Ohio Capital Journal

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday a new “anti-weaponization” settlement fund as a condition of President Donald Trump voluntarily dropping his multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for the leak of his tax returns several years ago.

Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization moved to drop the $10 billion suit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, with prejudice — meaning he cannot revive it in the future. 

Shortly after Trump’s filing hit the court docket, the DOJ announced the creation of a $1.776 billion settlement, not to be paid to Trump or his family, but to be divvied up among “others who suffered weaponization and lawfare,” according to a department press release.

Democrats swiftly denounced the settlement as a “slush fund.”

The move presumably means those pardoned by Trump for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol could seek money from the government. The DOJ’s announcement did not specifically mention President Joe Biden, former Attorney General Merrick Garland or the Capitol riot, and noted there are “no partisan requirements to file a claim.” 

Trump campaigned on pardoning anyone prosecuted by the Biden administration for crimes related to the 2021 attack, describing them as “patriots” and “hostages.” He pardoned roughly 1,600 defendants on the first night of his second term, and the White House published a dedicated web page to those targeted by “a weaponized Biden DOJ.”

In addition to monetary relief, eligible claimants will also receive a formal apology from the government.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney, said in a statement, “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”

“As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress,” he added.

Trump, his family and the Trump organization will also receive a formal apology but no monetary damages as part of the arrangement, according to the DOJ.

Trump tax info leaked

The president and his family had filed suit in January against the IRS for the leak to news media of their tax information by a contractor in late 2019. The contractor was sentenced for the leak in early 2024.

When questioned by the press Monday afternoon, Trump said he knew “very little about” the creation of the fund. 

“These were people that were weaponized and really treated brutally by a system that was so corrupt, with corrupt people running it, and they’re getting reimbursed for their legal fees and the other things that they had to suffer,” Trump said.

A committee of five “very talented people, very highly respected people” will decide how to distribute the money, he said.

Funding an ‘insurrectionist army’ 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the plan Monday afternoon as “one of the most depraved” uses by Trump of the Justice Department.

“This weekend, Trump worked up a plan to shake hands with himself in order to fund his insurrectionist army to the tune of billions,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement.

“Donald Trump sued his own government. Trump’s DOJ settled with Trump. And now Trump gets a nearly $2 billion slush fund to reward his own allies, loyalists, and insurrectionists. That is not justice. That is corruption happening in broad daylight,” he continued.

In an amicus brief filed Monday afternoon, 93 House Democrats urged U.S. District Judge Kathleen Mary Williams, nominated by President Barack Obama, to immediately dismiss Trump’s “collusive lawsuit” for lack of jurisdiction.

The Democratic lawmakers argued in the filing the fund is “plainly unlawful” for numerous reasons.

“(F)iling a collusive lawsuit only to immediately dismiss it in order to produce a collusive settlement that is illegal multiple times over would not only be legally barred; it would also raise serious questions about whether the parties have manipulated the court system to achieve illicit ends,” according to the brief.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Medicaid. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles reports, “Report: more than half a million Ohioans could lose Medicaid coverage in next decade.”

A new report shows recent cuts in funding from Ohio’s Medicaid budget will force more than a half a million Ohioans off the program in the next decade and threaten the closure of 31 hospitals and clinics in Ohio.

Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey (D-Cincinnati) said nearly 200,000 Ohioans have already lost care because of Medicaid cuts, with another 290,000 likely to be removed from Medicaid in the next decade…

The report from the group Protect Our Care says 31 hospitals, clinics and providers in Ohio are at risk of closing or are announcing cuts. That will increase stress on emergency rooms, and rural patients will have to travel to get medical care.

• Utilities. Cleveland.com’s Anna Staver reports, “Could Ohio repeat the mistakes behind its largest public corruption scandal?”

After Ohio’s largest public corruption case ended in the imprisonment of Republican House Speaker Larry Householder, state lawmakers rebuilt the wall between utilities companies and the power plants that generate our electricity.

But as electricity demand surges and electric bills keep climbing, a pair of Republican lawmakers say nuclear should become an exception.

• Data centers. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Victoria Moorwood, Haley BeMiller, Kelly Byer, Samantha Hendrickson, and Maria DeVito report, “Amid critics, ‘quiet’ deals, has Ohio flipped on data centers?”

Ohio residents are increasingly concerned about the growing number of data centers and their impact on local resources and the environment. Citizen groups have organized across the state, leading some communities to enact temporary bans on new data center construction.

State lawmakers are debating how to regulate the industry, considering issues like tax exemptions and environmental effects. Proponents argue data centers bring significant construction jobs and tax revenue to local economies.

• Mental and behavioral health. The Dayton Daily News’ Samantha Wildow reports, “Ohio lawmakers push for behavioral health checks, pursue regulations on health plans, insurers.”

Most health insurance plans must cover, at no cost, annual physicals and certain preventative care, and lawmakers want the same for Ohioan’s mental and behavioral health.

State lawmakers discussed bills that have implications for health insurance before the Ohio House Insurance Committee during its latest meeting, including hearing sponsorship testimony on a bill involving annual checkups for behavioral health.

• Payoff fund. CNN reports, “Trump administration creates $1.776 billion fund for allies of the president after he drops lawsuit against IRS.”

The Justice Department on Monday announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration.

It’s an unprecedented move that would allow the president’s administration to pay his supporters from a government agency he controls with taxpayer money.

Its creation comes as Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit alleging that the Internal Revenue Service failed to protect Trump and the Trump Organization from an unauthorized leak of their tax returns.

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More than 150 opponents flooded an Ohio House committee last week with written and spoken testimony against new legislation that looks to tie college and university funding to the higher education overhaul passed by state lawmakers last year.

Ohio GOP bill would tie state university funding to compliance with new anti-diversity higher ed law

Introduced in February, Ohio House Bill 698 — the S.B. 1 Compliance Supplemental Appropriation Act — would link a portion of public higher education funding to institutions’ compliance with the Ohio Senate Bill 1 law that bans diversity efforts, prohibits faculty strikes, regulates classroom discussion of “controversial” topics, and blocks unions from negotiating on tenure.

State Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Township, is H.B. 698’s primary sponsor, and said in his opening statement to the Ohio House Workforce and HIgher Education Committee that while the bill is not a “reiteration” of SB 1, it intends to strengthen accountability and transparency to ensure institutions’ adherence to the law. 

“This bill does not dictate curriculum, it does not eliminate academic freedom, it does not create political litmus tests, and it is not intended to relitigate the debate surrounding SB 1,” Young said. “What it does do is reinforce public accountability for institutions that receive taxpayers dollars and ensure the law passed by this General Assembly is implemented as intended.” 

Young said purported efforts at universities to “work around the intent” of SB 1 have been “astounding,” but did not provide any specific examples of institutions working to do so. He praised university presidents and administrators who have moved forward in complying with SB 1. 

“I understand that large institutions are complex, with many departments, employees and moving parts, and at times it can be difficult to be sure every individual within a university is operating consistently with the law,” Young said. “That is precisely why the additional provisions in HB 698 are necessary.”

Young’s new bill would require universities to create a “justification report” for university employees who formerly worked in DEI positions as of Jan. 2025, including their names, new salaries, responsibilities, and proof that their reassignment does not include DEI- related initiatives. 

The state’s higher education department would be required to review these reports under the bill, leading the reports to become public record. 

Last week was the second hearing for the bill, and the first time opponents were allowed to share their opinions on the bill. Seven opponents testified in person, while many more submitted written opposition. Lawmakers capped the session at an hour and a half. The bill is slated to be picked up again by lawmakers this week.

Opposition

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Critics raise concerns that the bill will expand government overreach and, strip labor protections for faculty and staff.

Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, said during her testimony the bill would have detrimental effects on labor protections for higher education’s faculty and staff. 

She said the bill represents a “dangerous escalation” of political interference within the state’s institutions of higher education. 

“H.B. 698 is not about accountability, it is about control,” Cropper said. “And to be blunt, this bill is anti-labor, anti-educator, anti-student, and fundamentally anti-education.” 

Cropper said the threat of lost funding is causing over-compliance with SB 1, and this supplemental bill would pave the way to broaden state overreach into unions’ collective bargaining process. 

“At its core, House Bill 698, attempts to weaponize state funding in order to force conformity onto the highest institutions of higher education,” Cropper said. 

She said the bill’s reporting requirements are designed to “intimidate” faculty and staff into “silence and submission.” 

“This should concern every worker in Ohio, educators and non educators alike,” Cropper said. “When the state begins stripping bargaining rights from one sector of workers, it creates a blueprint for broader attacks on organized labor across the state.” 

Steve Mockabee, the director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati, spoke on behalf of the Ohio AAUP, a labor union representing over 6,000 faculty and staff members from Ohio’s institutions of higher education. 

Mockabee said the bill’s reporting requirements raised “serious constitutional questions.” 

“HB 698 would create a system where Ohioans who were doing perfectly legal jobs in good faith would be placed on a watch list and monitored by the government in perpetuity,” Mockabee said. 

Mockabee criticized the bill’s language surrounding retrenchment, and said broad terms such as “organizational restructuring” and “strategic alignment” would enable administrators to shut down programs and terminate faculty at any time.

“After SB 1, job security for Ohio faculty is on life support,” Mockabee said. “HB 698, would pull the plug.”

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A recently added carveout to a math interventions bill would exempt some Ohio schools from teaching the science of reading curriculum — despite a statewide mandate. 

Lawmakers in the Ohio House Education Committee recently approved changes to Ohio Senate Bill 19 that would excuse Ohio’s classical schools from having to teach the science of reading, which is based on decades of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 

“This legislature and the governor placed a major emphasis … on science of reading to great effect, and now is not the time to start carving out loopholes for certain schools,” said Devin Babcock, senior legislative director for ExcelinEd in Action. 

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Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year after the law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget. 

The budget gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

“We’ve held the line as a state for the last few years, as have all the other states that have made this move,” Babcock said.

“If you’re a public school taking public money, then let’s do the best thing for kids and use the science of reading that we’ve adopted here as a state.”

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy. 

Ohio has eight classical schools that follow the K-12 curriculum of Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts college in Michigan.  

Some tenets of classical school curriculum include teaching Latin and a close reading of Western classics, among other things, according to Hillsdale College. 

Ohio S.B. 19 — which passed unanimously in the Ohio Senate in November — originated as an academic intervention bill to help students who score below proficient on state assessment tests. 

The bill would allow a public school student who scored below proficient in a state assessment test in math or English language arts to receive academic intervention services at no cost. 

The Ohio Education Association testified in opposition to the bill in March, 

“The bill is well-intentioned, but the details matter,” OEA President Jeff Wensing said in his testimony. “These tests provide useful information, but classroom educators have more information about a student’s knowledge and abilities in the subject.” 

The bill would require school districts or individual schools to come up with a math achievement improvement plan if 51% or less of the district or school’s students who took the third grade math achievement assessment scored at least a proficient score on the assessment.

Under the bill, schools would be required to develop math improvement and monitoring plans for each student that qualifies for math intervention services within 60 days after getting the student’s third grade assessment math results.

