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      in US Politics

      Montana governor signs bill banning transgender students from sports teams

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      Montana’s governor has signed a bill that bans transgender athletes from competing on school and university sports teams that correspond with their gender.Greg Gianforte’s signing on Friday makes Montana the latest Republican-controlled state to approve such legislation.Conservative lawmakers in state capitols across the US have proposed more than 80 laws this year targeting trans people, the majority of them seeking to ban trans children from certain sports teams or limit youth access to gender affirming health care.Supporters of the sports bills have said that they will ensure the playing field in girls’ sports remains fair. But there is no research suggesting that trans girls have an unfair advantage in school sports.When the Associated Press recently contacted lawmakers behind the proposed bans, most couldn’t cite a single local example of a trans girl playing sports. Some pointed to a Connecticut case in which cisgender girls’ families sued, alleging that two trans female sprinters had an unfair advantage. But two days after that lawsuit was filed, one of the cis girls beat her trans competitor in a state championship race.“If you look at the legislature’s justification for advancing the transgender sports ban, they could cite not one instance where transgender participation in athletics has been a problem or caused conflict,” said Alex Rate, legal director of ACLU of Montana.Rate called the Montana law “patently unconstitutional”.The bill had received widespread opposition from business leaders, physicians, athletes, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. “This bill unfairly targets trans youth and puts millions of federal education dollars at risk. It is an unnecessary and harmful policy that comes at a massive cost to the state,” said Shawn Reagor, director of equality and economic justice with the Montana Human Rights Network.Gianforte said last week that he had met with transgender people and athletes while considering whether to sign the bill.Lawmakers in more than 20 states have considered similar sports bans, and they have become law in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia. Idaho’s law was blocked by a court ruling last year. Governors in North Dakota and Kansas have vetoed similar measures.So far, sixteen anti-LGBTQ+ legislative proposals have been enacted this year, the highest-ever number of such bills signed into law in a single year, the Human Rights Campaign said on Friday. Eight of the laws specifically target trans people.Trans youth athletes have increasingly spoken out about the proposed bans in their states, with one 12-year-old girl in Utah, who is trans and a swimmer, recently telling the Guardian, “It’s a piece of your life that you work so hard for, and for it just to be taken away is hard. It just seems that [the lawmakers] only care about what’s in my pants and not about all the stuff I can bring to the team and all my hard work.”Trans youth represent just a fraction of the US population – recent estimates suggest they make up roughly 2% of youth.Montana’s Republican-controlled Legislature approved the measure last month, after it was amended to become void if the federal government withholds education funding from the state over gender discrimination and an appeal by the state fails.Joe Biden signed an executive order his first day in office banning discrimination based on gender, raising concern among officials in the Montana university system that $350m in education funding could be on the line if the measure is signed into law.A spokesperson for Gianforte did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      in US Politics

      Montana’s Republican governor pulls pandemic payments – is he for real?

