, even if with only a two-seat majority in both chambers.
"We spoke with a clear voice in November," Whitmer said. "We want the ability to raise a family without breaking the bank, strong protections for our fundamental rights to vote and control our own bodies."
With the likes of
Yes indeed.Amazing what can be done when sane people are in charge.
"In Utah, Mississippi and Tennessee, Republican-dominated legislatures are passing laws banning gender therapies for trans kids under age 18." But Michigan's legislature has been going in the opposite direction.It’s not easy being a progressive these days. Republicans control the House of Representatives and are threatening to tank the economy by refusing to raise the debt limit. The Supreme Court, after having overturned Roe v. Wade and set an impossibly high standard for new gun control legislation, looks primed to undo President Joe Biden’s student loan relief. And at the state level, it seems not a day goes by that a red-state legislature doesn’t pass new laws targeting LGBTQ people or imposing new mandates on schoolteachers.
Race-based hair discrimination? That's something that many black women have been subjected to for letting their hair grow out in its tightly curled state without trying to straighten it.Since January, Democrats have passed laws guaranteeing the right to abortion, providing drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, requiring state utilities to go carbon-free by 2040 and banning race-based hair discrimination. ...
More progressive bills may soon be on the way to Gov. Tim Walz’s desk. Voting rights legislation, which would make registration automatic, restore voting rights for felons, allow pre-registration to vote and increase campaign finance transparency, ... The House has also passed legislation to mandate that employers provide their workers with sick leave. ...
Overall, the Minnesota Legislature passed more bills in January than in the previous six Januaries combined. It’s yet another reminder that elections have consequences.
"Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair"The CROWN Act was created in 2019 by Dove and the CROWN Coalition, in partnership with then State Senator Holly J. Mitchell of California, to ensure protection against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles by extending statutory protection to hair texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in the workplace and public schools.
A good change from being whimpering cowardly Clintonite centrists, wringing one's hands about how one can't do anything nice, and expecting to win by being Republican Lite.As Republicans increasingly take more extreme positions, especially on social issues, they leave fewer third rails for Democrats. Legislation that once might have seemed “too liberal” now looks practically centrist in comparison to the positions adopted by Republicans. As the GOP increasingly moves to the far right, it has ceded the middle ground to Democrats. Indeed, only hours after Michigan legislators voted to do away with right-to-work laws — a key labor initiative — Democrats introduced legislation to create a full, refundable tax credit for money paid toward union dues. This, too, appears likely to pass.
A similar phenomenon unfolded during the first two years of Biden’s presidential term, with Democrats holding a narrow majority but still proposing and enacting progressive legislation — and pushing the policy envelope in ways that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago.
Michigan becomes 1st state in decades to repeal ‘right-to-work’ law | PBS NewsHourCalifornia and Maine have made universal meals permanent, legislation to do so is advancing in Vermont, and Nevada pitched in $75 million to extend free school meals for this school year. In Colorado, voters approved a ballot measure last fall giving school districts the opportunity to offer free lunches.
Nationally, debts for unpaid school meals have been rising, indicating the need to continue providing free meals to ensure students are able to concentrate in the classroom.
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The new law aims to boost the amount of food that comes from local growers through farm-to-table grants. Currently, about 168 farmers, ranchers and food businesses sell locally produced products to schools in 19 of the state's 33 counties.
Supporters also hope the new law will lead to less food waste by requiring kindergarten through sixth grade students to have more time to sit down and eat, and by collecting unused food for use by food pantries, students and other charitable organizations.
In effect, a right-to-freeload law.The state’s “right-to-work” law had allowed those in unionized workplaces to opt out of paying union dues and fees. Its repeal is seen as a major victory for organized labor with union membership reaching an all-time low last year.
The second-term governor also signed legislation restoring a prevailing wage law that had been repealed by Republicans in 2018. It requires contractors hired for state projects to pay union-level wages.
I call it Sinemization because its endpoint seems to be the Kyrsten Sinema sort of person: economically pro-capitalist-elite and culturally at least somewhat left-wing.My first dissertation paper is out from @PoPpublicsphere:
In it, I show the steady drift of affluent voters from the Republican to Democratic Party. It's beyond the "upper middle class"—it's the top 10%, 5% & even (in 2016) the top ~1%.
I'm primarily pointing to potential effects on the Democrats' economic policy prospects:
This (theoretically) makes it harder to impose policy costs of progressive economic policies on affluent voter blocs, which are now in the D coalition.