A math improvement and monitoring plan would identify the student’s “specific math deficiencies,” describe the additional instructional services they will receive, offer a chance for their parent or guardian to be involved, outline a monitoring process and offer high-dosage tutoring at least three days a week.

“From the experience of Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plans (RIMPs), I can tell you that this is an onerous task that will often fall on classroom teachers,” Wensing said in his testimony. “Educators’ time is in too short supply to add more paperwork, administrative tasks, and exercises in compliance.”

Ohio Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, introduced the bill, which has had five hearings in the Ohio House Education Committee.

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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Thousands of Ohioans were in line to get a break on their massive childcare costs. Then the Trump administration proposed canceling it.

That rule has gone final and is expected to take effect July 13. Some Ohio families will the be hardest hit in the United States.

In the midst of an already-existing affordability crisis, the government on Tuesday reported that inflation had spiked to its highest rate in three years. The spike has been driven by gas prices inflated by Trump’s war with Iran — and before that by massive tariffs levied on trade with most of the rest of the world. 

At the same time that Trump last summer cut $1 trillion in taxes on the richest 1% of Americans, he cut health and food benefits for the poor by a similar amount. Trump and Republicans in Congress also allowed healthcare subsidies to expire, which is expected to cost 356,000 Ohioans their coverage.

In the midst of all that, the administration moved in January to scrap a 2024 attempt by the Biden administration to cap the cost of childcare for families making $77,000 or less a year. The Trump administration did that by proposing a rule that goes beyond the 7% cap.

“The rule rescinds the requirement to cap child care copayments at 7% of household income, rolls back the use of grants and contracts for care that the market doesn’t readily provide for (like care for infants, toddlers, and kids with disabilities), rescinds prospective payments to providers and also enrollment-based pay, which risks destabilizing provider payment schedules, since they rely on predictable, reliable payments to cover fixed operating costs,” Hailey Gibbs of the Center for American Progress said in an email.

An analysis by her organization showed that some Ohio families will be hardest hit by the loss of the benefit. The researchers estimated that without the 7% cap, some eligible Ohio families are paying as much as 27% of their income on daycare.

For the maximum-earning family of three, that’s $1,700 a month. Under the Biden cap it would have been $452.

In other words, some Ohio families will now have to pay nearly $15,000 more for childcare than they otherwise would have. That’s nearly $4,000 more than the next-closest state, Vermont, the analysis said.

An extra bill of that size would plunge a huge number of Ohioans into poverty.

An analysis of government data earlier this year found that a $15,000 surprise expense would swamp the resources of virtually every single-earner, median income household of four in the Buckeye State.  

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A good friend of mine has owned his home for over a decade now.

A few years ago, he had a son, and it wasn’t soon after that when he found out he had dangerous levels of radon in his basement.

He quickly moved to remedy the problem.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, radon exposure can be a cause of lung cancer.

Even if he was to keep his son out of the basement (a tall order for a three-year-old), being down there himself would expose him to risk that could then put his son’s father in jeopardy. He quickly invested in fan systems that remove radon from his basement.

Radon is just one example of home hazards that can lead to long-term harms for families. Peeling paint in homes built in the 1970s and earlier can lead to lead poisoning for children. Secondhand smoke can lead to asthma, respiratory problems, sudden infant death syndrome, lung cancer, and accidental fires.

Lack of precautions like smoke alarms can lead to fire injuries and deaths. Moistures and molds can cause asthma and respiratory problems. Pesticide use can be the cause of acute poisonings and even chronic conditions such as cancer, low birth weights, and premature births.

Some of these problems can be solved with better information. My friend just needed to know this was a problem and he was ready to invest in remediation. He is surely not the only person in the state of Ohio who just needed a little bit of information to take action.

A new bipartisan bill introduced in the Ohio House last week aims to provide that information.

The “Healthy Homes Program Act” would instruct the state health director to create an information and awareness program around mold, lead, radon, and carbon monoxide to help members of the public understand the threat of these hazards and proper remediation of them.

The bill as it stands is just a mandate without a line item.

This means the health director would have to find ways to administer this program within his current budget.

The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission received a $2 million grant to support a Healthy Homes program in Central Ohio over the three years. The public information on the program emphasizes public information, home inspections, and assessments.

A well-financed state program would probably have to be funded more than this regional program to be effective at its goal.

Public information can only take you so far, however.

A special consideration here is children.

While we often assume parents will be perfect stewards of their children’ s health, we often find that parents underinvest in their children’s future, especially when they are dealing with tight budget constraints at home.

Subsidies for remediation targeted at low-income households with children would be a common-sense intervention for dealing with this mismatch between parental resources and children’s futures.

A well-funded information program with resources for needy households with children would help fight poverty and support economic growth in Ohio’s future.

Giving households tools to fight hazards in the homes can support health, educational outcomes, economic mobility, and equity for households in Ohio.

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Conversations with survivors of sexual abuse left Missouri state Sen. Tracy McCreery wondering what could have prevented the harm, leading her to sponsor a bill that would require clergy and religious workers to report suspected child abuse or neglect.

Her bill would have forced ministers to report even if they learned of abuse during confession or another religious rite. She urges people to view the issue through the lens of child safety and not against religion.

“Children are just very vulnerable and it’s up to us as adults to not allow them to be harmed,” the Democrat told Stateline. “There shouldn’t be an exception for adults that know about something and just don’t report it.”

Her bill failed to advance as the Missouri legislative session drew to a close. Other state lawmakers across the country also are grappling with the question of who should be required to report suspected child abuse or neglect, known as “mandated reporters.”

Some legislators are weighing whether clergy should be included — and whether they should be forced to reveal information from confessions. Other lawmakers are wrestling with whether sports coaches, talent agents, camp leaders and other professions with access to children should be mandated reporters.

The religious freedom question played out most recently in Washington state. A Washington law enacted last year requires clergy to report suspected child abuse and neglect, even when they receive the information through confidential communication during a religious rite, such as confession. Catholic bishops and then Orthodox churches sued, saying it violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. The U.S. Justice Department joined the lawsuit on the bishops’ side.

Confession is considered a sacred rite in the Catholic faith. Penitents confess their sins to a priest, who is forbidden by church law from revealing anything said. The Washington law “puts Roman Catholic priests to an impossible choice: violate 2,000 years of Church teaching and incur automatic excommunication or refuse to comply with Washington law and be subject to imprisonment, fine, and civil liability,” the bishops’ suit said.

A federal judge blocked enforcement of that portion of the law, and the state eventually agreed to drop the obligation. Clergy remain mandated reporters, but state prosecutors do not enforce reporting requirements related to confession.

In New York, a pending bill would add any “clergy member or other minister of any religion” to the list of required reporters, similar to a Kansas bill that passed the state House but died in the Senate this session. Both bills would exempt information received through a confession.

South Dakota lawmakers also considered adding clergy to the state’s list of mandated reporters this year, with exemptions for confession, though that proposal failed in committee. Church opponents said requiring faith leaders to make “subjective” calls on whether difficult life circumstances or poverty amount to reportable abuse or neglect would interfere with the clergy-parishioner relationship, and run afoul of First Amendment protections, the South Dakota Searchlight reported.

A pending Vermont bill, however, aims to end the mandatory reporting exception for confession.

McCreery rejects the idea that an adult should be able to confess to abuse in a religious setting without prompting a report, and thinks there are loopholes in reporting laws that undermine child safety.

“That really repulses me,” she said. “Why are we not thinking about our obligations to protect the child?”

But Chris Motz, senior counsel with First Liberty Institute, which pursues religious freedom cases, said the Washington litigation should serve as a lesson to other states considering similar bills.

“The lesson for state legislators is going to be that they have to respect long-standing religious rights, while balancing the important interests in safeguarding children,” he said. “We don’t have to always see things as sort of a winner take all, this or that. We can do a little bit with both hands.”

Carrying the legal burden

The bills sometimes define “clergy” widely, including not only ordained leaders such as priests and rabbis, but also those who serve as spiritual leaders of any religious community, church or sect.

Michael W. Halcomb, an ordained minister and assistant professor at Montreat College in North Carolina, told Stateline that if abusers know clergy must report anything disclosed in counseling or confession, they may never seek help at all.

“If reporting is mandated, abusers will likely never come forward for help or counseling,” Halcomb said. “That means the abuse stays completely hidden no matter what happens.”

Halcomb said many pastors are not equipped to determine where “spiritual guidance ends and a formal criminal confession begins,” which could complicate broad reporting mandates.

“Whoever has the ability to isolate a child, in other words, should have to carry the legal burden to report.”

But Vermont Democratic state Rep. Esme Cole introduced a bill seeking to repeal the state’s clergy-confidentiality exception. Cole said the bill is not aimed at one denomination or only at what is said in confession. She said it is also about abuse known about by church leaders that is never reported; she wants such leaders to be required to report as well.

The issue is personal, Cole told Stateline. A close friend, she said, is an adult survivor of physical and emotional abuse that happened in a church setting when he was about 10. The priest accused of the abuse, she said, never faced discipline and was instead moved elsewhere.

Cole calls it the “pass the trash” loophole.

“When there’s bad behavior, and by bad behavior I mean real abuse committed by a member of the diocese they move them to the next church over or two churches over,” Cole said. “If we want to stop that kind of movement in its tracks, it needs to be reported.”

Cole’s proposal comes against the backdrop of a long history of clergy abuse allegations in Vermont’s only Catholic diocese. After the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2024, another 118 people submitted confidential claims, after previously settling 67 lawsuits for about $34.5 million, VTDigger reported.

Who else should report?

Other states are debating whether to add coaches and other professionals with access to children to mandated-reporter lists.

If the goal is protecting children, Halcomb said, states should look beyond churches and impose reporting duties on “anyone with unsupervised authority over minors,” including club sports coaches, private tutors and camp volunteers.

This month, Connecticut passed legislation requiring paid municipal youth camp directors, assistant directors and staff members age 21 or older to serve as mandated reporters.

Although the South Dakota clergy bill failed, the legislature did approve a separate measure requiring any “coach of a school activity” to be a mandated reporter. Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed it into law in March.

California expanded its definition of mandated reporters to explicitly include certain school volunteers, governing board members and private school employees as of July 1, 2026, and requires annual mandated-reporter training. The state also enacted a law last year that added talent agents, talent managers and talent coaches who work with minors.

Beth Sanborn, a retired Pennsylvania police officer, now leads other school resource officers in mandated-reporter training sessions as a Montgomery County School Safety Coordinator. She asks them to imagine being pressed to describe to a stranger their last sexual encounter.

The question elicits nervous giggles from flustered adult officers, she said. She then asks them to think of a young child who has been sexually abused by a relative, and how the fear and shame can be overwhelming enough for them to not seek help.

“What if you’re an 11-year-old kid and what if it was nonconsensual? What if it was your uncle?” Sanborn said. “Do you really want to share that with a stranger? It became a shared responsibility for us who are trained to recognize these signs.”

In Pennsylvania, Sanborn said she saw a complete shift in mandated reporting after 2012, when the state enacted a law that requires school employees and contractors with direct contact with children to receive training on recognizing and reporting child abuse. The laws were enacted in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State.

