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JANUARY 6, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
How California Got So Blue
Liberals owe thanks to two notable progressives who are stepping down
from their posts.
As my colleague Gabrielle Gurley notes today in her excellent interview
with David Toscano, the former Democratic leader of the Virginia House
of Delegates, state legislatures matter: They can be laboratories of
democracy or, when controlled by today's Republicans, of autocracy.
Even the most progressive legislatures, however, sometimes need a member
or two who recognize unmet needs more immediately than their colleagues,
and successfully prod those colleagues to do something about it. Over
the past decade, both houses of the California legislature have seen the
Democrats in control of between two-thirds and three-fourths of the
seats, but the colleague who's really pushed them to enact
life-enhancing changes has been San Diego Assemblymember Lorena
Gonzalez, who announced earlier this week that she was stepping down
from her post there.
A former labor leader who once headed the San Diego AFL-CIO, Gonzalez
played a key role in pushing the state to set a $15 minimum wage. She
authored the acts that grant part-time workers paid leave and enabled
farmworkers to qualify for overtime pay. She authored AB-5, which
forbade employers from misclassifying their workers as "independent
contractors"-for which Uber, Lyft, and their ilk spent a couple
hundred million dollars on an initiative campaign that hoodwinked
California voters into repealing the act in 2020. She authored laws that
strengthened protections against workplace harassment and gender
discrimination, and laws that made it easier to vote. And when Tesla's
founder refused to temporarily shut down his factory during the first
wave of COVID-19, she tweeted, "F*ck Elon Musk."
There's a legislator with her head screwed on right.
Gonzalez isn't about to vanish over the horizon, however. By all
accounts, she's preparing to succeed another notable California
progressive-Art Pulaski-as head of the state's two-million-member
AFL-CIO. Since Pulaski took the helm of the state's labor movement in
1996, he's made it an election-season powerhouse. In tandem with the
late Miguel Contreras, who headed the Los Angeles AFL-CIO from 1996
until his death in 2005, Pulaski devised election programs that not only
prompted union members to go to the polls and vote for progressives, but
also mobilized other potentially progressive communities whose rates of
voter participation had been historically low. In particular, the state
Federation was among the first groups to identify and devote
considerable resources to mobilizing the state's burgeoning Asian
American communities, which today constitute roughly 15 percent of
California's population, and whose support for progressive candidates
and causes has at times been as high as 80 percent.
California didn't become the anchor state of Blue America simply due
to demographic change. It took the efforts of many thousands of movement
activists and the leadership of some visionary progressives like Art
Pulaski and Lorena Gonzalez.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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Spinning Their Wheels in the U.S. Senate
A debate on voting rights seems destined to irrelevance, as the Biden
agenda remains stalled out. BY DAVID DAYEN
Can OSHA Keep Workers Safe? The Court Hears the Case Tomorrow.
Had OSHA's standard not been stayed by the most conservative circuit
court, the number of COVID cases and deaths would have been reduced. BY
DEBBIE BERKOWITZ
Merrick Garland Is Undermining the Biden Antitrust Strategy
By fighting over personnel to the Justice Department's Antitrust
Division, the attorney general is prioritizing the status quo over the
public good. BY MAX MORAN
The Critical Power of State Legislatures
A Q&A with David Toscano, the former Democratic leader of the Virginia
House of Delegates, on nullification, federalism, voting rights, Glenn
Youngkin, and more BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
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