This new state of American politics (a drastic change from 20th century voting coalitions) has certainly been caused in part by the increasing divergence in Republican & Democratic agendas on "2nd dimension" issues, eg abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, environmental regulation. However, I also argue that the relative friendliness of the Democratic economic policy agenda toward affluent voters (of the 90s + 2000s + even 2010s)—eg not imposing many direct policy costs—was a necessary condition for this new reality (relying on historical work by @LGeismer).
It's still unclear the degree to which affluent Democrats actively oppose certain forms of redistribution, and which they may somewhat support (more likely those that don't imposing direct costs on the affluent—eg, taxation, housing policy reforms). It's clear the Biden Dem. Party can win affluent voter support and propose a certain kind of progressive agenda—albeit one that only imposes small direct costs on large corporations and the super rich (eg, top 1%).
This paper was certainly shaped by writing & research by folks like @LGeismer, @karpmj, Phillip Rehm, Herbert Kitschelt, @PikettyLeMonde, @ameliamalpas, Sander Trubowitz, @LukewSavage & others
Thus Sinemizing the Democratic Party, making it more like Kyrsten Sinema.Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats. In this paper, I show detailed evidence for this decades-in-the-making trend and argue that it has important consequences for the U.S. politics of economic inequality and redistribution. Beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party started winning increasing shares of rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation, and stock-owning voters. This appears true across voters of all races and ethnicities, is concentrated among (but not exclusive to) college-educated voters, and is only true among voters living in larger metropolitan areas. In the 2010s, Democratic candidates’ electoral appeal among affluent voters reached above-majority levels. I echo other scholars in maintaining that this trend is partially driven by the increasingly “culturally liberal” views of educated voters and party elite polarization on those issues, but I additionally argue that the evolution and stasis of the parties’ respective economic policy agendas has also been a necessary condition for the changing behavior of affluent voters. This reversal of an American politics truism means that the Democratic Party’s attempts to cohere around an economically redistributive policy agenda in an era of rising inequality face real barriers.
A departure from the past.Voters with college and post-graduate degrees have been shifting their support from Republican to Democratic candidates in the past ten to twenty years (e.g., Kitschelt and Rehm Reference Kitschelt and Rehm2019; Grossman and Hopkins Reference Grossman and Hopkins n.d.). Contemporaneously, rural and small-town voters have increased their Republican allegiance, while urban dwellers have become a solid Democratic voting bloc (e.g., Rodden Reference Rodden2019).
... from the 1950s to the 1990s, Republicans gained more and more support from the rich (and higher-educated), and Democrats won votes from lower-income (and less-educated) voters.
... In today’s America, both political parties largely split the support of higher-income voters.
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Now, the Democratic and Republican voter coalitions look far more similar to one another by income than they ever have (see, e.g., figures 1 and 2).
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Strikingly, in multiple elections since the 2010s, the data actually show a form of “backwards” polarization:Footnote 8 majorities of affluent voters voted for Democratic candidates. Specifically, some evidence shows that Democratic candidates actually beat Republicans in attaining support from the top 5% (by income), the highest income stock-owning voters, and even the top 1% of voters (by income) over the past decade.
American politics literature has established trends such as geographic, education, and racial and ethnic polarization between the parties: urban voters, more-educated voters, and voters of color have become (on average) more likely to support the Democratic Party, while rural voters, less-educated voters, and white voters have shifted toward the Republican Party.
Like Dwight Eisenhower accepting the New Deal, Bill Clinton accepted Reaganism -- neoliberalism, as it's sometimes called. "The era of big government is over." Bill Clinton said in his 1996 inaugural address.Recent American politics literature has shown that Republican presidents tended to exacerbate economic inequality, while Democrats, after winning office, mitigated inequality (Bartels Reference Bartels 2008; Kelly Reference Kelly 2009). However, the effects of Democratic presidents on inequality tended to disappear beginning in the 1990s—which is when the Democratic Party began attracting increasing shares of affluent voters (e.g., figure 2). Some scholars have argued that the Democratic and Republican Party agendas converged, more or less, on multiple areas of regulation of the economy (e.g., financial regulation) beginning in the 1990s, and this is one way that politics has perpetuated inequality in society (Keller and Kelly Reference Keller and Kelly 2015; Kelly Reference Kelly 2020). Historical work has shown how the Democratic Party agenda moved in an anti-welfare, anti-organized labor, and ideationally pro-free market direction in the 1990s as the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton rose to prominence within the party (Geismer Reference Geismer 2022).
