“This legislative term, the governor and his fellow Republicans waged culture wars everywhere from the classroom to the bathroom to Disney World, making the state a pioneer of some of the most extreme right-wing policies in the US.
DeSantis’s legislative agenda in Florida — which he has framed as a “blueprint” for America — has targeted immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, Black Americans, and women, as well as the corporations who come to their defense. And state lawmakers have advanced DeSantis’s own political career at the expense of transparency and accountability. That’s all been done in the name of wooing an activist GOP base, which still loves former President Donald Trump and has given him a historically large lead in Republican primary polls.”
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“DeSantis signed a law that imposes felony penalties on health care workers who provide gender-affirming care for minors. The law includes a unique provision that could allow some parents to ask Florida courts to override other states’ custody decisions for children receiving gender-affirming care, though it only applies to a narrow set of circumstances. Advocates are challenging parts of the law on an emergency basis in court, arguing that it violates parents’ fundamental rights to make medical decisions for their children and that it violates the Constitution by discriminating against transgender children.”
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“Bathroom bill: DeSantis has made it illegal for Floridians to use bathrooms and changing facilities that don’t correspond with their sex at birth.”
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“Gender identity: Florida expanded DeSantis’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law to place additional restrictions on the teaching of “human sexuality” through high school and to require that schools promote abstinence from sex outside of marriage and monogamous heterosexual marriage. That law also prevents schools from requiring that teachers use pronouns that align with their students’ gender identity and declares that it is “false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.””
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“Drag shows: He also signed a law that bars establishments from allowing minors to watch an “adult live performance” that “depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or specific sexual activities.” Though the law is intended to target drag shows, many drag shows do not include any such content.”
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“The legislature has approved a bill that bars most abortions after six weeks, with some exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. In cases of rape and incest, a person would have to provide documentation like a restraining order in order to obtain an abortion up to 15 weeks. The legislation would penalize physicians who knowingly violate its parameters with potential fines or jail time. The policy won’t take effect until the state’s Supreme Court makes a decision on its existing 15-week abortion ban.”
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“One new law bars public colleges and universities from funding efforts that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI. DEI programming typically examines disparities and focuses on how marginalized groups can be better represented in staffing or curriculum. Opponents of the law worry that it could drive away students and faculty, while supporters argue that such programs are used to quell dissent.”
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“A new policy also bans the state’s public colleges and universities from offering general education courses about “identity politics” and the idea that “systemic racism” is “inherent in the institutions of the United States.” This law expands restrictions DeSantis previously pushed in the K-12 system to higher education.”
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“The legislature amplified the state’s efforts at book banning, with a new law that mandates that certain books can be pulled from school shelves for review within five days of a person flagging it as concerning. At least one Florida school district has already faced a lawsuit over its approach to book banning due to concerns that it violates free speech rights.”
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“There has been $12 million allocated for flights that DeSantis can use to transport migrants from Florida to other states. DeSantis gained national attention for flying migrants from San Antonio, Texas to Martha’s Vineyard; and now faces a lawsuit over that stunt.”
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“DeSantis signed a law nullifying an agreement that would have allowed Disney to continue to develop and maintain its theme parks in Florida with relative independence. Disney consequently sued DeSantis for waging a “relentless campaign to weaponize government power” over the company. It’s part of a long-running feud between the governor and Disney, which started when company executives spoke out last year against what critics call Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.”
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“DeSantis signed a law eliminating the requirements to report where he goes and who he meets with in an official capacity, insulating him from public scrutiny as he launches his presidential campaign.”
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“DeSantis signed a law that relaxes campaign finance reporting requirements for state political committees, which currently disclose their fundraising figures monthly. That applies to DeSantis’s state political committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis, which reported about $86 million cash on hand as of the end of April.”
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“the bill introduces new fines for outside voter registration groups and requires they provide a receipt when they help someone fill out a voter registration application — a measure that Democrats say could have a chilling effect on minority voters who tend to register through these groups.”
“”As Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes in a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Sackett v. EPA is likely to hobble the law’s ability to protect several major waterways, including the Mississippi River and the Chesapeake Bay.
The case involves an admittedly quite difficult question of how to read a vague provision of the law. The Clean Water Act prohibits “discharge of pollutants” into “navigable waters.” But it also defines the term “navigable waters” counterintuitively, to include all “waters of the United States, including the territorial seas.”
Both the courts and the federal agencies that enforce this law have struggled over the last half-century to determine which “waters” can be regulated under this uncertain statutory language — a problem exacerbated by the fact that pollutants discharged far from a major waterway can nonetheless migrate into that waterway. A toxic chemical dumped miles from the Mississippi River might find its way to that river through the network of streams, creeks, wetlands, and similar geographic features that feed into it.”
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“As an amicus brief filed by professional associations representing water regulators and managers warned, this new definition will “exclude 51% (if not more) of the Nation’s wetlands” from the Act’s protections. Wetlands often act as filtration systems that slow the seepage of pollutants into major waterways, and as sponges that help control floods.
