A 2-year-old organization called the State Innovation Exchange could help progressives push a progressive agenda even amid the grim prospect of ultra-right domination now being unrolled by Donald Trump’s transition team. One of its big projects: Turning its Progressive Economic Blueprint for the States into reality. But, like other left-of-center projects, SiX, as it’s known by acronym, faces an uphill fight both with that blueprint and its other efforts. So what else is new?
Defending past gains and battling new proposals put forth by right-wing numbskulls and malignants is, obviously, essential to an effective resistance. But our resistance can’t be solely defensive. A powerful offense also is crucial, an offense of diverse elements. As progressives inside and outside government have argued for a long time, spreading fresh ideas and programs, or resurrecting vital old ones that never got a fair chance in the first place ought to be one of those elements.
The right knows this. It’s paid megatons of moolah to propagandists to spread distortions, exaggerations and outright lies on a range of subjects in order to get its agenda into retrograde state legislation. Long before “fake news” made it into the headlines, the traditional media have eagerly lapped up this fabricated output. But there’s been a quieter, more effective aspect of the right’s campaign to enact its agenda, the American Legislative Exchange Council. It has worked behind the scenes to get extremist everything from stand-your-ground laws to weaker worker protections enacted into state law by means of model legislation.
Efforts to establish a left-of-center version of ALEC have so far failed to gain traction. SiX—which gathered together 400 state and national lawmakers and progressive activists in Washington, D.C., this week to consider a progressive blueprint for legislation—could fill that important role.
It was previously the American Legislative and Issue Campaign (ALICE), but in 2014 merged with two other non-profits, the Progressive States Network and the Center for State Innovation. SiX Executive Director Nick Rathod—who has years of experience in similar groups and in the Obama administration as assistant director of intergovernmental and international affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—noted in 2015:
“In the same way that conservatives 30 years ago decided to put money and investment in the states and are now seeing the benefits of that—with the largest number of chambers in their control since the 1920s and their ability to move legislation—we hope that this is the beginning of a similar movement for progressives in the states, where we are able to advance progressive legislation and also build a farm team of the next generation of leaders.”
Unlike ALEC, SiX isn’t writing model legislation. But the library it inherited from ALICE currently contains 2,000 bills that have been passed in several states. The public online library includes laws not just for states, but also at the county, municipal, and school district levels. These cover the gamut from reproductive health to energy policies.
Earlier this year, Rathod told the Colorado-based High Country News:
“We work on what we think is good public policy [...] addressing climate change and fighting back against fracking, supporting civil rights and women’s rights. There never has been a strong enough entity that can compete with the infrastructure on the right.”
Focusing more attention on state and local legislation has been a long-time objective of a slice of progressives who have watched in horror as ever more of these entities wind up under ultra-rightist control, passing extremist laws or reversing progressive ones. Innovative state legislation offers opportunities to advance a left-of-center agenda, going beyond efforts just to hold the line against rightist efforts to dismantle progressive programs and repeal laws already on the books, a rearguard strategy that is necessary but lacks the wallop of good legislation of our own.
The SiX blueprint, which was the topic of discussion at the D.C. gathering earlier this week and is set up as a 100-day project, has a lot to recommend it. It includes:
- Support investment to advance the clean energy economy, spur green job creation, reduce dependence on foreign oil, and mitigate the costs of climate change. [...]
- Reward hard work with fair pay by requiring that women earn equal pay for doing the same work as men. [...]
- Make sure that no one is excluded from the economy by “banning the box” to create job opportunities for people with prior convictions and arrests, targeting job programs at the most economically marginalized communities, and cracking down on predatory lending which takes advantage of low-income workers.
- Raise the state minimum wage, pass fair overtime rules, and expand the state Earned Income Tax Credit so that those who work hard and play by the rules can earn enough to support their families. [...]
- Eliminate state and local tax incentives that subsidize companies who turn around and ship jobs overseas, and instead give tax breaks to companies that create jobs here.
- Lower taxes for middle- and low-income families, including regressive state taxes like sales and property tax that disproportionately impact lower-income households. [...[
- Crack down on wage theft so that employers can’t deny their workers a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
All good ideas. But there is also a lot missing from that list that ought to be included in the 100-day framework and beyond. Here are a handful of examples:
- Extend the benefits of renewable energy directly to low-income people through community solar projects that provide sun-generated electricity to people who cannot otherwise afford it or live in dwellings not suited for solar installations
- Give all citizens access to fast, affordable municipally owned wi-fi infrastructure as Chattanooga has done.
- Make it easier for municipalities to own and operate utility services. Fifteen percent of Americans now get their power from municipally owned utilities.
- Create state-owned banks like North Dakota’s.
- Link schools and unions in an effort to revive the vocational training that has disappeared in most of the nation’s public schools
None of the ideas on SiX’s list or mine are radical. Many of them don’t yet go far enough. But all of them provide easily defined individual and community benefits. If put forth in well-crafted messages, they can be made to appeal to at least some lawmakers who might otherwise balk at even considering them.
And even if a majority of states reject these approaches initially, those states or local governments that pass them can prove they work and thus get them reconsidered by those rejectionist states and cities.
Nobody suggests that making such changes will transform all that needs transforming, or that getting these ideas into law will be simple. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be called resistance.