Sandusky, a former assistant football coach, was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys. The scandal led to the dismissal of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s revered longtime football coach, who was criticized for not doing enough after learning of an allegation involving Sandusky as early as 1998.

Sanborn thinks some school officials, from teachers to officers, hesitate to report because of a common misconception they must prove abuse occurred. The point of mandated reporting, she said, is for adults to pass along a reasonable concern before a child is harmed.

“The school resource officer gets to see one facet of a kid’s behavior. The coach gets to see another. The guidance counselor sees another. The favorite teacher sees another.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org. 

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Thousands of people joined demonstrations in Selma and Montgomery on Saturday to protest redistricting by southern Republican state legislatures targeting Black Democratic members of Congress.

An afternoon rally in Montgomery that drew over 5,000 people featured politicians, activists and civil rights dignitaries as of the All Roads Lead to the South campaign, aimed at organizing voters to offset the advantages Republicans may gain from redistricting.

“Our democracy is on the line,” said Victor Coar, who traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery. “Our rights are on the line. They are trying to take it all away. They are suppressing our vote, trying to keep us quiet, trying to silence our vote.”

The events on Saturday deliberately invoked the Civil Rights Movement in cities that featured some of its most famous moments, and came just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court targeted one of its major legacies. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided last month, the nation’s high court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting and election laws, by saying plaintiffs challenging maps under Section 2 would have to prove intentional discrimination, a significantly higher standard than the prior one.

The court’s decision led Republican-controlled legislatures across the South to introduce redistricting legislation targeting Black majority districts. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a 2023 congressional map it had previously ruled racially discriminatory. Gov. Kay Ivey set special primary elections in four congressional districts for August, though plaintiffs in the state’s major redistricting case, known as Allen v. Milligan, have continued litigation. A federal court Friday set a hearing in the case for Friday.

Earlier on Saturday, faith leaders gathered at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma and offered prayers, criticisms of the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump and calls for voting rights protections for vulnerable communities.

After an hour, 400 people then marched silently from the church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where civil rights protestors were attacked on March 7, 1965, an assault that eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

“I know how important moments like these are, and I am here because I know that one of us can go far but we cannot go far enough,” said Rev. Cece Jones-Davis, who traveled from Washington, D.C. to participate in the day’s events, in an interview after the march. “It is going to take all of us, and so I am just here to add my voice to the collective.”

At the Montgomery rally, speakers spoke to several grievances aimed at the Trump administration and at the U.S. Supreme Court regarding voting rights, but also urged the crowd to have resolve during the current political climate.

Bernice King, the daughter of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and CEO of the King Center, harkened to the past as a rallying cry for the present.

“Today we return to the very grounds where my parents and freedom families stood, when Black voter registration was scarce, when discrimination was the norm, and when violence was the price for seeking dignity. Their sacrifice opened the door to the Voting Rights Act,” she said.

Now, she said, people are called once again to act.

“Because the recent Supreme Court rulings demand our presence,” she said. “It was not only a legal decision, it is a moral disgrace and a shameless assault on Black political power.”

Lawmakers from Alabama took the stage to urge the crowd to continue their efforts to mobilize the vote.

“Sometimes I wonder what would I have done if I had been present and alive during the movement,” said Sen. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove. “Would I have marched? Would you have marched? Would I have participated in a boycott? Would you have done that? Would I be one of the lawyers who filed one of those lawsuits? Would I have been a freedom singer, singing and moaning for the movement like my grandfather? We are here to tell you, you don’t have to wonder anymore. This is our time, right now, and we are fired up and ready to go.”

Then Alabama’s congressional delegation and their colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives took the stage to rally the audience and to meet the moment.

Changing Alabama’s congressional maps will significantly threaten the re-election prospects of U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, and could eventually put U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, at risk.

“It is time to show up and show out, not just in one state capital, not just for one election but we need you to step up and show up for every one of our state legislators who are trying to get out the vote,” Sewell said.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, said that the freedom that we enjoy also requires responsibility.

“We also stand here with the understanding that the freedoms we inherited from our ancestors are not possessions that we hold, they are rights that we hold in trust,” he said to the crowd. “That we were given to be stewards of. A lot of people are drinking deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that they did not dig. They are eating from banquet tables prepared for them by their ancestors, sitting back, getting dumb, fat and ugly, and happy and comfortable. This is one of moments where we understand our blessings come with obligations.”

Khadidah Stone, one of the Allen v. Milligan plaintiffs, criticized Ivey’s decision to schedule the special session during an interview at Saturday’s event in Montgomery.

“I would really like those legislators to focus on the quality of life of Alabamians,” Stone said. “We have a lot of rural hospital closures, we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the country, 50,000 Alabamians just lost SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, and most of the recipients are the elderly and children.”

Figures said after the rally that he was “inspired by what we see.”

“It is an incredibly humbling experience to see thousands come out and, in essence, help defend my seat, and defend Congresswoman Terri Sewell’s seat, so we can’t help but be overwhelmed by gratefulness and humility by what we are seeing, and encouraged because we think this is going to carry over until November,” he said.

Figures, however, said that he felt there were factual differences between the Callais case and the Milligan case, and expressed confidence that the Milligan plaintiffs could still win.

“The dispute with our district goes all the way back to the 2020 census, and the original maps that the state Legislature redrew, and the three-judge panel, two of whom were appointed by Trump and one by (Ronald) Regan originally, they found that the state had engaged in intentional discrimination in how they drew those maps.”

Several of those who attended the afternoon rally criticized attempts by the various legislatures to reconfigure their district maps.

“It is important for folks to understand what folks are getting taken away from them, and they are getting taken away their right to representation,” said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Alabama, who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination to be governor, in an interview at the event in Montgomery. “We have come so far in the state of Alabama. We have 60 years of progress that has been thrown backwards by the Supreme Court and the Legislature just a few blocks from here.”

Reginald Mason, who also traveled from Birmingham, said voting is what matters.

“People who don’t actually vote are not informed, they don’t know about the struggle that our ancestors went through,” Mason said. “I never thought I would be standing here today fighting for what they have already fought for me.”

Religious and faith leaders expressed many of the same concerns when they led congregants in prayers prior to the morning march across the Edmund Pettus bridge.

“What I realize is that it is just our turn, and freedom is not fought for once, freedom has been fought for many times,” Jones-Davis said. “We are here to do our part.”

This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas’ gerrymandered congressional map to take effect in December, its conservative majority wrote that a lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign” when it blocked the map more than three months before the election.

Now, the Supreme Court is the one upending elections.

For the past two decades, the Supreme Court has advanced the idea that federal courts should not order major changes close to an election to limit voter confusion. Over time the doctrine, first articulated in the 2006 case Purcell vs. Gonzalez, became known as the Purcell principle. 

But election law experts and one of the court’s liberal justices say the Supreme Court is wielding — or disregarding — the principle unevenly in ways that aid Republicans.

In recent weeks, the Supreme Court has effectively allowed last-minute election changes in Southern states that hold major consequences for what districts voters are assigned to and the future of Black political representation across the region.

These Republican-controlled states are racing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate majority-Black districts, many of which have elected Black Democrats to Congress. The gerrymandering rush has come even with early voting underway in some states.

Wilfred Codrington III, a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, who has studied the Purcell principle, said limiting voter confusion is common sense. But after that general idea,  the principle “just falls apart” because the Supreme Court has never answered questions raised by the doctrine — like how close to an election is too close.

“The court has not thought through them and it seems like when the court applies them, they’re being applied in partisan ways,” Codrington said, about questions the doctrine raises.

April ruling OK’d redistricting

After the high court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act in Callais, a landmark decision on April 29 that found Louisiana’s map unconstitutional, it fast-tracked paperwork so the state could quickly redraw district lines. 

Voting had begun in the state’s congressional primary election, which Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended, discarding 42,000 votes already cast.

A majority of the court voted to immediately certify its decision instead of observing its typical 32-day waiting period. In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the justices were disregarding their previous insistence that courts shouldn’t risk assuming political responsibility for a redistricting process that often produces hard feelings.

“There is also the so-called Purcell principle, which we invoked only five months ago to chide a federal district court for ‘improperly insert[ing] itself into an active primary campaign,’” Jackson wrote. “The Court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray. And just like that, those principles give way to power.”

The conservative justices on May 11 then cleared a path for Alabama to move toward implementing a Republican gerrymander that state lawmakers approved in 2023 but was blocked by a lower court. Their decision came a little more than a week before the state’s primary election. 

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has called an August special primary election for some of the state’s congressional districts.

“The United States Supreme Court’s decision is plain common sense and enables our values to be best represented in Congress,” Ivey said in a statement.

‘Like it doesn’t exist’

The Supreme Court’s actions this spring stand in stark contrast to its December decision to allow Texas’ gerrymander to take effect. After President Donald Trump urged GOP states to redraw their maps for partisan advantage, Texas was the first state to respond, enacting new lines that could help Republicans pick up five seats.

A three-judge district court panel ruled against the map, finding that it was racially gerrymandered. The Supreme Court paused the panel’s decision, finding that the panel likely made serious errors and that the district court was “causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections” amid the campaign season.

That language echoed the Purcell decision, which found that an appeals court had erred in blocking an Arizona law requiring a photo ID to register to vote. The Supreme Court’s unsigned opinion cautioned that court orders affecting elections can cause voter confusion. 

“As an election draws closer, that risk will increase,” the 2006 opinion said.

Nearly 20 years later, the Supreme Court made no mention of Purcell in its Callais opinion, which dropped like a political bomb across the South. Since the decision, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee have either enacted new maps or are seeking to do so ahead of the November midterm elections.

Mark Johnson, a Kansas City-based lawyer with a long history of working on election litigation, noted that Callais was argued at the Supreme Court twice, first in March 2025 and again in October. The justices then waited a long time before releasing their decision, he said, adding that if they didn’t realize the implications of their ruling they were “asleep at the wheel.”

“That’s why the Callais case is so disturbing, because a Supreme Court that has by and large followed Purcell just acted like it doesn’t exist,” Johnson said.

Court legitimacy at stake

Several high-profile observers of the Supreme Court have been unsparing in their criticism of the justices’ approach. 

Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and a foremost expert on the court, wrote in an online post that the court’s recent decisions “fatally undermine” the animating purpose of the Purcell principle.

“The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is. Either way, they don’t seem to mind the inconsistency—in a context in which it’s having the remarkably coincidental effect of benefiting Republicans,” Vladeck wrote.

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote on social media that the Supreme Court in Chief Justice John Roberts’ hands “has become a chaos agent in elections.”

Public support for the Supreme Court was dropping prior to Callais. An August 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 48% of Americans hold a favorable view of the court, a 22-percentage point drop from August 2020.

In the wake of the decision, Democrats have renewed their calls for court reform. Some have proposed term limits for the justices or expanding the size of the court to dilute its conservative majority. However, major changes are unlikely to become law while the U.S. Senate retains the filibuster and Trump remains in office.

For his part, Roberts has taken pains to paint the court as outside of politics. But at a judicial conference in Pennsylvania in early May, Roberts acknowledged the public thinks the justices are expressing policy preferences rather than interpreting the law.

