Evening Wrap

To be fair, the lack of productivity isn’t always intentional — sometimes, even when they try, lawmakers just can’t quite get things done. That’s the case in Georgia, where a bipartisan House bill that would expand access to mental health care was met with resistance Monday at a legislative hearing in the Senate, per the Georgia Recorder.

Let’s begin at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution, a Boise-area compound that opened in 1989 to house the state’s “most disruptive male residents.” But not everyone who resides at the facility fits that description. Inside the prison, in the same wing that houses inmates on death row, are nine cells reserved for people deemed “dangerously mentally ill” — many of whom are not serving a sentence, have not been convicted of a crime and, in some cases, are not facing criminal charges at all.

Beyond attacking LGBTQ+ kids, the GOP’s attack on LGBTQ+ school policies serves an important purpose: Distracting you from the GOP’s attack on the schools themselves. You would be forgiven for struggling to articulate the details of this attack, if only because there are so many details. There’s the effort to reallocate public education funding for private school tuition. There’s the push to empower parents to complain about reading material they don’t like or classes they object to. There’s a widespread attempt to ban diversity and inclusion, both at K-12 schools and at colleges and universities. 

The current affordable housing crisis in the United States dates back to the Great Recession, when construction of new dwellings stalled after the collapse of the housing market. Demand for housing surged amid the dwindling supply of new units, eventually pricing millions of people out of the market altogether. Rentals then went similarly bonkers, leaving low-income families vying for an ever decreasing number of affordable housing options. 

My trusty intolerance monitor informs me that we’re up to 389 anti-LGBTQ+ bills this year, up 34 from a week ago. (If you want to play a terrible game, open that tab in the morning and then check it every few hours. Spoiler: It always goes up.) The most popular targets of those bills are still schools (184) and health care (108), which have become such ubiquitous topics that I can basically discuss them in the context of any state in the country. (I am fun at parties.)

Most modern-day parents are familiar with school-ranking websites, where you enter your address and then proceed to obsess over the performance metrics for your child’s school. Those rankings are powerful (they’re why houses are astronomically expensive on one street but not the next), which is dumb, because they’re not actually the best measure of a school’s performance. Most of them rely heavily on standardized test scores, which can be a useful measuring tool — but usually not at the expense of considering every other aspect of your local public education system. 

A Norfolk Southern train skittered off the tracks Saturday in eastern Ohio, marking the rail line’s second major derailment in the state in just over a month. The train was not carrying hazardous materials and no one was injured, officials said. But the incident still renewed questions about rail safety that surfaced after a Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that forced thousands of people to evacuate amid a massive chemical spill.

Let’s start with a rare display of political competence out of Arizona, where Attorney General Kris Mayes announced plans to revamp the state’s Election Integrity Unit, shifting its focus from trying to confirm (bogus) claims of election fraud to protecting voter rights and prosecuting threats against election officials. Among the first tasks for the now-appropriately named division: Investigating a slate of fake electors who attempted to give Arizona’s electoral votes to the guy who did not win them, the Arizona Mirror reported.

This isn’t entirely new — Republicans have been chipping away at public education since at least the 1990s — but it’s never been such a big focus. And if you knew nothing about American politics, that hyperfocus might seem logical. Because public education always needs more attention. Schools are underfunded, particularly in areas with high concentrations of Black and Latino students. Districts across the country are struggling to recruit and retain teachers, a long-time problem that’s been exacerbated by low pay, poor morale, increased pressure and health and safety concerns. The problems are persistent and complex — exactly the type of thing you’d want your elected representatives to prioritize.

Republican lawmakers have had a productive year so far, if you measure productivity in terms of pointless-but-prejudiced policy proposals. Nationwide, they’re up to 351 anti-LGBTQ+ bills — the most ever introduced in a single year, let alone two months. Most of them use similar language to suggest “solutions” for things that are not problems, like drag performances or transgender people using the bathroom. Together, the proposals constitute a massive expansion of government oversight into what are traditionally parental and family decisions, which is an … interesting platform for the self-proclaimed party of small government and parental rights. A contradictory set of priorities, you might say.

The most important of the important work took place last week at a legislative hearing in Arizona, where a QAnon loyalist gave a 40-minute presentation accusing dozens of elected officials of taking bribes from a Mexican drug cartel. Republican leaders denounced the allegations but shirked responsibility for allowing the testimony, which they claimed was not included in materials provided to lawmakers before the meeting, per the Arizona Mirror.

Let’s dive right in with a story about kratom, an energy-boosting herbal extract that would be legalized in Indiana under a bill approved last week by House lawmakers. The plant, native to southeast Asia, was legal in the Hoosier state until 2014, when lawmakers prohibited it in anticipation of a federal ban that never materialized, per the Indiana Capital Chronicle.