Evening Wrap

What is now a nationwide assault on LGBTQ+ rights began as these things tend to begin: With a single bill. That legislation, filed in Idaho in February 2020 as the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” barred transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s athletics. Its lead sponsor was state Rep. Barbara Ehardt, a Republican and former collegiate basketball player and coach, who said the policy was designed to protect athletic opportunities for (cisgender) women. She’d come up with the idea after hearing about transgender girls winning track meets in Connecticut.

It’s been seven months since the fall of Roe v. Wade, and abortion access remains a mess of uneven access, ongoing legal battles and ever-evolving policies that continue to spark confusion for providers and patients across the country. The chaos is a predictable feature of the post-Roe world, where 50 individual governments are forced to regulate one extremely complex and controversial issue. It’s political free-for-all, and it’s by design.

There’s arguably no Republican who threads the climate-change needle better than Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who coasted to re-election on a platform that did not include (or acknowledge) climate change. That’s despite his own years-long effort to make the Peach State a national leader in electric vehicle production, a goal he’s framed as an economic development push to “expand Georgia’s role as a world-renowned hub for global commerce.”

Believe it or not, we’re going to kick off today’s newsletter with an example of lawmakers using their power to advance, rather than attack, democracy. (I know, right?) That distinction goes to Democrats in New Mexico, who said they planned to reintroduce a sweeping proposal to improve voting access for Indigenous people, restore voting rights to convicted felons, expand the use of absentee ballots and implement automatic voter registration, Source New Mexico reported.

Ideally, the power of democracy lies in the people, who have ultimate say via their votes. But democracy has never really lived up to its own hype. In the early days of American democracy, that power of voting was restricted to white male landowners, who have since employed a number of creative strategies to claw back that power after extending it to women and people of color. And for the most part, it worked. Decades of voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering have steadily diminished the voice, and power, of the general public. We know the problem, but we still can’t seem to fix it.

Roughly 75 million Americans are under the age of 18, which sounds like a lot until you realize those kids are outnumbered four to one by adults. And those adults control everything. Occasionally, they’ll let kids weigh in, but more often, adults are too busy talking to (or over) each other to pay attention to anyone else. And there’s not much young people can do about that. Sure, kids can be loud (...so loud), but at some point, the size of the megaphone matters less than the size of the crowd.

You can trace the GOP’s all-out war on schools back to at least the 1990s, when Christian nationalists infiltrated the GOP with their anti-public education agenda in tow. It began quietly, with support for publicly funded charter schools, pushback against sex education and routine resistance against federal oversight.

I almost opened today’s newsletter by writing that Sunday would have marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, had it not been overturned last June. But that’s incorrect. Roe happened, whether opponents of abortion like it or not — the same way that abortions happen (and will continue to happen) regardless of the success or failure of attempts to ban them. Abortion has always existed. Abortion will always exist. Roe is dead. Long live Roe.

Pretend we’re at a bar, and I’m serving up shots and chasers in the form of political news. (It’s Friday, just go with it.) First up on our drinks menu: Medicaid expansion, which increased hospital funding and improved health outcomes for New Hampshire residents after taking effect eight years ago. Lawmakers will decide this year whether to renew it for a second time, per the New Hampshire Bulletin.

My ongoing state of sickness is a side effect of parenthood, which is a nice way of saying that children are petri dishes. Children are also the focus of today’s news, in which adults do odd and unproductive things in the name of supporting them — like, for example, reading pornography during a school board meeting! (I feel compelled to add: This is a real-life example that I did not make up!)

What a thrill to come back from a long weekend of illness to discover that the Republicans have been using their taxpayer-funded positions of power to prioritize the important issue of our time: Attacking the general emotional and physical well-being of transgender children! It’s just extremely heartening to have enough examples of this to focus an entire newsletter on it, you know?

With state legislatures coming into session in many states this month, most lawmakers are having their first chance to meet and grapple with the fallout from the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer to do away with the constitutional right to abortion. The result? Just as chaotic and inconsistent as you might imagine.