“I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do,” Roberts said, according to The Associated Press.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another of the court’s conservatives, has drawn a distinction between federal courts ordering last-minute changes to elections and states making changes themselves — suggesting that courts shouldn’t necessarily thwart state legislatures that alter rules and procedures in the run-up to elections.

In a 2020 concurring opinion about a federal judge who had altered Wisconsin’s absentee ballot deadline amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kavanaugh wrote that it was one thing for state legislatures to change their own election rules “in the late innings” and bear responsibility for unintended consequences.

“It is quite another thing for a federal district court to swoop in and alter carefully considered and democratically enacted state election rules when an election is imminent,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Chaotic campaign season

But voting rights advocates say Callais is unleashing a wave of voter confusion as Southern legislatures rush to gerrymander.

Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a map May 7 that divides the Memphis area among three congressional districts. The move splits a majority-Black district in Memphis represented by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat. Cohen announced Friday he wouldn’t seek reelection.

The state’s primary election is scheduled for Aug. 6.

“This is a year where we’re already in the cycle and they’re going to have to redo everything they’ve already worked on because these districts are completely different,” Matia Powell, executive director of the voting rights group Civic TN, told reporters.

The Tennessee Democratic Party and several Democratic candidates, including state Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for Cohen’s current seat, have filed a federal lawsuit against the map. They argue the new map will cause “significant voter confusion” and severely burden the right to vote.

Tennessee Republican Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argues the Democrats have a solution in search of a problem. Tennessee lawmakers have provided more than $3.1 million to implement the new map and that state officials are already working to meet election deadlines, Skrmetti’s office wrote in a Wednesday court filing.

“At bottom, this suit is an invitation to play politics, not law,” Tennessee Senior Assistant Attorney General Zachary Barker wrote in the filing.

U.S. District Court Judge William Campbell, a Trump appointee, on Thursday declined to immediately halt the map.

The Supreme Court has sent states the message that “there are no rules” and that state legislatures are welcome to gerrymander Black representation at any point, said Anna Baldwin, voting rights litigation director at Campaign Legal Center, which has sued over Florida’s recent gerrymander.

And the way the court applies the Purcell principle encourages states to make changes close to elections — because courts are more reluctant to block them.

“The court is creating a perverse incentive structure that ultimately does make it harder for people who are trying to protect voting rights to prevail,” Baldwin said.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Medicaid. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Karen Kasler reports, “Legislative leaders speak out about allegations of fraud in Ohio Medicaid program.”

The Trump administration is temporarily stopping new home health and hospital providers from enrolling in Medicare because of concerns about fraud in the system. This comes after a conservative outlet reported dozens of home health care businesses in Columbus allegedly billed the other government insurance program, Medicaid, for millions of dollars’ worth of services that were never provided. Ohio’s legislative leaders are now weighing in on the situation.

House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima) said he believes the report put out by the Daily Wire. Huffman said he is talking with other leaders about the possibility of new legislation on fraud. But he said lawmakers have tried to deal with protecting the program from fraud.

• Medicaid measures. The Dayton Daily News’ Samantha Wildow reports, “DeWine imposing Medicaid changes to address possible fraud, waste.”

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine imposed new limitations on aspects of the Medicaid program that critics have accused of lacking oversight or proper checks, making the program vulnerable to potential fraud or misuse…

DeWine instructed the Ohio Department of Medicaid to seek permission from the federal government to impose a moratorium on new home-healthcare and hospice businesses being able to become Medicaid providers. He also plans to issue an executive order that would lead to more stringent oversight of certain providers already part of the Medicaid program.

• FirstEnergy re-trial. Cleveland.com’s Jeremy Pelzer reports, “Dave Yost predicts FirstEnergy bribery retrial will proceed under new Ohio AG.”

Outgoing Attorney General Dave Yost expressed confidence Thursday that ex-FirstEnergy executives Chuck Jones and Mike Dowling will be retried on bribery charges even though Yost is stepping down next month.

Yost’s comments, posted on social media, are the strongest indication yet that a scheduled retrial of Jones and Dowling this fall will continue as planned under his recently appointed successor, Ohio Department of Public Safety Director Andy Wilson.

• False. The Columbus Dispatch’s Chad Murphy reports, “Letter falsely claims DeWine signed law banning ‘aimless driving’ in Ohio.”

The letter falsely states a new law, House Bill 626, outlaws “aimless driving” with a $1,000 fine. The real House Bill 626 deals with electronic court notifications and has not been passed into law. Similar hoax letters targeting “joyriding” have also appeared in Florida and Kentucky.

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An Ohio House committee eliminated funding for a program intended to increase childcare accessibility in a bill meant to address potential childcare fraud.

The House Children and Human Services Committee brought Ohio House Bill 647 up for a hearing recently for the sole purpose of making changes to the bill. The committee’s chair, Republican state Rep. Andrea White, said she hopes to see the committee approve the bill soon.

The bill was initially introduced in response to a right-wing influencer’s claims out of Minnesota that federal funding was being fraudulently used by childcare facilities, particularly those managed and owned by Somali immigrants.

The Trump administration responded to the Minnesota claims by freezing childcare funding to that state, and other Democratically led states.

Ohio officials including Gov. Mike DeWine made comments at the time that the claims were made, hoping to avoid a freeze on federal funds coming to the state for its Publicly Funded Child Care program.

The sponsors of H.B. 647, Republican state Reps. Phil Plummer and Tom Young, defended the state’s oversight of the childcare system, while also introducing the bill to help prove enforcement of laws would be strong and swift, so the federal funding distributors didn’t take action.

“We can’t gaslight this and freak out the federal administration, and they pull our funding,” Plummer said in January when the bill was announced. “Because then we lose childcare centers.”

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SUBSCRIBE The bill focuses on increasing the state’s data analysis skills when it comes to childcare centers and funding. It would also put in a new oversight system, including not only county prosecuting attorneys who are typically the ones to investigate local childcare fraud allegations, but also the state Inspector General’s Office, and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office as well.

The legislation would base funding from the Publicly Funded Child Care coffers on a child’s enrollment in a childcare facility, rather than on a child’s individual attendance. It would also allow the Ohio Department of Children & Youth to suspend a childcare center’s license without a prior hearing “if DCY has reason to suspect that (the center) has engaged in the misuse of public dollars or acted with intent to commit fraud against the PFCC program,” according to bill analysis by the Legislative Service Commission.

H.B. 647 received the support of Kara Wente, director of the Ohio Department of Children & Youth.

Changes made this week by the House committee remove money for a pilot program that Republicans have been trying to enact for several years, a program that was an attempt to increase accessibility in a state that advocates say is in “crisis” when it comes to affordability and access to childcare.

The Child Care Cred Program was originally a standalone piece of GOP-led legislation, but had since been absorbed into H.B. 647. The program was sold by supporters as a cost-sharing model, one in which the state would contribute to the cost of childcare, while the remaining cost would be split between participating employers and eligible employees.

In the committee changes, an appropriation for the program of $600,000 for fiscal year 2026 and $4.4 million in 2027 was removed, among other changes.

“So, instead of using the Child Care Cred money, that money is going to stay in (the budget of the Ohio Department of Children & Youth), and then the department will use other funds that are within their budget,” White told the committee.

The most recent state budget put forth $10 million in support of the Child Care Cred program.

There were no objections to the changes made to the bill. State Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur, R-Ashtabula, said the bill changes were “a big improvement,” but commented on a different change, one in which the time period for childcare centers to “backdate,” or make changes to attendance records, was increased from seven days to 10 business days or 14 calendar days, whichever is later.

“I would prefer to see even tighter timelines,” Fowler Arthur said. “I think we really need to be making sure that we have the most accurate data possible.”

Another change made to H.B. 647 eliminated an increased to the Department of Children & Youth’s “community projects and assistance” funding by $2 million in 2026 and $3 million in 2027. In a previous version of H.B. 647, the money was required to go toward “enhanced data analytics for use in conducting automated attendance reviews of publicly funded childcare providers.”

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Ohio lawmakers are launching a joint data center committee where they will invite data center workers, citizens, and companies like Google and Meta to come in and testify. 

Ohio state Rep. Adam Holmes, R-Nashport, and Ohio Senator Brian Chavez, R-Marietta, will be co-chairs of the committee. 

The committee will include Ohio reps. Thad Claggett, R-Licking County, Heidi Workman, R-Rootstown, and Chris Glassburn, D-North Olmsted. Ohio Sens. Bill Reineke, R-Tiffin, Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, and Willis E. Blackshear Jr., D-Dayton, will also be on the committee. 

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“The mission of this committee is to ensure that Ohio citizens have accurate, relevant and usable information concerning the economic, environmental, and security impacts of Ohio data center development,” Holmes said. 

The committee’s first two meetings will be May 27 and May 28 with the plan going forward to have at least one meeting a week, Chavez said. 

“We’re going to go until we get to a natural breaking point, and then we’ll let the information disseminate,” he said. 

“We intend to get this information out to council trustees, county commissioners, mayors, and concerned citizens. We want to make sure that folks are able to get information and be able to have critical conversations with the relevant information.”

Holmes said they have talked to companies like Meta and Google about coming to testify.

“They’re anxious to come,” he said. “I think they have a message they want to broadcast on exactly how they’re handling the concerns.”

Ohio has about 200 data centers, the fifth-highest state in the country. Most of the data centers are in central Ohio. Cincinnati has 26 and Cleveland has 23, according to the Data Center Map. 

“Some Ohioans are troubled by reports of exorbitant water use, negative land and wildlife impacts, excessive sound light and electromagnetic emissions and increased local energy costs,” Holmes said. 

A large data center can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes, according to the Office of Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.

Data centers used 4% of all U.S. electricity in 2023 and that is expected to grow to 9% by 2030, according to the counsel. 

Virginia has a high concentration of data centers and electricity prices there have increased by up to 267% in recent years, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. 

“Energy and information are not only the economic drivers for the 21st century; they are also a national security imperative,” Holmes said. “It’s crucial Ohio establishes sound data center development policies that benefit all Ohioans.”

A group of Ohioans are currently collecting signatures to get a data center ban on the November ballot. 

The proposed constitutional amendment would prohibit building data centers with a peak load of more than 25 megawatts per month, but the amendment will need more than 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1. 

“We’re just trying to get information out so the folks can have critical thoughts and critical conversations,” Chavez said when asked about the amendment. 

The Ohio House unanimously passed Ohio House Bill 646, which would create a new data center study commission. The bill is now in an Ohio Senate Committee. 

“We took a look at (Ohio H.B. 646), and we felt like this was going to be a much faster process,” Chavez said when asked if this is replacing the data center study commission bill. 

“This doesn’t necessarily have to replace it, but it seems to be the quicker vehicle that we’re going to pursue right now.” 

Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, favors the committee over the bill that would create a data center commission. 

“We can be a little bit more prepared to delve deeper into the issues, rather than a commission that’s so broad that it can’t delve very deep into the issues at all,” he said. 

Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, is optimistic about the work that will come out of the committee.  

“We definitely think that it’s important that we address some of the policy issues and safety issues, the environmental issues and local control issues around data centers,” she said. 