Multiple recent studies of European politics show some suggestive evidence that center-left parties—who have been gaining increasing support from higher-educated, middle- and high-income professionals—have shifted their economic policy agendas from mitigating “old” labor market risks (e.g., unemployment) to “new” risks (e.g., education, childcare spending), therefore overall still supporting some forms of welfare state policies (Gingrich and Hausermann Reference Gingrich and Häusermann 2015; Abou-Chadi and Emmergut Reference Abou‐Chadi and Immergut 2019).
As Kitschelt and Rehm (Reference Kitschelt and Rehm 2019) make clear, the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy—where the economic gains to educational attainment have vastly increased—has created a new class of voters with “libertarian” (a.k.a. socially/culturally liberal) views on issues such as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, drug laws, racial inclusion, and other issues that involve extending civil rights to subgroups of Americans. Dovetailing with a literature that argues that voters with more education and more income are more likely to hold more socially/culturally liberal views than other voters (e.g., Inglehart Reference Inglehart 1981; Broockman, Ferenstein, and Malhotra Reference Broockman, Ferenstein and Malhotra 2019) which may even be more likely than their economic views to drive their voting behavior (Enke, Polborn, and Wu Reference Enke, Polborn and Wu2022), many scholars agree that many more Americans today simply hold more socially/culturally liberal views than ever before.
Also important is the development of a post-industrial economy.The Democratic Party’s relative warmth toward the movements for Civil Rights and women’s liberation of the 1960s and 1970s created the impression that Democrats care more than Republicans about the well-being of Americans who are not white and not men (e.g., Ladd and Hadley Reference Ladd and Hadley1975; Edsall and Edsall Reference Edsall and Edsall 1992; Kitschelt and Rehm Reference Kitschelt and Rehm2019). Followed quickly by the rise of the Christian Right’s ascendance within the Republican Party, by the 2000s, Democrats and Republicans had clearly opposing policy agendas on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, and Republicans had begun winning majorities of white Americans (e.g., Miller and Schofield Reference Miller and Schofield 2008; Abrajano and Hajnal Reference Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson 2020). The Democrats had become the party of social/cultural liberalism, through and through (Brownstein Reference Brownstein 2021).
So these upper middle class people favor sorts of government spending that Republicans have ideologically opposed for decades.When it comes to possible voter preference changes on economic issues, the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy is once again relevant. Economic activity in the twenty-first century is now far more likely to be generated in cities and metropolitan areas and primarily powered by people with college and post-graduate degrees, and these voters do seem to favor increased government spending on infrastructure, research and development, transportation, and what might be called “new labor market risks” such as education and childcare spending—essentially, policy demand created by the economic activity of a more educated workforce living in dense metropolitan areas in both the United States and Europe (Gingrich and Hausermann Reference Gingrich and Häusermann 2015; Abou-Chadi and Emmergut Reference Abou‐Chadi and Immergut 2019; Ansell and Gingrich Reference Ansell, Gingrich, Hacker, Hertel-Fernandez, Pierson and Thelen 2021; Hacker, Pierson, and Zacher Reference Hacker, Pierson and Zacher 2021).
Much like European far-right parties: civil rights and social democracy only for Real Citizens.Trump campaigned on a platform that was more anti-immigration, anti-trade, and pro-social safety net than nearly all Republicans in recent memory. He also broke from the mold via his rhetoric, framing other political actors more starkly as winners or losers and employing insults, among other ways (e.g., Ross and Rivers Reference Ross and Rivers 2020).
Third, European studies of shifts in the voter coalitions of different parties show that the trend of more-educated, urban, middle- and higher-income voters toward center-left parties (and less-educated voters toward right populist parties) is happening in those countries, too (e.g., Gingrich and Hauserman Reference Gingrich and Häusermann 2015; Oesch and Rennwald Reference Oesch and Rennwald 2018).
"Instead of capitulating, progressives should" build a "network of anti-occupation donors, operatives, and local community members on the ground—precisely mirroring the ideologically driven electoral infrastructure that the AIPAC network has already built."
To defeat the anti-Palestinian lobbying network that spends millions of dollars to help corporate Democrats beat left-leaning congressional candidates, progressives in the United States need not temper their criticism of Israel's brutal occupation nor Washington's role in subsidizing it, a pair of organizers wrote Monday in The Nation.
Alexandra Rojas and Waleed Shahid—respectively the executive director and communications director of Justice Democrats—argued that U.S. Rep. Summer Lee's (D-Pa.) recent victory provides "a road map for how progressive Democrats can unite to build infrastructure to elect candidates whose values will be consistent both at home and abroad."