Evening Wrap

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.

It’s Monday and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Like many of the government officials we cover, most of our staff is taking the holiday off, but let's have a look at what our various state newsrooms are saying about King and his legacy.

It’s Friday the 13th, which seems like an appropriate time to check in on the state of abortion rights.

During the midterm elections, we focused mostly on high-profile congressional races, gubernatorial contests and the many election-deniers vying to oversee elections. We talked much less about the insidious battle unfolding across the country in oft-overlooked school board races, where conservative candidates campaigned on plans to overhaul education policy based largely on right-wing rhetoric.

Whenever I’m stuck on a starting point I just cruise on down to Florida, where the cup of news forever runneth over. Today’s dispatch: Millions of low-income families in the Sunshine State will likely lose their health insurance at the end of March following the expiration of a pandemic-era provision that required states to expand Medicaid coverage, per the Florida Phoenix.

We talked yesterday about the difficult (a relative term) situation facing Arizona Republicans, who wield razor-thin legislative majorities under a Democratic governor for the first time in their political careers. The party’s tenuous grip on power coupled with the threat of Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto pen all but guarantees that GOP lawmakers will have to embrace compromise if they want to accomplish anything of consequence.

More than half of state legislatures had reconvened as of Monday, when lawmakers in nine states headed back to work. (An additional 13 legislative sessions will also kick off this week. It’s all happening!) For some, the new session is a chance to build on last year’s accomplishments, like sweeping changes to mental health services in Georgia. 

This, I thought on Jan. 6, 2021, will finally be the thing. The rally, the flags, the chants, the broken glass, the bullets, the violence, the hordes of people swarming the U.S.Capitol, all in service of one big lie from one huge liar — this had to be the moment that Republicans finally turned on Donald Trump. They would stand amid the wreckage, I thought, and they would finally get it: There was nothing left to defend, if there’d ever been anything worth defending in the first place.

Friends, we cannot avoid it any longer: It is time to talk about Kevin. On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) failed yet again to clinch the title of Speaker of the House. His failure now spans three consecutive days and at least 11 votes. He failed even after bowing to demands from the MAGA Republicans blocking his election, including a promise to allow any one lawmaker to force a vote to oust him from leadership. Those Republicans continued to vote against McCarthy for speaker even after knowing that they could easily remove him from the job. McCarthy — and I cannot overstate this — failed.