Evening Wrap

Let’s start with the big news out of D.C., where President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a stopgap funding measure hours ahead of an impending government shutdown. The bill, approved by bipartisan coalitions in both the House and Senate, is an anodyne placeholder that maintains current spending levels for high-priority agencies through Jan. 19, with a Feb. 2 deadline for the rest. It does not include aid for Ukraine or Israel, or anything else that might be considered even slightly controversial, our D.C. bureau reported. 

Three months after his 18th birthday, Casey McWhorter and two of his friends hatched a plan to rob a house. The plan, McWhorter said, was to “go in, get a bunch of stuff, some guns, some weed, some drugs, and leave.”

Testimony from drug recognition experts — law enforcement officers trained to determine whether a driver is under the influence of drugs — is “reliable enough” to be used as evidence, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The 5-2 decision affirms a 2022 report from a court-appointed special master but limits how the testimony can be used, creating a framework for enforcing impairment laws in a state where marijuana is legal, the New Jersey Monitor reported.

Child care is a crucial economic driver. Last year alone, gaps in care disrupted work for nearly two-thirds of parents, costing an estimated $122 billion in lost wages, productivity and tax revenue. 

Worker shortages will ebb and flow in some job markets, but for others, the problem will be chronic. For some industries, it already is. Health care workers, for example, have been in short supply for decades; a longstanding problem laid bare by the pandemic and the surging demand from all those retiring boomers. In September, there were just .29 unemployed workers for every health sector job. The disparity will likely get worse, particularly in low-wage health care jobs, where shortages could grow by as much as 3.2 million in the next five years.

Let me begin by restating Tuesday’s victories, which extend far beyond the issue of reproductive rights. Residents in five cities approved reform measures designed to ensure that election results reflect voter preferences. Publicly financed candidates nearly swept local races in New Mexico. Voters in Kansasrejected far-right school board candidates who campaigned on culture war issues like book bans and bullying LGBTQ+ kids, mirroring a national trend of local pushback against fringe groups interfering in school policy. Virginians locked in Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, stymieing GOP efforts to enact new voting restrictions. As far as I know, no one blamed their loss on Hugo Chavez, election workers or nonexistent voter fraud. It was a good night for Democrats, yes — but it was also a good night for democracy.

Nationwide, there are more than 391,000 children and teens in foster care. Those programs, which place children in temporary care when their parents can’t (or won’t) care for them, are administered at the state level, with varying degrees of success. (States with restrictive abortion laws, for example, place higher numbers of children in foster care, particularly children of color.) As a whole, the system is plagued with chronic problems, most stemming from underinvestmentthat leaves agencies with too few employees overseeing too many cases with too few foster homes to accommodate them. 

Democrats on Tuesday once again outperformed expectations, overcoming a historically unpopular president and a generally disaffected electorate to notch decisive wins in key elections across the country. The magic ingredient: Abortion rights, which emerged as a central campaign theme in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio (the only state where reproductive autonomy was literally on the ballot). Voters sided with Democrats in each of those races, proving the staying — and political — power of our collective rage over the demise of Roe v. Wade. Turns out hell hath no fury like half a nation of people whose bodily autonomy is constantly under attack.

Thirteen states held general elections on Tuesday, including marquee races for governor in Kentucky and Mississippi, key mayoral contests in Philadelphia and Houston, and a pair of proposed constitutional amendments in Ohio that would enshrine abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana. Polls will close after I file this newsletter, so I won’t have results for you until Wednesday (the perennial plight of the Election Day reporter), but fear not — I’ve still got plenty to tell you (the other perennial plight of the Election Day reporter).

Among Tuesday’s marquee matchups is a gubernatorial race in Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is vying for a second term against Democrat Brandon Presley, a former mayor and state utilities regulator (and cousin of Elvis). Republicans have controlled the governorship for the past two decades, but this year’s race has been unusually close, thanks to Presley’s well-funded campaign and Reeves’ connection to a massive welfare scandal that unfolded during his tenure as lieutenant governor. If neither candidate clears 50% of the vote, both would advance to a runoff contest three weeks later — a first in state history.

You’re probably at least passingly familiar with Georgia’s Fulton County Jail, either because of Donald Trump’s weird mugshot or because of its notorious reputation as a dilapidated and dangerous place. Like virtually every other jail, the facility is severely overcrowded, understaffed, and woefully ill-equipped to deal with the hundreds of inmates who require behavioral health treatment. Those chronic issues have worsened amid funding shortfalls, crumbling infrastructure and unsanitary conditions, creating an unstable and increasingly violent environment that’s the subject of both a federal investigation and a state probe, the Georgia Recorder reported.

Behavior among a certain set of Republicans has deteriorated noticeably since 2015, when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and described Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. (This was astonishing at the time. He apparently said it again in 2018. I didn’t notice.) By last January, most of the party had embraced Trump’s repeated lies about the 2020 election.