In short, this opinion will significantly curtail the federal government’s ability to protect American waters.”
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“The specific dispute in Sackett involved Idaho landowners who wanted to fill in what a federal appeals court described as a “soggy residential lot” with dirt and rocks so that they could build a house on it. The lot is near a tributary that feeds into a creek, which itself feeds into Priest Lake, a sufficiently large body of water that no one really questions if it is subject to the Clean Water Act.
Although all nine justices agreed that the Clean Water Act does not apply to this particular lot, they split 5-4 on how to read the act, with Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices in dissent. (Technically, both Kavanaugh’s opinion and Justice Elena Kagan’s separate opinion, which also disagrees with Alito, are opinions “concurring in the judgment,” because all nine justices agreed that the property owners should prevail. But both of those opinions dissent from Alito’s reading of the law.)
The Clean Water Act is not the most precisely drafted law, and its text offers few hints as to what the “waters of the United States” might be. But it does include one pretty clear indication of how the law treats wetlands. One provision of the Clean Water Act applies the law to “wetlands adjacent” to waterways covered by the act.
As Justice Kagan writes in her opinion, “in ordinary language, one thing is adjacent to another not only when it is touching, but also when it is nearby. So, for example, one house is adjacent to another even when a stretch of grass and a picket fence separate the two.”
But Alito’s opinion does not apply the act to all wetlands that are “adjacent” to nearby waterways. Under Alito’s approach, only wetlands that have a “continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that there is no clear demarcation between ‘waters’ and wetlands” are subject to the law’s restrictions on pollution.”
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“regardless of whether the Sackett opinion can be squared with the actual language of the Clean Water Act, it is a binding opinion by the Supreme Court of the United States, and its narrow reading of that act could drastically limit the nation’s ability to fight water pollution.”
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“Near the end of his opinion dissenting from Alito’s approach, Kavanaugh lays out several ways that “the Court’s rewriting of ‘adjacent’ to mean ‘adjoining’ will matter a great deal in the real world.” He warns that this decision “may leave long-regulated and long-accepted-to-be-regulable wetlands suddenly beyond the scope of the agencies’ regulatory authority.””
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“The fundamental challenge facing any water regulator is that water systems are interconnected. As Kavanaugh writes, “because of the movement of water between adjacent wetlands and other waters, pollutants in wetlands often end up in adjacent rivers, lakes, and other waters.”
This explains why Congress not only extended the Clean Water Act to significant waterways, it also extended it to wetlands that are “adjacent” to those waterways. It makes no sense to prohibit pollution dumped directly into the mighty Mississippi, but to permit pollution to be dumped on nearby wetlands that feed directly into the river.
Nevertheless, five justices ruled that Congress’s decision to apply the law to adjacent waterways does not matter.”
“intersex is actually an umbrella that covers four parts of human biology: chromosomes, those X’s and Y’s that carry genetic information; gonads, the organs that produce eggs or sperm; the mixture of hormones coursing through a person’s veins; and what their genitalia looks like. An intersex person might have differences in one of these areas, or all of them.”
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“Not only is gender a spectrum, but actual physical, biological sex is a spectrum … And so it’s impossible to fit these bodies into a single box.”
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“Wong says it’s hard to know for sure what the rate of intersex traits are because there are so many differences that could be counted and because some differences go unnoticed without genetic testing — which most Americans never do. But she and Fraser worry that these laws could mandate that kind of test, say for participation in sports.”
“WHAT SEPARATES THE CLINTON AND TRUMP CASES?
A lot, but two important differences are in willfulness and obstruction.
In an otherwise harshly critical assessment in which he condemned Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” then-FBI Director James Comey announced that investigators had found no clear evidence that Clinton or her aides had intended to break laws governing classified information.
As a result, he said, “no reasonable prosecutor” would move forward with a case. The relevant Espionage Act cases brought by the Justice Department over the past century, Comey said, all involved factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S. None of those factors existed in the Clinton investigation, he said.
That’s in contrast to the allegations against Trump, who prosecutors say was involved in the packing of boxes to go to Mar-a-Lago and then actively took steps to conceal classified documents from investigators.
The indictment accuses him, for instance, of suggesting that a lawyer hide documents demanded by a Justice Department subpoena or falsely represent that all requested records had been turned over, even though more than 100 remained in the house.
The indictment repeatedly cites Trump’s own words against him to make the case that he understood what he was doing and what the law did and did not permit him to do. It describes a July 2021 meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which he showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” to people without security clearances to view the material and proclaimed that “as president, I could have declassified it.”
“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” the indictment quotes him as saying.
That conversation, captured by an audio recording, is likely to be a powerful piece of evidence to the extent that it undercuts Trump’s oft-repeated claims that he had declassified the documents he brought with him to Mar-a-Lago.”