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      The coronavirus pandemic – heard of it? It’s famously still going on! Though national case numbers are finally starting to drop and recent regional outbreaks in the midwest have begun to subside, there were still about 50,000 new Covid-19 infections recorded in the US on Tuesday and just over 700 new virus-related deaths.But Greg Gianforte, Montana’s governor, has other priorities: he’s been talking about a “labor shortage” in a cynical attempt to cut public assistance. The Republican governor released a statement on Tuesday announcing his state will stop participating in the federal program that has given unemployed workers additional unemployment payments since the start of the pandemic – in an apparent attempt to get Montanans back to work, and he plans to give those who choose to do so something he calls a “return-to-work bonus”.Here’s why it won’t work:The “return-to-work” bonus is not a replacement for added unemployment benefits.Thanks to the additional unemployment payments of $300 a week, out-of-work Montana residents receiving assistance currently get between $351 and $810 weekly, in enhanced unemployment benefits. Gianforte’s new plan will cut out those additional payments starting 27 June, and “incentivize Montanans to re-enter the workforce” with a single “return-to-work” bonus of $1,200 after one full month of work.Now, I’m no high-falutin’ big city math-e-ma-tician, but a one-time payment of $1,200, which will only go to the first 12,500 workers to claim it – a tactic which, by the way, has huge “while supplies last!!” vibes – simply does not compare to $300 a week for the duration of the pandemic, ie, the foreseeable future.Who knows how long that could be? Only about a third of Montana residents are vaccinated, according to the New York Times, and infections have risen approximately 8% over the past 14 days. The pandemic is not over yet.What could “labor shortage” be another term for?Although Montana’s unemployment rate fell to 3.8% in April, which is about at pre-pandemic levels, the state’s labor commissioner, Laurie Esau, says its labor force is approximately 10,000 workers smaller than it was pre-lockdown, a drop that Gianforte assumes is to do with lazy people who, given their new found pandemic benefits, don’t want to work any more. And according to Montana department of labor estimates, nearly 25,000 people are currently filing unemployment claims, a good chunk of whom the governor is eager to push into the state’s 14,000 or so job openings.But this means there aren’t enough job openings for the number of people unemployed; even if the governor’s plan succeeds in filling those vacant positions as intended, there will still be over 10,000 people without jobs to apply for, forced to subsist on less. It is also wildly reductive to assume that because there are fewer people working, it must be the result of a lack of will. People had jobs, and those jobs were taken away, either through mass layoffs or government shutdowns of businesses. That kind of disruption takes time to recover from. People could now be working out childcare arrangements again; finding out where they fit in a new jobs market; or worried about returning to work until the coast is clear.Workers also aren’t to blame for making more on unemployment than they would at their jobs.The basis of the governor’s claims are that enhanced unemployment benefits have incentivized out-of-work Montana residents to stay unemployed. He says that the extra $300-a-week payments are now “doing more harm than good”, which is a strange way to view an intervention that is hopefully keeping people housed, clothed, and fed, but OK, sir! You’re the governor!But let’s analyze the logic of whether benefits that make your life livable stop people from wanting to work. Last year, a study by economists at Yale found the enhanced unemployment pay authorized by Congress did not disincentivize Americans from seeking employment. And if “a bunch of Yale economists” aren’t convincing enough, how about the labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who told the AP that there’s no evidence of Gianforte’s claims to the contrary.Even if there are some people choosing to stay home rather than go back to work because their enhanced unemployment benefits pay them more than their jobs (which again, no proof that that’s happening!), the argument that the alternative is preferable should be reconsidered.Full-time workers earning minimum wage in Montana earn about $346 a week – far less than MIT estimates an average single Montanan needs to live. For those living with children, even the enhanced unemployment benefits wouldn’t cut it.Nearly two-thirds of Americans have been living paycheck-to-paycheck since the pandemic hit stateside. So if I were a governor and wanted to, say, prevent an already-mounting housing crisis from mounting any further, want to give my residents enough to live on. But maybe that’s far too simple. More

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      in Elections

      Senator Jon Tester on Democrats and Rural Voters: ‘Our Message Is Really, Really Flawed’

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      in US Politics

      Montana Republican refuses to quit over call for socialists to be ‘jailed or shot’

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      State representative Rodney Garcia condemned by his party for ‘reckless’ remarks – but he says he has been praised by supporters A Montana Republican lawmaker who says the US constitution allows for socialists to be jailed or shot will only resign “if God asked me to”. Related: Iowa caucus chaos: Democrats to release partial results […] More

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      Montana Republican rebuked for saying socialists should be ‘jailed or shot’

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      State legislator Rodney Garcia insists constitution says socialists should be jailed or shot, according to Billings Gazette The Republican party of Montana has rebuked a state legislator who insists the US constitution says socialists should be jailed or shot. According to the Billings Gazette, in responding to a speech in Helena on Friday by former […] More