“instituting a “duty of care” for AI developers to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users” (per Blackburn’s summary of the bill). This duty would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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“It’s basically just an invitation for lawyers to sue any time anything bad happens and someone involved in the bad thing that happened somehow used an AI tool at some point.
And then you have to go through a big expensive legal process to explain “no, this thing was not because of AI” or whatever. It’s just a massive invitation to sue everyone, meaning that in the end you have just a few giant companies providing AI because they’ll be the only ones who can afford the lawsuits.”
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Section 11 of Blackburn’s bill is promoted as combating “the consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Big Tech and AI systems.” But, in practice, it could require AI systems to have a pro-conservative slant—at least as long as President Donald Trump or other Republicans are in power.
The bill would set up “audits of high-risk AI systems to undergo regular bias evaluations to prevent discrimination based on protected characteristics, including political affiliation.”
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“Right now, 230 lets platforms get frivolous lawsuits dismissed quickly at the motion to dismiss stage. This change would force every platform to go through lengthy, expensive litigation to prove they weren’t “facilitating” (an incredibly vague term) or “soliciting” third-party content that violates federal criminal law.
That’s gutting the main reason Section 230 exists. Instead of quick dismissals, you get discovery, depositions, and trials, all while someone argues that because your algorithm showed someone a post, you were “facilitating” whatever criminal content they claim to find.””
Because states run programs like Medicaid, but the federal government pays for over half of it, states have the incentive to come up with new programs and less incentive to properly police Medicaid spending.
“state and federal prosecutors have been trying to bust fraudulent preschools and other Medicaid fraud schemes in Minnesota for more than a decade. And yet, there are always more. Law enforcement is doing its best, but the problem seems to be that the state’s welfare bureaucracy is doing a terrible job of stopping the scammers in the first place.
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This is not just a problem in Minnesota either. Medicaid fraud is remarkably common. The federal departments of Justice and Health and Human Services run a joint program to catch fraudsters, and in 2024 alone it accounted for 1,151 convictions that recovered almost $1.4 billion.
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Anyone who wants to stop Medicaid fraud should focus less on scoring partisan political points or demonizing immigrants and more on the boring work of fixing federal policy.
Telling states to pay for a larger share of their own Medicaid spending seems like an obvious step in the right direction. It would give state officials—from governors like Walz all the way down to the lowest-ranking bureaucrat—a stronger incentive to prevent waste and fraud in the first place. It would reduce the burden placed on out-of-state taxpayers when states with lax enforcement allow fraud like this to occur.”
“The initial images of bored Drug Enforcement Administration agents strolling past perplexed joggers on the National Mall were more clownish than carceral. Local street resistance to the occupation was limited to a drunk guy throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
But inevitably, as this operation has dragged on, things have taken a darker turn. The sandwich-thrower was overcharged and rearrested in a needless, publicized show of force.
Masked federal agents have set up an unconstitutional checkpoint, violently arrested at least one delivery driver, and filmed themselves tearing down a banner protesting their presence in the city. Each day, more and more National Guard members pour into the capital.
The conversation about Trump’s declared crime emergency has understandably, albeit unhelpfully, provoked a lot of discourse about how safe D.C. is, whether a federalized local police department will make it safer, whether federal agents are being deployed in the right places and going after the right crimes, and on and on.
This incessant crime conversation has distracted from just how un-American Trump’s show of force in the nation’s capital is.
Uniformed troops and masked federal agents doing routine law enforcement at the command of the president is just not how we do things in the United States.
The entire point of the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the federal government from becoming a despotism, and one of the primary ways it does this is by limiting how many men with guns it has at its disposal.”
“Over the past three months, the Trump administration has filed lawsuits against Los Angeles, Illinois, Colorado, New York state, New York City, and other places for the express purpose of forcing them to abolish their “sanctuary city” policies and start aiding the feds in rounding up undocumented immigrants and enforcing federal immigration laws.
But unless the U.S. Supreme Court rapidly overturns several of its own precedents, including a recent one from 2018, all of these cases will be constitutional losers for President Donald Trump. Why? Here is how the late conservative legal hero and long-serving Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once spelled it out.
“The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems,” Scalia wrote for the Court’s majority in Printz v. United States (1997), “nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”
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federal agents still retain their own independent authority to enforce federal immigration law inside of sanctuary states and cities, just as federal authorities retain the independent authority to enforce other federal laws in states and cities. The key point under Printz is that it is unconstitutional for the feds to compel local officials to lend them a helping hand in carrying out the enforcement of federal law.”
“Five major U.S. cities are suing the Trump administration over funding to prevent nuclear attacks and terrorism that they argue has been illegally withheld by the Department of Homeland Security.
The lawsuit filed by Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Boston alleges that the administration has not reimbursed cities for relevant security expenses since February and has failed to award funding for 2025.”
“California may have gone too far this time in nudging the industry to ever-higher sales of zero-emission vehicles. The rules would have required automakers to hit increasing percentages — 35 percent by model year 2026 and 68 percent by model year 2030 — before reaching 100 percent of new-car sales in 2035.
Maybe that would have worked if it were just about California. But a dozen other states are signed on to California’s targets, and they have been slower and less generous with incentives and EV charging infrastructure. Where California has more than a quarter of its new car sales coming from EVs, New Jersey is at 15 percent, and New York is under 12 percent”
“President Donald Trump is throwing the weight of the Justice Department against the last bastion of U.S. climate action: states and cities.
In a sweeping executive order signed late Tuesday, Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to “stop the enforcement of State laws” on climate change that the administration says are unconstitutional, unenforceable or preempted by federal laws.”
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“The move came as Trump presided over a White House event Tuesday aimed at reviving the coal industry, which has withered against competition from less expensive natural gas and renewables.
He pledged to a row of coal miners standing behind him that he’d direct the Department of Justice to “identify and fight every single unconstitutional state or legal regulation that’s putting our coal miners out of business.”
Some legal experts said the White House’s executive order would be “toothless,” though climate advocates worry about gambling with a judiciary dominated by conservative appointees. And in a statement, Democratic governors said Trump would not intimidate them from climate action.”