Lawmakers in at least 11 states — Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin — have introduced legislation that would temporarily ban data centers. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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Ohio leaders acknowledge that artificial intelligence should be regulated as both explicit and political content grows, but bills have remained stagnant. Now, they say they aren’t sure what they are able to enforce.

Political ads are required to come with some disclaimers, like who paid for them. But it’s getting even more difficult to tell what is real, because deepfakes — AI-generated pictures and videos — aren’t outlawed.

A video posted by a conservative political action committee called Ohio Flyer PAC features former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown sitting at a birthday party, refusing to leave. A woman in the video complains about the Democratic candidate, as text on the screen says, “THE PARTY’S OVER, SHERROD.” There is no admission that the video is AI.

In a contentious primary battle between two Republicans seeking the same state Senate seat, a mailer from candidate Craig Reidel includes an AI-generated photo of state Rep. Jim Hoops with drag queens. Another doctored animation has Hoops dunking on a teen girl while playing basketball, claiming that he supported males in female sports. From the images we obtained, no disclaimers were included. Reidel won the nomination.

“It is the government’s role to regulate responsibly new and emerging technologies,” House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, said.

Ohio doesn’t have regulations on the new-age type of AI-created content, but Isaacsohn said lawmakers have put forward a handful of bills to change that.

Ohio House Bill 185 would allow everyone to own their image, and it would be a trademark infringement to produce malicious content without someone’s consent. There could be civil penalties of tens of thousands of dollars.

H.B. 185 is further reaching, but a bipartisan bill introduced in 2024 would have required disclaimers on specifically election-related AI content.

Ohio House Bill 524 would establish penalties for developers whose AI models generate content encouraging self-harm or violence. The state would be able to investigate and impose civil penalties of up to $50,000 per violation

Ohio Senate Bill 163 and Ohio House Bill 786 would prohibit AI-created child sexual abuse material. These would both make creating, transmitting and possessing AI-CSAM content criminal offenses. S.B. 163 would make it a third-degree felony, while H.B. 786 could result in a second-degree. That could result in up to eight years in prison and $15,000 in fines.

President Donald Trump also signed a bill into law last year that criminalizes AI-generated CSAM under federal law.

In April, a Columbus man became the first in the country convicted of creating this explicit and abusive material, the Department of Justice reported.

Gov. Mike DeWine, in his State of the State Address in March, advocated for these types of state provisions.

“Ohio law needs real consequences,” DeWine said. “The Ohio attorney general and county prosecutors must have clear legal tools to hold these tech companies criminally and civilly accountable.”

Despite little public opposition, each bill has stalled.

We asked each legislative leader why.

We asked Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, why no bills have been moved even though there have been bipartisan bills put forward.

“Well, I think, probably two or three points to make,” he responded.

Technology can be confusing, he said.

“It’s difficult for folks… to wrap our heads exactly around what it is that we can do to do this, or to effect good change,” the speaker said.

Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, said that he supports certain AI regulations, such as with pornographic material.

“I’m in favor of passing something that would address those issues, really make it illegal and put it on par with peddling other forms of obscene materials and child pornography,” McColley said.

But there is a committee process that needs to play out, he said.

“I’m sure they have their reasons for taking time on these bills, and hopefully we’ll wind up somewhere here very shortly or before the end of the year,” the president added.

Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio said that she is concerned about not handling artificial intelligence correctly and safely.

“I think we have to do our homework, and I don’t wanna see us just making knee-jerk responses and reactions to policy making without really doing a deep dive in what should this look like,” Antonio said.

Public safety concerns, like issues with children and sexual content, are important to “get in front of,” she said, but the legislation needs to be done right.

“We’re at the beginning of having these kinds of conversations and trying to understand the depth and breadth of what we can even do,” Antonio said.

Isaacsohn hammered that point home.

“We have to protect our communities and regulate this new technology in a responsible way,” he said. “It should come from the federal government, but no one believes that they’re going to do anything positive.”

What’s possible

Huffman brought up legal concerns, adding that the federal government has “far overreached” since 1803 (when Ohio became the 17th state).

“A state regulation of AI, that’s not just going to be within the state of Ohio,” Huffman said, noting that the feds typically rely on the Commerce Clause to stop statewide statutes impacting businesses.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last year that punishes states that create their own AI regulations.

“My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones,” the White House executive order’s press release states. “The resulting framework must forbid State laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order.”

A part of the executive order restricts states from accessing a portion of federal funding if their AI regulations are too “onerous.”

Congressional Republicans and the White House aren’t going to safeguard technology, Isaacsohn said.

“They are bought and paid for by the tech billionaires, and so it is incumbent on states, especially here in Ohio, for us to step up and protect our communities, particularly children, from the potential negative impacts of artificial intelligence,” he said.

Trump’s order does state that he wants Congress to come up with a plan that does “ensure that children are protected.”

Ohio is one of five states that don’t have laws criminalizing AI CSAM, according to Enough Abuse, a child advocacy organization. Because federal law already exists making it a crime, this type of regulation likely wouldn’t violate the “onerous” warning in the executive order.

But the DOJ is already fighting some regulations. Colorado is currently in a legal battle with both xAI and the DOJ after it passed a law requiring tech developers to prevent “algorithmic discrimination,” which could result in “unlawful differential treatment” to users, according to the law.

AI companies have repeatedly said that their products are protected by the First Amendment.

“I don’t have a specific answer on AI,” Huffman told me. “But we’re going to work on it.”

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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Ohio’s Safe Haven law allows parents in crisis to legally and anonymously surrender a newborn under 30 days old at hospitals, fire stations, or law enforcement agencies without fear of prosecution. The state has also expanded Safe Haven Baby Boxes in select communities, offering a fully anonymous option for immediate infant surrender.

On its surface, this system is a carefully constructed safety net. It ensures that when a parent believes there are no remaining options, a lawful and safe alternative still exists.

The difficulty is that the existence of an exit is not the same as preventing the conditions that make it necessary.

Ohio’s Safe Haven framework reflects a broader policy approach that intervenes at the moment of crisis rather than addressing the conditions that produce it. The assumption is that harm can be avoided if a safe option is available at the point of collapse. In practice, this places the weight of the system at the very end of a much longer sequence of unmet needs.

Research on Safe Haven laws nationally suggests they have not significantly reduced unsafe infant abandonment on their own. Instead, they function primarily as a last resort mechanism activated only after earlier systems have already failed.

Those failures rarely begin at the moment of birth. In Ohio, the circumstances that can lead to unsafe infant abandonment are often shaped by overlapping structural pressures including poverty, limited access to prenatal care, untreated mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and lack of stable support for new parents. These conditions accumulate long before crisis becomes visible.

Ohio’s law itself is straightforward. It permits anonymous surrender at designated locations, requires no identifying information, and imposes no criminal penalty. Safe Haven Baby Boxes extend this model by allowing immediate and fully anonymous surrender in select fire stations and hospitals, triggering an alert for infant retrieval.

These measures reflect a serious commitment to preventing immediate harm. In moments of acute crisis, they can and do save lives.

But they are fundamentally reactive.

It is far easier to create a legal pathway for surrender than it is to address why a parent reaches that point in the first place. Prevention requires sustained investment in maternal healthcare access, perinatal mental health services, addiction treatment, and economic stability for families with newborns. These are complex and long term policy commitments rather than discrete legal interventions.

Safe Haven laws are often presented as a complete solution to unsafe infant abandonment. In reality, they are a narrow but essential intervention that operates only after multiple systems have already failed.

Ohio is not unique in this structure. States like Kentucky maintain nearly identical Safe Haven frameworks, relying on crisis response infrastructure rather than upstream prevention. The consistency across states highlights a broader national pattern in which Safe Haven laws are widely implemented but rarely evaluated in terms of whether they reduce the conditions that lead to crisis.

There is also a subtler policy effect that deserves attention. The presence of Safe Haven laws can create a sense of resolution, as though the problem has been addressed because a safe exit exists. That perception can obscure the continued presence of the underlying conditions that make such exits necessary in the first place.

That distinction matters.

Safe Haven laws in Ohio do serve an important purpose. In moments where stability, safety, and support have collapsed, they provide a legal option that can prevent irreversible harm. Their value in those moments is real.

However, emergency response is not prevention.

The more difficult question is not whether Ohio has a Safe Haven law, but whether Ohio is doing enough to reduce the likelihood that a parent would ever need to use it. Until policy begins to address both crisis response and the upstream conditions that generate crisis, Safe Haven laws will remain what they are today, an essential but incomplete safeguard activated only after crisis has already arrived.

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In the past two years, a dozen states have either approved new U.S. House maps or are moving toward doing so — a highly unusual mid-decade revamp prompted by President Donald Trump and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling late last month. And the situation isn’t settled yet — even as ballots are being printed and early voting is already underway in some places. Pending litigation could scramble the situation even further.

Redistricting, the process of redrawing the geographic boundaries of U.S. House and state legislative districts, usually takes place every 10 years following the census.

Trump upended that schedule early last year, when he began pressuring state GOP officials to redraw their maps to help Republicans hold onto a slim, five-seat majority in the U.S. House ahead of potentially grim 2026 midterm elections for his party.

The Supreme Court recast the redistricting fight with its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. That decision all but nullified a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act that required states to draw electoral maps to give racial minority voters the opportunity to elect their chosen candidates.

A total of nine states — Alabama, California, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — have redrawn their maps since last year. At least three other states — Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina — appear likely to follow suit, though Georgia’s new maps would not be in effect for the upcoming midterm elections.

As things currently stand, Republicans are likely to gain up to 17 seats, while Democrats are likely to gain up to six seats.

In the aftermath of the Callais decision, hundreds of protesters have gathered at statehouses in recent weeks, particularly in the South, to decry what they say is a concerted effort to dilute Black voting and governing power. Republicans argue that maps should be “colorblind.” Gerrymandering to benefit one political party over another is legal at the federal level, though some states have their own laws restricting it.

The latest redistricting efforts are changing elections that have already begun. Some candidates must now pivot to races in brand-new districts with just a few weeks until their primaries. They’ve spent money and time reaching people who can no longer vote for them, fighting opponents different from the ones they now face. At least one Tennessee Democratic candidate no longer lives within the new boundaries of the district he’s seeking to represent.

Voters in states such as Alabama will now be asked to turn out for primary elections in both May and August, in addition to the November general election.

Here’s where things stand now.

Nine states already have redrawn their maps

Alabama

Republicans could gain 1 seat.*

A 2023 court order required Alabama to draw a congressional map with a second majority-Black district. But after the Callais decision last month, Alabama’s Republican state officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let them reinstate the old map, which has just one majority-Black, majority-Democratic district and which the court had previously ruled racially discriminatory. The high court quickly agreed.

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has announced new primary elections in August for the affected districts. These will be held in addition to next Tuesday’s statewide primaries for other federal and state offices.

Alabama is also appealing a separate ruling requiring it to redraw two state Senate districts. That case is still ongoing.

California

Democrats likely to gain 3-5 seats.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year led the Democratic response to Trump’s call for Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps.

In November 2025, California voters approved Newsom’s proposal to temporarily override the state’s independent redistricting commission and instead to allow the Democratic-dominated legislature to redraw the maps to create districts more favorable to Democrats. The new map is valid through 2030.

