It’s not easy being a progressive these days. Republicans control the House of Representatives and are threatening to tank the economy by refusing to raise the debt limit. The Supreme Court, after having overturned Roe v. Wade and set an impossibly high standard for new gun control legislation, looks primed to undo President Joe Biden’s student loan relief. And at the state level, it seems not a day goes by that a red-state legislature doesn’t pass new laws targeting LGBTQ people or imposing new mandates on schoolteachers.
But not all is lost, liberal America — Michigan has your back.
The Wolverine State is not normally where progressives look for hope. But since Democrats formally took control of both houses of the Legislature in January — after a clean sweep of all statewide races, from governor to attorney general, in last fall’s midterm elections — Michigan has quickly become a contender to be America’s wokest state.
In Utah, Mississippi and Tennessee, Republican-dominated legislatures are passing laws banning gender therapies for trans kids under age 18. But in Michigan, the Legislature is moving in the opposite direction. It recently voted to amend the state’s civil rights law to ban workplace, housing and other forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The legislation was decades in the making, but it became possible only because of the Democratic sweep last fall.
In those midterm elections, Michigan voters overwhelmingly backed Proposition 3, which enshrines a right to abortion in the state constitution — and this month, legislators voted to repeal a 1931 state law criminalizing the use of abortion drugs.
It’s not just on social issues where liberals are scoring huge wins. On Tuesday, the state Senate gave unions a huge victory by voting to reverse a GOP-passed 2012 right-to-work law that allowed workers to opt out of paying union dues. (The House voted to repeal the law last week.) In the process,…
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