“In 2019, the heavily gerrymandered Legislature passed a deeply unpopular bill prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant — without exceptions for rape or incest. The law is currently on hold, pending judicial review. In response, reproductive rights advocates secured enough petition signatures to put a referendum before the voters this November; if it passes, abortion rights will be enshrined in the Constitution, beyond the Legislature’s ability to meddle.
Given current polling, Republicans are expected to lose the November vote, so they’re trying to change the rules mid-game. The gambit is so transparent that even two former GOP governors, Robert Taft and John Kasich, have come out in opposition.”
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“Since 1912, when Ohio joined other states in adopting the referendum system, voters have been able to bypass the state Legislature and amend the constitution by a simple majority. The new measure would require 60 percent support.”
“They found that banning investors from buying and converting housing to rentals worked in one sense: The share of investor-owned rental properties in affected neighborhoods fell, and the number of properties bought by first-time homebuyers increased.
On the other hand, however, these new homeowners tended to be richer than the renters they were replacing, and the costs of rental housing increased overall.
“The ban has successfully increased middle-income households’ access to homeownership, at the expense of buy-to-let investors. However, the policy also drove up rents in affected neighborhoods, thereby damaging housing affordability for individuals reliant on private rental housing, undermining some of the intentions of the law,” write researchers in the study published on SSRN.”
“A federal court has permanently struck down Arkansas’ ban on gender transition procedures for minors. The law violated the rights of Arkansas children and their parents, as well as the rights of health care providers, held the court, finding that the ban went against the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, Due Process Clause, and First Amendment.”
“Drug prohibition sows the seeds of its own defeat by creating a highly lucrative and resilient black market that is always adjusting to enforcement efforts. When police arrest a drug dealer, someone else takes his place. Even dismantling an entire trafficking operation does not have a substantial and lasting impact on retail prices or consumption because it creates opportunities that other organizations are happy to seize.”
“the Maine measure would institute what’s known as “asymmetrical criminalization” or the “Nordic Model” of prostitution laws, a scheme criminalizing people who pay for sex but not totally criminalizing those who sell it. This model has become popular in parts of Europe and among certain strains of U.S. feminists.
But keeping sex work customers criminalized keeps in place many of the harms of total criminalization. The sex industry must still operate underground, which makes it more difficult for sex workers to work safely and independently. Sex workers are still barred from advertising their services. Customers are still reluctant to be screened. And cops still spend time ferreting out and punishing people for consensual sex instead of focusing on sex crimes where someone is actually being victimized.
A recent study of prostitution laws in European countries found full decriminalization or legalization of prostitution linked to lower rape rates, while countries that instituted the Nordic model during the study period saw their rates of sexual violence go up.”
“A federal judge delivered a stinging rebuke to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature over rules and a new state law that banned minors from receiving “puberty blockers” and other types of gender-affirming care.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle on Tuesday blocked the state from applying the ban to three minors whose parents are part of an ongoing lawsuit, saying they would “suffer irreparable harm” if they were not allowed to continue access to hormones and other types of treatment.”
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“The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care for adults and adolescents. But medical experts said gender-affirming care for children rarely, if ever, includes surgery. Instead, doctors are more likely to recommend counseling, social transitioning and hormone replacement therapy.”
“The actual policy mechanisms in the bill are more subtle than you might think. Most abortions — at least 88 percent in North Carolina — take place at or before 12 weeks. To reduce abortions during the period when it remains legal, the bill contains new in-person visit requirements for patients and onerous licensing restrictions on surgical clinics. These likely wouldn’t have the same effect as a full ban but would still make it harder for patients (especially out-of-staters) to access care.
North Carolina Republicans chose this more subtle pathway deliberately: Reporting from the Washington Post shows that the legislative drafting process was shaped by the widespread evidence that strict abortion bans are a political loser for the GOP.
The bill even includes some limited financial support for parents, like paid parental leave for state employees and teachers, to defang the popular Democratic argument that Republicans don’t actually care about the welfare of mothers and their children. It’s a state abortion restriction seemingly designed to counter the post-Dobbs backlash — one that could serve as a model for Republicans elsewhere looking to retreat from more hardline positions if it proves politically effective.
Whether the bill actually works as intended, on both policy and political grounds, it has potentially massive stakes for the entire country.”
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“The new North Carolina law restricts elective abortion through 12 weeks (the first trimester). After that, abortion is prohibited with narrow exceptions: rape and incest through 20 weeks, life-threatening fetal anomalies through 24 weeks, and life of the mother throughout (a notoriously murky exception).”
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“the new law imposes a new requirement that abortion clinics maintain facilities on par with those of ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), which are non-hospital outpatient surgery clinics. ASCs are required to adhere to specific rules, including physical layout restrictions, that abortion clinics don’t always meet.
There is no evidence that these restrictions improve outcomes in patients who have abortions; a study of 50,000 abortions found no difference between those performed in ASCs and those performed outside of them.
The ASC rule is the most common restriction found in so-called TRAP laws — short for “targeted regulation on abortion providers.” The idea behind TRAP legislation is to impose financially burdensome requirements on abortion clinics that all but force many of them to shut down. Research by the Guttmacher Institute found that TRAP laws in four states — Arizona, Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas — caused roughly half of all clinics in those states to shut down between 2011 and 2017. And Planned Parenthood has already said that none of its existing clinics in North Carolina meet the state’s ASC standards.”
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“strengthens an existing North Carolina law that prohibits patients from using abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone at home or elsewhere absent a physician’s supervision. Providing abortion drugs directly to a patient carries a $5,000 fine, as does advertising the sale of any such drugs.”
“One Florida school’s decision to restrict access to a poem written for and performed at President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration has increased scrutiny of book bans in the state, and the growing commitment to such efforts across the country.
The bans, some of which can begin with a single parent flagging a book as objectionable, have included books like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. And as education experts tell Vox, the bans can have the effect of cutting out entire groups and themes from students’ learning experiences, particularly stories centering people of color and LGBTQ people.
Last month, a Miami-Dade County school removed Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” from its elementary school collection following a complaint filed by a parent, according to a report by the Miami Herald. Gorman, who was 22 during the inauguration, was the country’s national youth poet laureate at the time. Her poem, which she wrote shortly after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, laid out an optimistic vision of how the country could move forward and attempt to bridge its divides.
In the complaint, the parent reportedly flagged multiple books addressing Black history, and claimed that Gorman’s poem “indirectly” featured “hate messages.” The poem is still available to the school’s middle schoolers, but not younger readers. The decision to change access to the poem is alarming given both the message it contains, and the important historical context it provides.
The treatment of Gorman’s poem, however, is just one example of a broader resurgence of book bans driven by Republican lawmakers across multiple states.”
“Supporters of gas stove bans argue that the gas needed to fuel them is bad for the climate and that the emissions they produce within the home are bad for your health.
Steve Everley, writing in National Review in January, covered several flaws in the most recent studies finding serious health impacts from gas stoves. Experimental studies that found links between gas stoves and child asthma used airtight rooms without ventilation. The author of another much-touted meta-analysis finding a link between gas stoves and child asthma said their study “does not assume or estimate a causal relationship.” Masses of earlier studies, Everley notes, have found no health impacts from gas stoves.
In the short-term, mandated electrification of appliances is probably worse for the climate. On-site use of gas stoves and furnaces uses almost all the energy in the gas. Generating electricity from gas and then using that electricity to power appliances is much less efficient. Of New York’s 10 largest power plants, for instance, five are powered by natural gas.”