“The agency tasked with advancing America’s energy security, developing its nuclear arsenal, and handling environmental challenges is now shaping the landscape of interscholastic sports in the United States.
The Energy Department recently released two direct final rules to modify existing Title IX protections. One of the rules would strike regulations requiring schools that receive federal funds to allow students to try out for opposite-sex noncontact sports teams if schools do not offer the sport to their sex. This change would impact sports such as tennis and swimming.
The Energy Department says “such athletics rules ignore differences between the sexes which are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality while also imposing a burden on local governments and small businesses who are in the best position to determine the needs of their community and constituents.” The rule was issued in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which directed the Education Department to bring Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions receiving federal funding “that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”
The second rule issued by the Energy Department would strike a provision that allows students to “take affirmative action” to “overcome the effects of conditions that resulted in limited participation” if a federal agency determines that they have not faced discrimination based on sex in an “education program or activity.” The rule also strikes a requirement mandating schools to conduct self-evaluations on how their programs and practices comply with Title IX. Reporting under this provision ended in 2002.
While Title IX enforcement has traditionally been led by the Education Department, the Energy Department has “long used the law to close the gap between men and women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields,” reports Politico. Still, the method by which the agency is proposing to reform Title IX is worrying several civil rights groups.
The agency is using a direct final rule process, which has been reserved for “noncontroversial rules” that are “unlikely to receive significant adverse comments,” notes Politico. Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, told Politico that direct final rules can’t be used for Title IX.
“Technically, it just takes one significant adverse comment for them to have to withdraw the rule or to go through the notice of proposed rulemaking,” said Patel. “However, we’re dealing with an administration that has made very clear that they are not about complying with the law.””
Trump’s big beautiful bill hits Medicaid hard, which provides health insurance for low-income people. The bill adds onerous paperwork requirements that many people will fail to complete. Republicans represent the cuts as getting able-bodied young men back to work, but for Medicaid to save money, it has to no longer pay medical bills, which do not primarily come from able-bodied young men.
“Murkowski..was able to extract key concessions for her state…She won victories on clean energy tax credits, delaying changes to food aid for her state and the promise of massive revenues from oil and gas drilling leases, among other priorities she can take back home.
In the end, she voted for a bill that makes up the core of her party’s domestic agenda.
“I held my head up and made sure that the people of Alaska are not forgotten in this, but I think that there is more that needs to be done, and I’m not done,” Murkowski told reporters immediately after the vote. “I am going to take a nap, though.”
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she ultimately voted for a bill she just minutes later decried as “rushed” and “imperfect.”
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What Murkowski was wrangling for was pretty basic: How to blunt the impact of the bill on her state.
“What I tried to do was to ensure that my colleagues understood what that means when you live in an area where there are no jobs, it is not a cash economy,” she told reporters. “And so I needed help, and I worked to get that every single day.”
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Bowhead whaling boat captains recognized by the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission will be able to deduct more for whale-hunting-related expenses, up to $50,000 from the current $10,000.”
“In 1994, Donald Trump tried to use eminent domain to take a woman’s house so he could create parking spaces for limos outside his casino in Atlantic City.
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A court eventually denied Trump’s Atlantic City land grab. That turned out well for everyone, since his casino went bankrupt, and no limos needed to park.
However, judges were less reasonable in another eminent domain case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.”
“However the 9th Circuit ultimately comes down on that question, any decision addressing the legal merits of Newsom’s argument will amount to a rejection of the Trump administration’s alarming position that the president has the authority to deploy National Guard troops at will, even without pretending to meet statutory requirements or citing any facts to support his decision. That argument would transform the National Guard, today’s version of the state militia, into a federal force that the president can use at his discretion, without regard to constraints imposed by Congress or the 10th Amendment.”
Although both parties have been fiscally irresponsible, the Republicans have been more irresponsible, despite talking about it more. The Democrats tend to offset some of their spending with taxes. Republicans just take on debt to pay for wars and tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy.
The Iranian government is corrupt and needs enemies to hold its people together. This is why it treats the U.S. as the great Satan and Israel as the little Satan. There’s no deep reason why Israel and Iran should be enemies or why Iran and the U.S. should be enemies.
“Tillis — who voted against the bill in a key procedural vote Saturday night and announced Sunday he would not run for reelection — delivered a scathing rebuke of the president’s agenda-setting bill in a Senate floor speech, explaining his position and pledging to withhold his vote unless his concerns about drastic cuts to Medicaid are addressed.
“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? I think the people in the White House … advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise,” Tillis said in his floor speech.”