Florida

Republicans likely to gain 1-4 seats.

Last month, the Republican-majority Florida Legislature approved Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new congressional map that could net the GOP up to four new congressional seats.

Both DeSantis and the voting rights organizations suing to block the new map agree it violates parts of the state constitution. But DeSantis argues the constitution’s anti-gerrymandering amendments, which were overwhelmingly adopted by Florida voters in 2010, are invalid, partly due to the Callais ruling.

Missouri

Republicans likely to gain 1 seat.

Earlier this week, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the state’s gerrymandered 2025 congressional map, handing Republicans a victory. Last summer, Trump pressured Missouri Republicans to help maintain the GOP majority in the U.S. House, so lawmakers met in a special session to draw a map that likely will give them an additional seat by carving off parts of Kansas City into surrounding rural districts.

The new map will be used in Missouri’s August primary, the state Supreme Court ruled this week, because it’s uncertain whether a referendum petition seeking to repeal the map will succeed.

North Carolina

Republicans likely to gain 1 seat.

At Trump’s behest, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature redrew the state’s congressional map last fall. It was an effort to make the state’s only competitive district solidly Republican. The maps passed strictly along party lines. The state’s congressional delegation is now likely to be 11 Republicans and three Democrats. North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein is a Democrat, but redistricting isn’t subject to the governor’s veto.

Ohio

Republicans likely to gain up to 2 seats.

Last fall, Ohio Republican House Speaker Matt Huffman publicly rebuffed Trump’s national push to gain more seats in Congress, while state Democrats proposed their own maps. An Ohio redistricting commission eventually approved a new map last October that is likely to yield 12 Republicans and three Democrats, compared with the current 10-5 split. GOP and Democratic lawmakers called it a “compromise.”

That map will be in place for the next six years. But political operatives told the Ohio Capital Journal they expect to see more redistricting efforts in 2030.

Tennessee

Republicans likely to gain 1 seat.

In a chaotic special session earlier this month, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee redrew congressional maps to shatter the state’s only majority-Black, majority-Democratic district. The newly passed map now favors Republicans in all nine Tennessee districts. Hundreds protested at the Tennessee statehouse as House Republicans voted on the new map and House Democrats gathered at the front of the chamber, locking arms in a show of solidarity.

This week, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, punished his Democratic colleagues for their protests by stripping them of committee and subcommittee appointments. On Friday morning, longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen announced he would not seek reelection after his district was carved up in the redrawing of the maps.

Texas

Republicans likely to gain 3-5 seats.

The nation’s redistricting battle kicked off in Texas last summer, after Trump pressured the Texas GOP to redraw the state’s congressional map to add up to five more Republican seats. State House Democrats pushed back, fleeing the state temporarily in August to halt the vote. But the map eventually passed after they returned. Civil rights groups sued, saying the new map was racially discriminatory.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court permanently upheld the new map, ensuring it remains in place for the 2026 midterms.

Utah

Democrats likely to gain 1 seat.

In 2018, Utah voters approved an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure that created an independent redistricting process, but Utah’s Republican-dominated legislature repealed and replaced it in 2021. Voters rights groups sued, arguing the resulting new map was a partisan gerrymander.

Eventually, after a multi-year legal battle, a new court-ordered map in 2025 gives Democrats a chance to win one of the state’s four congressional districts. The Utah GOP proposed a ballot initiative this year to ask Utah voters to officially repeal the 2018 anti-gerrymandering law, but it failed last month after thousands of petition signers removed their signatures.

Three states are in the process of redrawing their maps

Georgia

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has refused to pursue redistricting ahead of this year’s elections, which are already underway. But Kemp announced Wednesday that he will call a special session to redraw the state’s political maps for the 2028 elections. Georgia’s congressional delegation currently has nine Republicans and five Democrats.

Louisiana

Republicans could gain 1 seat.

The day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s existing congressional districts as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s congressional primaries to give lawmakers enough time to pass new maps.

This week, in a nearly 10-hour overnight committee hearing, Louisiana lawmakers advanced a bill that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. The new map, if it passes, likely would give Republicans another seat in Congress.

The new map must win approval from both chambers by June 1. Litigation over the decision to delay primaries is ongoing.

South Carolina

Republicans could gain 1 seat.

South Carolina legislators will gather Friday for a special session to redraw the state’s congressional lines just 12 days before early voting opens. Lawmakers have set a deadline of May 26 to pass a new map. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who previously said the matter was for the legislature to decide, called for the special session under pressure from the White House and state GOP.

The South Carolina GOP’s goal is to pass a bill that would delay U.S. House race primaries until August while keeping other primaries on schedule for June. One proposed map would cut South Carolina’s lone congressional Democrat, U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, out of the seat he’s represented since 1992 and create all seven Republican seats.

At least a half dozen other states are interested in redrawing their maps

Mississippi

This week, Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves canceled a special legislative session he’d called to redraw districts for the state’s Supreme Court. Some GOP officials had hoped he’d add congressional redistricting to the agenda. Instead, he said this week, he’s working with Trump and the White House on a plan to redraw Mississippi’s congressional districts and legislative districts in the future. Reeves wants a map that would boot the lone Democrat in Mississippi’s U.S. House delegation, Rep. Bennie Thompson, from his seat.

If that happens, Republicans would likely gain one congressional seat.

Virginia

The Virginia Supreme Court earlier this month struck down a voter-approved redistricting amendment that could have given Democrats a 10-1 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation. Virginia voters last month had approved a referendum that would have netted Democrats three or four additional seats. Earlier this week, Virginia Democrats asked the U.S. Supreme Court to revive the amendment, in a case that’s ongoing.

Arizona, New Jersey, New York, Washington 

Officials in Arizona, New Jersey, New York and Washington all have suggested drawing new maps following the Callais decision, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Colorado Voting Rights Act, passed last year by the state’s Democratic-majority legislature, will likely prevent the state from embarking on a redistricting effort. The state’s congressional delegation is currently split 4-4 between Democrats and Republicans. But a Democratic-led group is gathering signatures for ballot measures that would allow the state to change its maps ahead of the 2028 election.

*Seat gain predictions from The Cook Political Report.

This story was updated to include the Friday morning announcement by Tennessee Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen that he will not seek reelection. Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided Thursday to preserve telehealth access to the abortion drug mifepristone until after the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled on the merits of the high-stakes federal lawsuit Louisiana v. Food and Drug Administration.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas issued dissenting opinions.

In his dissent, Thomas said the rule violates the Comstock Act, a long unenforced 1873 law that bans the mailing of “obscene” material. During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump said he didn’t support using the Comstock Act to stop mail delivery of abortion pills, saying he thought the federal government should have nothing to do with the issue.

Mifepristone’s manufacturer “makes a passing reference to the possibility of lost sales,” Alito wrote in his dissent. “But lost sales in states where abortifacients are generally illegal are not ‘irreparable injuries’ that can justify granting a stay.”

Abortion-rights advocates around the country called the decision a relief after two weeks of uncertainty.

On May 1, the appellate court sided with Louisiana, where state officials sued the FDA in October, arguing that a rule allowing telehealth access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester or to treat miscarriage, undermines the state’s abortion ban. Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, two manufacturers of mifepristone, filed emergency appeals, leading the Supreme Court to issue a 10-day stay on May 4, extended until today.

“Though today’s decision means that mifepristone remains available through telehealth for now, this fight is not over,” said Dr. Camille A. Clare, president of the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, in an emailed statement. “The chaos and confusion wrought by competing decisions and the revocation and restoration of access on an almost daily basis do real harm to patients and to the clinicians who care for them.”

Abortion opponents decried Thursday’s decision.

“Women deserve better than dangerous abortion drugs sent through the mail without physician oversight or in-person support,” said Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International, a major network of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. “A state like Louisiana that values life in its laws should be able to protect its smallest residents as well as their moms.”

The FDA’s approved two-drug regimen via telemedicine is an increasingly common abortion method, especially for people living in parts of the country where abortion is banned or difficult to access.

Last month, a federal district court paused the lawsuit at the request of the FDA until after the completion of a safety review on mifepristone. That review was prompted by non-peer reviewed, anti-abortion research and in spite of the drug’s record of safety and efficacy since 2000. The state appealed to the 5th Circuit.

Due to multiple ongoing efforts to restrict or block mifepristone, abortion providers have told Stateline they are ready to eventually switch to a misoprostol-only method, which researchers have found to be as safe as the two-drug regimen but typically involves more symptoms and is slightly less effective.

National groups have tried to pressure the Trump administration to drop the Biden-era rule allowing telehealth abortion and called for the head of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary for reportedly slow-walking a safety review of the drug until after the midterm elections. Makary resigned on Tuesday, and anti-abortion groups wasted no time in getting Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas on the phone.

Live Action founder and president Lila Rose, in a written statement, said she talked to the acting commissioner on Wednesday and that he said he was morally opposed to abortion. “Diamantas told me that reviewing the abortion pill is a top priority for him and the administration,” Rose posted on X.

Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins wrote a similar message to supporters in an email on Thursday, saying Diamantas will be the “most pro-life FDA commissioner in American history.”

But many doctors around the country say curbing access to telehealth abortion is likely to cause harm to people in states with bans who may face more barriers to obtaining an abortion without that option.

“Women will be forced to travel long distances — at times hundreds of miles — to access safe, essential health care at a doctor’s office, no longer having the option to receive mifepristone via telemedicine,” wrote Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in Michigan and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, in a letter asking the Supreme Court to maintain access to telehealth abortion. The letter was cosigned by more than 2,200 physicians.

Stateline reporter Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.  Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org. 

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Stories From The States is a weekly podcast from States Newsroom that explores, through personal stories, how people and communities across America are being affected by government decisions. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s still uncertain if an abortion medication can be prescribed over telehealth. Mifepristone is one of two drugs used to terminate a pregnancy before 10 weeks and to treat miscarriages, but could require an in-person visit before it’s dispensed, depending on a U.S. Supreme Court decision. 

In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a rule that allowed mifepristone to be dispensed through telehealth appointments. However, the state of Louisiana says the policy undermines their state law banning abortion and sued the FDA.

On May 1, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals took Louisiana’s side and blocked remote access to abortion medication nationwide. However, that was paused when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary stay on May 4. Now, the Supreme Court ruled telehealth abortion can resume while Louisiana’s lawsuit continues.

In Episode 28, you’ll hear from Professor Jessica Waters to understand how the abortion policies from just one state are upending access nationally. Waters is the director of the American University School of Public Affairs Leadership Program. Her research focuses on reproductive rights law and policy. 

States like Florida, Oklahoma and Texas already have laws that specifically ban providers from mailing abortion pills to patients. 

Iowa is on its way to join that list, after state legislators sent a bill to the governor’s desk. You’ll hear from Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter, Robin Opsahl, who has been covering the debate. 

Finally, Daybreak newsletter author Madyson Fitzgerald shares the top stories she’s watching.

Episode produced and edited by Mallory Cheng. Music for Stories From The States composed by David Singer.

Click here for the full transcript.