“This new wave of bills targets a long-standing and common standard of job protection for college and university professors, meant to ensure freedom of thought among academics and insulate them from political attacks. The bills that are emerging this year are part of a broader trend among conservative legislatures attacking perceived liberal teachings in high schools and public universities: Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that would require professors at public universities in the state to undergo a tenure review process every five years, saying that tenure promotes “intellectual orthodoxy.” Other Republican state leaders like Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have since taken up the mantle, arguing that higher-level education is a place of liberal indoctrination and a source of “societal division.”
But the debate is about more than whether professors get to keep their jobs for life: It’s yet another sign that state-level Republicans are doubling down on appealing to their base. The partisan divide between those who go to college and those who do not is one of the firmest divides in American politics today, and it has reinforced diverging attitudes about the value of higher education itself and the role it plays in American life. Republican voters are increasingly suspicious of colleges and universities, and attacks on tenure are just the latest way the party is stoking those concerns.”
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“Opponents of measures like the ones proposed in Texas and Ohio — and the law passed in Florida last year — are concerned that eliminating tenure will make educators vulnerable to politically motivated firings.”
“One of the most common types of new laws this year are those that allow handgun owners to carry a concealed gun without a permit. Florida, Nebraska and South Carolina have passed such laws, joining 23 other states that have passed permitless concealed carry since 2010. North Carolina advanced a similar law that was shelved earlier this month, but the state legislature did repeal a law that required a permit to buy a handgun, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto.
Other states have considered expanding the areas in which concealed weapons can be carried. In Mississippi, the state Board of Education implemented a policy last year to comply with a decade-old law that allowed guns in K-12 schools. In West Virginia, guns are now allowed on public college and university campuses, a similar law to one Tennessee considered. The Iowa state House passed a bill allowing legal gun owners to keep a weapon in their car on public grounds and decriminalized the carry of concealed weapons for certain people, like those deemed a danger to themselves or others. The Missouri House advanced a law allowing guns in places of worship and on public transportation.
Many of these gun-rights expansions are also geared toward schools. After the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, the Republican Party promoted arming teachers as a way to increase school safety, and states have since begun passing laws allowing it. Last year, Ohio passed a law allowing teachers to be armed after 24 hours of training (down from 700 hours); this year, Mississippi passed a bill that would create a program to arm teachers, and Oklahoma has considered one similar to Ohio’s, though its legislative session is almost over. Texas’s legislature is considering a law that would offer a stipend to armed teachers, and Indiana has passed a bill allowing state-funded handgun training for teachers.”
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“We don’t know much about the effects most of these specific laws will have, because longstanding roadblocks on gun-related research mean we don’t know a lot about what kinds of gun laws prevent shootings, especially mass shootings. More than 20 years of research has found that increased availability of guns is associated with higher rates of homicide, and a 2014 study in the Journal of Urban Health found that a repeal of Missouri’s permit requirement for handgun purchases contributed to a 25 percent increase in firearm homicide rates in the five years that followed.”
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“many states are working to prevent the kind of data collection that would tell us more about the relationship between guns and gun violence. The federal government doesn’t track gun purchases. To fill in the gaps in that data, the gun-safety advocacy community has tried to work with credit-card companies to track gun purchases, according to Holihan. But Arkansas, Florida, Montana and Utah are among the states that have passed new legislation preventing “discrimination” against gun manufacturers in an effort to stop that practice before it starts, and credit-card companies have backed away from it. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has also banned state agencies from working with banks that track gun purchases.”
“In an executive order signed on April 6, Biden fleshed out the details of how the new regulatory regime will operate. There are three major changes.
First, the executive order changes the threshold for what counts as an “economically significant” regulation from $100 million to $200 million—and orders the new, higher threshold to continue rising with inflation. Because regulations deemed to have economically significant costs are subject to additional layers of scrutiny before being approved, this change would expand the number of regulations that could be approved without that additional oversight.”
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“Secondly, Biden’s new rules instruct federal agencies to “promote equitable and meaningful participation by a range of interested or affected parties, including underserved communities.” This push for greater equity is so complicated that it requires a separate 10-page memo explaining how to implement it. That includes new guidance for how the White House’s Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs should “facilitate the initiation of meeting requests” from groups that have “not historically requested such meetings, including those from underserved communities.”
It’s certainly easy to roll one’s eyes at the federal government’s equity mess, but getting more feedback from groups that could potentially be affected by federal regulations is not necessarily a problem—even though it will surely include calls for greater regulation in many cases. At the very least, adding more steps to the approval process might slow the gears of the regulatory state.
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“Finally, Biden’s executive order also changes how regulations will be weighed by the federal agencies approving them, including the foreshadowed changes to how costs and benefits are calculated. Probably the most significant change is a new time horizon for the consideration of regulatory costs, including a new formula for calculating costs and benefits that will extend over multiple generations—seemingly an attempt to make climate regulations appear less costly.”