• Michigan repeals its "right to work" law.
Republicans have been running a con job on workers for the last 75 years, claiming that making it impossible for unions to organize and exercise collective power somehow enhanced individual's freedom. The Democratic majority in the Michigan legislature called bullshit.
For the first time in almost 60 years, a state has formally overturned a so-called “right to work” law, clearing the way for workers to organize new union locals, collectively bargain, and make their voices heard at election time.
This week, Michigan finalized the process of eliminating a decade-old “right to work” law, which began with the shift in control of the state legislature from anti-union Republicans to pro-union Democrats following the 2022 election. “This moment has been decades in the making,” declared Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber. “By standing up and taking their power back, at the ballot box and in the workplace, workers have made it clear Michigan is and always will be the beating heart of the modern American labor movement.”
In addition to formally scrapping the anti-labor law on Tuesday, Michigan also restored prevailing-wage protections for construction workers, expanded collective bargaining rights for public school employees, and restored organizing rights for graduate student research assistants at the state’s public colleges and universities.
• Maybe Democrats don't have to run away from immigration issues.
The Congressional election on Long Island last week was one sort of test case. Tensions about migrants without resources dumped in New York City by Texas had plenty of resonance in the district. But although Democrat Tom Suozzi called loudly for getting the border under better control, he also brought a record of calling for legalizing the Dreamers and creating a path to citizenship for others without papers. He won handily over a restrictionist GOP immigrant.
Former Washington Post journalist Paul Waldman maintains in his newsletter:
Democrats can keep winning campaigns by showing that they value immigration and also want an immigration system that actually works, something Republicans clearly don’t. And maybe some day, the savvy set in Washington will be willing to accept what’s right in front of their eyes.
He's got the polling to prove it.
• Maybe Joe Biden's age is an asset.
I certainly think so. Biden is a good president, in part, because he grew up politically in the "before times." That's before Ronald Reagan. From 1932 until 1980, we believed that the job of government was to make our lives better. Most politicians at least paid lip service to the project of government for the people. In their B-level actor, the Republican Party finally found a salesman for the lunatic notion that corporations and rich people are all that matter. Biden is a throwback to a better time.
And he's fine. Just listen to novelist Marianne Robinson:
Frankly, I’m less than a year younger than Joe Biden, so I believe utterly in his competence, his brilliance, his worldview. I really do. You have to live to be 80 to find this out: Anybody under 50 feels they’re in a position to condescend to you. You get boxed into this position where people who deal with you are making assumptions about your intellect. It’s very disturbing. Most people my age are just fine. What can I say? It’s a kind of good fortune that America is categorically incapable of accepting: that someone with a strong institutional memory, who knows how things are supposed to work, who was habituated to their appropriate functioning is president. I consider him a gift of God. All 81 years of him.
Well, maybe she goes a little further than I might, but age has positives.
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