Relevant reading from States Newsroom outlets and partners: 

• US Supreme Court rules telehealth abortion can resume while lawsuit continues (Stateline)
• Iowa House votes to restrict abortion medication, requiring in-person prescriptions (Iowa Capital Dispatch)
• KY AG weighs in on abortion medication, asks SCOTUS to block telehealth prescriptions (Kentucky Lantern)
• Rhetoric versus reality: Facts about the abortion pill (States Newsroom)

Photo: A hearing in the Louisiana v. Food and Drug Administration case on telehealth access to abortion medication took place at the John M. Shaw U.S. Courthouse in Lafayette, La., in late February. (Photo by Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)

This podcast is produced by States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

WASHINGTON — Democrats and advocacy groups urged a quick rejection of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order on compiling citizenship lists and creating traceable mail-in ballots in a federal court hearing Thursday.

Lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, Democratic minority leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and interest groups argued that, with the midterm elections less than six months away, there was no time to see how the Trump administration executes the order.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, argued the order had not been put into effect yet and therefore could not be overturned.

The groups are seeking a nationwide preliminary pause on Trump’s late-March order that U.S. citizenship and age data from the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security be provided to states.

The proposal would result in a “maximum amount of confusion” and be a “nightmare for election officials,” said Danielle Lang, who argued on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “Waiting will only erode public confidence in elections.”

Thursday’s hearing marked the first courtroom showdown over the executive order. A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general have also sued to block the order. At least five lawsuits have been filed in total.

Trump’s edict also orders the U.S. Postal Service to promulgate a rule that would design special envelopes for mail-in ballots, including a unique barcode. States, which the U.S. Constitution delegates authority over election administration to, have argued the order would restrict mail-in voting.

‘No one knows’

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, had tough questions for both sides. He suggested the Democrats’ and aligned groups’ challenges may be premature because a rule specifying how the order would operate has yet to be written, though he also grasped their argument that the order was inherently unconstitutional. 

“No one knows what’s gonna be in the rule,” Nichols told lawyers for the Democratic groups.

“I think it’s very clear from the EO (executive order) that we know exactly what’s gonna be in the rule,” said Lalitha Madduri, who represented the Democratic groups and congressional leaders.

After back-and-forth, Nichols conceded, “I agree with your point: There can be no rulemaking consistent with the EO that can be lawful.”

Madduri also argued there is “no way to repair that harm” of uncertainty for voters.

Department of Justice senior trial counsel Stephen Pezzi said the plaintiffs have a right to “prepare for the darkest fears,” but, he argued, they can’t win a preliminary injunction based on speculation of error-prone citizenship lists and a postal rule not yet created.

There’s “certainly no irreparable harm,” Pezzi said.

Of the lists of intra-agency government data compiling U.S. citizens and their ages, Pezzi said “it’s not a list of individuals to be targeted. It’s not a list of noncitizens.” He also said it’s “not a concern” of the federal government what states do with the lists, if they even decide to use them.

“No list’s ever going to be perfect,” Pezzi said, adding that “responsible” states would not blindly kick people off voter rolls if their names do not appear on the lists verifying citizenship.

Commitment to updates

Nichols told Pezzi in the event he denied a preliminary injunction, he would expect information sharing from the government as the case continued.

“Fair enough,” Pezzi said.

“I didn’t hear a commitment,” Nichols warned, prompting agreement from Pezzi.

Nichols said he would soon issue an order and opinion, but did not specify a date. 

“I understand the time pressure here,” he said.

He warned the government to notify him of “anything even approaching a material change” on implementing Trump’s executive order — though he stopped short of issuing an official order requiring updates. But, he said, “it would not be good for the government,” if they do not promptly inform him of new developments.

Trump’s elections push

Democrats and voting rights groups maintain Trump’s order is effectively compiling an illegal national voter list and usurping the state authority over elections. The order’s opponents accuse Trump of trying to unilaterally assert power over elections.

Trump and his aides say the order will help secure the midterm elections this November. While voter fraud is extremely rare, Trump has long promoted false conspiracy theories surrounding his 2020 election loss.

The executive order, signed by Trump on March 31, came amid a broader campaign by the president to influence how elections are run. 

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for sensitive voter data that it plans to use to identify potential noncitizen voters. 

Trump has demanded that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents proving their citizenship, though the bill has stalled in the Senate. Last year, Trump signed an executive order to unilaterally impose similar requirements that was blocked in federal court.

“President Trump has tried repeatedly to rewrite election rules for his own perceived partisan advantage,” Madduri, an attorney at Elias Law Group, wrote in a court filing.

GOP officials defend order

Republican state attorneys general have intervened in the lawsuits on behalf of the Trump administration and have urged federal judges to uphold the executive order. They have cast the order as offering “optional” resources.

Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas intervened in the suit argued Thursday and were represented in the courtroom.  

The states “would like to access this resource so they may verify the accuracy of their own voter-registration lists. This flow of information between federal and state agencies is a common and critical feature of our federal system,” the Republican officials wrote in an April 20 court document.

The order requires lists of voting-age U.S. citizens living in each state to be provided to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election. 

The order does not tell states how to use the data, but it instructs the U.S. attorney general to prioritize investigations into state and local officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters.

The list of citizens will be drawn from naturalization and Social Security records, according to the order. It will also include data from SAVE, a powerful computer program maintained by Homeland Security that verifies citizenship by checking names against information in federal databases. 

The order also directs states, at least 90 days before a federal election, to tell the U.S. Postal Service whether they intend to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would then have to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.

Opponents of the order argue that under federal law Trump cannot direct the postmaster general to take any action — on elections or any other matter. The Postal Service is overseen by a Board of Governors and the postmaster general reports to the board. 

Trump’s allies argue that the Constitution grants the president sweeping authority over executive branch agencies and that Congress cannot place agencies, like the Postal Service, beyond the president’s reach.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon took heat Thursday over forthcoming changes to the federal student loan system that will impose new borrowing limits for professional and graduate students.  

Lawmakers took specific aim at stricter loan caps set to be established for students pursuing advanced programs that do not fall under the department’s “professional” classification, such as nursing, teaching and social work. 

Members on both sides of the aisle voiced their criticisms during a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce, where McMahon defended the incoming federal student loan overhaul as well as President Donald Trump’s administration’s separate, ongoing efforts to dismantle the 46-year-old department. 

McMahon emphasized that her department is “not making any kind of a judgment relative to professional degrees” and instead is trying to “bring down the cost” of tuition. 

The secretary pointed to “exorbitant” college costs, noting that “students are burdened with debt.” 

Megabill provision

The imminent shifts to the federal student loan system stem from congressional Republicans’ tax and spending cut megabill that Trump signed into law last year. The department this month published the finalized regulations consistent with the law’s directive. Most provisions will take effect July 1.

The regulations eliminate the Grad PLUS program, which allowed for graduate and professional students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. 

Graduate student loans will also have a $20,500 annual cap and $100,000 aggregate limit. Professional student loans will have a yearly limit of $50,000 and aggregate cap of $200,000. 

But the programs falling under the department’s “professional” category — and thus eligible for the higher borrowing limit — are limited to pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology and clinical psychology. 

The agency has also clarified, in an agency fact sheet on the finalized regulations, that the “professional” student classifications “do not express a value judgment about the importance of any occupation or field” but instead serve a “loan-administration function.”

‘Tone-deaf’ message

Rep. Jahana Hayes said she was “very concerned” about the department’s “professional” student classifications, noting that these limits “make higher education, especially master’s degree programs, more difficult to afford for nursing, social workers (and) teachers.” 

The Connecticut Democrat clapped back at McMahon’s assertion that the overhaul is about bringing down college costs, saying: “The people who can afford it don’t apply for these programs, the people who can afford it don’t need student loans, the people who come from communities like mine and just want to go back and serve those communities are the ones who are going to be most affected, not the colleges, not the universities, not the board of directors, not the top 1%.”

Rep. Joe Courtney, also a Connecticut Democrat, blasted the regulations’ exclusion of nursing from the “professional” category as “one of the most insulting, tone-deaf messages to 5 million nurses imaginable across the country.” 

Courtney added that the exclusion “will, in fact, raise education costs for critically needed nurses,” and pointed to a petition from the American Nurses Association that received more than 245,000 signatures and urged the department to include nursing programs in its “professional” definition. 

McMahon defended her department’s “professional” classification to the panel, arguing that the agency “looked very, very carefully at the entire nursing profession,” and “95% of the nurses that are in programs do not exceed these caps.” 

The secretary added that “78% of the nurses that are moving for graduate programs do not exceed or come up to these caps.”

Even some Republican members on the panel, whose party championed the “big, beautiful” law that sets forth the student loan overhaul, called into question the new limits.  

Rep. Lisa McClain, chair of the House Republican Conference, asked McMahon “if there’s any way, or you had any thoughts on: Can we explore opening the nurse graduate programs up to expand these caps or lift these caps, because it’s a good return on investment, and we sure do need them?” 

In the GOP’s tax and spending cut law, “one of the things we did was we put the caps on, but we had some carveouts and caveats … and I think this sector of graduate nursing programs was just an unintended consequence, perhaps, that got overlooked,” the Michigan Republican said. 

“And what I’m here to do is really advocate for these programs, because I think they’re extremely important.” 

Legislation to reverse the caps

Bipartisan efforts are underway in Congress to both address the forthcoming loan limits and expand the “professional” student definition. 

Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, introduced a bill in December that would expand the “professional” definition to also include “nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, ministry, social work, audiology, physician assistant, public health, business administration and management, accounting, architecture, secondary education, and special education.” 

Rep. Tim Kennedy of New York brought forth legislation in December with fellow Democratic Reps. Jill Tokuda of Hawaii and Rep. Shomari Figures of Alabama that would ensure graduate and professional students are subject to the same annual and aggregate loan caps. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, introduced a bill that would “restore the full loan limits that were narrowed” under the GOP’s mega tax and spending cut law. 

In the upper chamber, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Maryland Democrat, introduced a companion bill to Torres’ in March, which has drawn more than a dozen co-sponsors.  

Meanwhile, a handful of Democratic lawmakers brought forth a resolution this month that seeks to reverse the forthcoming student loan regulations through the Congressional Review Act, a procedural tool Congress can use to overturn certain actions from federal agencies.

Those lawmakers are: Rep. Suzanne Bonamici and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Rep. John Mannion of New York, Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois and Alsobrooks. 

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Data centers. News Channel 5 WEWS’ Michelle Jarboe reports, “Ohio’s data center boom really started in New Albany. We went there to see what it looks like.”

In 2024, the state provided $554.9 million in sales-tax breaks for data centers — and local sales-tax breaks for those projects totaled $166.8 million, according to new calculations from the Ohio Department of Taxation.

Those numbers illustrate the sharp uptick in these construction projects, including the building boom taking place in New Albany.

• Prices. The Associated Press reports, “Producer prices shot up 6%, adding pressure on companies to hike prices for struggling customers.”

U.S. wholesale inflation came in hot last month. Producer prices rose 6% from a year earlier, the highest point in more than three years, as the Iran war pushes up energy prices and intensifies pressure on companies to pass along their rising costs to consumers.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it hits consumers — shot up 1.4% in April, the biggest monthly gain in more than four years.

