Happy Mother's Day!!
The petition has been at 758 signatures for two weeks.
Everyone who signed did their part. Now the ask is one more thing: share this petition today with one person who is carrying something the law doesn't see. Session closes May 13 - four days. Sharing is the highest-impact thing you can do right now.
This week, the redistricting war made the Colorado CARE Act argument impossible to ignore.
The Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act - the provision that for five decades prohibited maps designed to dilute the voting power of racial minorities. The response was immediate: Tennessee signed new maps to eliminate its only Democrat-held district. Louisiana suspended its May 16 primary entirely. Alabama called a special legislative session. Virginia's redistricting referendum was struck down yesterday by the state Supreme Court, handing Republicans as many as 12 additional House seats.
Colorado's maps are protected.
Because in November 2018, Colorado voters passed Amendments Y and Z - creating independent redistricting commissions with the protection for minority voting power written directly into the state constitution. When the federal guardrail was weakened, Colorado's constitutional architecture held. The federal provision was gutted. Colorado's maps were untouched.
The voters who passed those amendments in 2018 didn't know this would happen. They built the state-level architecture anyway - because they understood that federal guarantees require federal institutions to hold them. And federal institutions are not guaranteed to hold.
Build before you need it.
That is exactly what the Colorado CARE Act asks Colorado to do - for the same reason, in the same window.
Federal caregiver workplace protections are narrow and dependent on an EEOC operating at nearly half its 1980 staffing. The enforcement infrastructure for protecting employed caregivers is being systematically removed. Colorado already named caregiver status as a protected class in the 2021 POWR Act. What doesn't exist yet is the accommodation architecture - the interactive process requirement, the Employment Detachment Event definition, the anti-retaliation enforcement teeth - that make that protection real rather than decorative.
The Colorado legislature adjourns May 13. The summer interim begins May 19. That is the window to move from petition to bill language, from coalition to sponsor, from advocacy to statute.
Your signature is part of what we bring into that window. Your share is what expands the base before the window closes.
Please share this petition today. One person. That is the ask.
Read and listen to this week's full piece - "Build Before You Need It": [https://open.substack.com/pub/therevenueneutralcaregiver/p/21st-century-guardrails-a-dispatch?r=6a52ih&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true]
Sign or share here: https://c.org/WjGpN6TYnB
758 signatures. 242 from 1,000. Session closes May 13.
Rose comes to my office doorway every weekend morning and asks: "What's the plan? Can I help?"
She has end-stage dementia. She can't always remember what day it is. But she knows you ask about the plan before the moment arrives.
The plan is the CARE Act. The moment is the summer interim. Colorado has done this before.
Kindly and Gratefully,
- Mark Fukae Director of Advocacy, Professionals Who Care Founder, CASI - Caregiver Advocacy Support Initiative mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | casiadvocacy.org