Energy prices climbed 7.8% from March to April and 22.7% from a year earlier. Gasoline soared 15.6% from March and diesel, the dominant fuel used in shipping, jumped 12.6%.

• $700,000. WCMH’s David Rees reports, “Federal judge orders Ohio anti-vaccine activist to pay nearly $700,000 in taxes.”

A federal judge has ordered Ohio physician and vaccine skeptic Sherri Tenpenny to pay nearly $700,000 in unpaid federal taxes and interest, years after her testimony against COVID-19 vaccine requirements drew national attention during the pandemic.

• Lawsuit. Cleveland.com’s Sabrina Eaton reports, “U.S. Rep. Max Miller sues ex-wife and her lawyer for defamation over abuse claims.”

U.S. Rep. Max Miller on Wednesday filed a defamation lawsuit against his former wife, Emily Moreno, and her attorney, Andrew Zashin, and his law firm, alleging they falsely portrayed him as a domestic abuser to multiple media outlets.

The lawsuit assigned to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Joy Kennedy seeks compensatory damages in excess of $25,000, punitive damages “in an amount sufficient to punish Defendants and deter future similar conduct,” and attorneys fees.

Miller, a Bay Village Republican, claims the defendants engaged in a coordinated defamation campaign against him, providing false statements published by national media outlets including the New York Post, TMZ, the Daily Mail and The Daily Beast, that falsely depict him as violent and abusive towards Moreno and the couple’s two-year-old daughter.

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When then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted was appointed to the U.S. Senate at the start of 2025, he was coming from an administration with numerous high-ranking officials connected to the utility lobby. In 2020, that administration was rocked by the biggest bribery and money laundering scandal in Ohio history — all of it related to utilities.

When Husted reached the Senate five years later, one of his first moves was to hire as a top advisor a longtime utility lobbyist. 

The lobbyist’s client made millions off the scheme at the heart of the 2020 utility scandal. The same lobbyist had also represented a massive drug wholesaler that had paid out millions to settle claims that it had negligently distributed vast amounts of opioids in addiction-ravaged Ohio.

Ohioans’ utility bills are spiking amid a tax-subsidized data-center boom and lavish executive pay. The Trump administration has also threatened billions in federal funding for addiction treatment.

Husted’s decision to hire the lobbyist, Sean Dunn, has some questioning whether average Ohioans’ welfare is Husted’s top priority.

“It’s tone deaf because he’s an elected official who doesn’t see how cozy relationships can compromise his decision making,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, which advocates for accountable government. “Or he sees a benefit to these very cozy relationships.”

‘Public servant’

Husted’s office didn’t respond to questions for this story. But less than a month after he took office in 2025, Husted announced that Dunn would be his senior advisor and counsel.

“Dunn brings decades of experience as a lawyer and public servant focused on technology, public utility, workforce and a variety of legislative issues,” Husted’s office said in a written statement. “He has held roles with the Office of Chief Legal Counsel to the Ohio Governor, the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services and the Ohio Senate Majority Caucus.”

What the statement didn’t say was that Dunn had been a lobbyist for Virginia-based AES, which has 527,000 customers in the Ohio region that includes Dayton. 

According to disclosures filed with the Ohio Lobbying Activity Center, Dunn began lobbying for AES in 2009 and did so until February 2025.

During that time, Dunn lobbied the state legislature and the executive branch on numerous measures relating to Ohio House Bill 6, the 2019 law that was the product of what one federal prosecutor said was “likely the largest bribery and money-laundering scheme ever in the state of Ohio.” 

Akron-based FirstEnergy was the major utility player in the scandal, in which putting $61 million in bribes won a $1.3 billion bailout financed by customers.

It was passed by the legislature and immediately signed by Gov. Mike DeWine, in whose administration Husted was No. 2.

Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, is now serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for his involvement in the scheme. A state trial of former FirstEnergy executives ended in a hung jury earlier this year.

$77 million to subsidize a wealthy utility

In addition to FirstEnergy, other Ohio utilities also richly benefitted from the scandal-ridden H.B. 6 law.

The law claimed to promote clean energy because it bailed out two nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy. But it gutted Ohio’s energy efficiency standards and it created a separate bailout for two aging coal-fired generators owned by a consortium of Ohio’s other utilities — including Columbus-based AEP and AES, for whom Dunn lobbied.

The group was called the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation and one of its 71-year-old coal plants isn’t even in Ohio, it’s in Indiana.

Subsidies from the corrupt bailout law stopped flowing to FirstEnergy after the FBI started making arrests in early 2020. But money continued to flow to the other utilities for years as the utilities — and apparently Dunn as a lobbyist — fought their repeal. 

It wasn’t until May of 2025 that DeWine finally signed a law ending the subsidies. 

By then, AES’s share of them was $77 million, according to a subsidy scorecard kept by the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel. That’s part of $670 million in subsidies paid by customers that had gone to the consortium since 2017. 

As AES’s representative, Dunn registered to lobby on H.B. 6 — presumably in support of it — disclosures show. And he lobbied on numerous bills that would have repealed the coal subsidies, after the scandal broke. AES executives testified against them.

While AES pleaded poverty to justify its share of the customer-financed subsidies, the company found a way to pay CEO Andrés Gluski $9 million last year.

The bribery and bailout scandal

Husted had exposure of his own in the massive bribes-for-bailout scandal. 

Emails have come to light indicating that shortly after he agreed to be DeWine’s running mate in 2017, he lobbied DeWine to support the massive utility bailout. 

And in 2024, Husted declined to say whether he knew that FirstEnergy was the source of a $1 million dark money contribution to a group supporting him back when he was still vying with DeWine for the Republican governor nomination.

There was also a meeting that raised a lot of questions.

On Dec. 18, 2018, FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and VP Michael Dowling met with Gov.-elect DeWine and Lt. Gov.-elect Husted at the Columbus Athletic Club.

They discussed whether the executives wanted Sam Randazzo, a former FirstEnergy consultant, to be the top utility regulator in Ohio.

Jones and Dowling then drove a mile to Randazzo’s condo and negotiated what FirstEnergy later said was a $4.3 million bribe. DeWine nominated Randazzo to be chairman of the Public Utilities Commission six weeks later.

Even though he was supposed to be policing utilities on behalf of consumers, Randazzo helped write the corrupt bailout legislation. In 2024, facing state and federal indictments, Randazzo took his own life by hanging.

Others with close connections to FirstEnergy also played prominent roles in the DeWine-Husted administration.

Legislative Affairs Director Dan McCarthy was a FirstEnergy lobbyist when he set up one of the main dark money groups through which FirstEnergy would funnel millions in bribes. He joined the DeWine-Husted administration shortly thereafter.

And DeWine’s chief of staff, Laurel Dawson, was married to a former FirstEnergy lobbyist whom a state indictment said had gotten a $10,000 loan from Randazzo a few years before DeWine took office. 

Dawson, the administration said, knew about the massive FirstEnergy payment to Randazzo, but didn’t tell DeWine about it for nearly two years. As of late last year, she still worked for DeWine.

Other lobbying

In addition to Dunn’s ties to AES, he also lobbied on behalf of Dublin-based Cardinal Health, one of the three largest prescription-drug wholesalers in the United States. Dunn’s engagement with the company ran from 2009 to 2019.

Federal enforcement actions and government lawsuits against the drug wholesaler alleged that Cardinal frequently ignored “blatantly suspicious orders” as it shipped billions of opioid pills into Ohio and other U.S. states.

In 2021, Cardinal and two other giant wholesalers agreed to pay $808 million to settle state allegations that the companies’ negligence fueled Ohio’s raging addiction crisis.

Disclosures also show that Dunn made $895,000 in the 15 months before he joined Husted’s team and was owed between $1 million and $5 million by his old firm. 

Ohioans

Median household income in Ohio is $72,000 a year and many say they’re getting crushed by the cost of utilities, prescription drugs, gasoline, healthcare and groceries. 

Husted’s office was asked what the senator was doing to relieve the affordability crisis, and to explain his decision to hire as a top advisor someone who’d grown wealthy lobbying on behalf of some of the industries driving the crisis.

It didn’t answer.

Turcer of Common Cause said Dunn’s hiring and the lack of a response may be a consequence of gerrymandering and longtime, one-party rule in Ohio.

“When power is really entrenched, (leaders) are not asking themselves the kinds of questions that voters would ask them,” she said. “They’re just not challenging themselves to do better for voters because they think they’re anointed rather than elected.”

In the November election, Husted faces former Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown. The Cook Political Report rates the race a tossup.

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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost recently filed a motion on behalf of Ohio State University asking to drop 77 cases involving the late Dr. Richard Strauss sexually abusing Ohio State student-athletes.

Yost is arguing that any claims of abuse that happened before Oct. 21, 1986 should be thrown out, he said in a May 10 filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

Congress passed a law on Oct. 21, 1986 allowing states and universities to be sued in federal court for failing to prevent the sexual abuse of students. 

Yost’s motion applies to plaintiffs in three cases against Ohio State.

He is arguing 43 plaintiffs should have their claims dismissed entirely because the abuse happened before Oct. 21, 1986, and he is asking that 34 plaintiffs should have their claims dismissed in part for the abuse that occurred before Oct. 21, 1986, according to the motion. 

Strauss sexually abused at least 177 male victims between 1979 and 1996 during his time as a physician for Ohio State’s Athletics Department and at the university’s Student Health Center, according to an independent investigation commissioned by Ohio State University.

Strauss retired from Ohio State University in 1998 and died by suicide in 2005 when he was 67. 

Earlier this month, 30 former Ohio State football players joined a federal lawsuit against Ohio State for Strauss’ abuse.

At least three of the football players were part of the 1980 Rose Bowl team and played for coach Woody Hayes. 

Ohio State has reached settlement agreements with 317 survivors for more than $61 million, according to the university. The most recent settlement was with 13 survivors for $1.8 million in April. 

This motion comes days after Yost announced he would resign, effective June 7, to take a job with Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing Christian nonprofit law firm. The Southern Poverty Law Center labels the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group.

Ohio state Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, criticized Yost’s motion to dismiss the claims. 

“He is completely betraying the needs of survivors of sexual abuse as he heads out the door,” DeMora said in a statement. “This decision has nothing to do with the case against Ohio State and Dr. Strauss; it is purely Yost using every opportunity he has left to screw Ohioans and benefit the ultra-rich elite class that he has always worked for.”

Survivors of Strauss have said that Ohio Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan knew about the sexual abuse when he was an Ohio State assistant wrestling coach from 1987 to 1995. 

Jordan, who recently ran unopposed in the May primary for his Fourth Congressional District seat, has repeatedly denied knowing about any abuse. 

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The Ohio Attorney General’s Office and the ACLU of Ohio are countering the claims of a Trumbull County judge who says the Ohio Constitution’s amendment protecting reproductive rights hinders his ability to do his work.

In a filing with the Ohio Supreme Court, the ACLU of Ohio said Trumbull County Family Court Judge David Engler has “no standing” as a matter of law or fact.

Engler is arguing that the reproductive rights amendment of the Ohio Constitution passed by voters in 2023 keeps him from being able to properly judge cases in which a minor makes a legal request to have an abortion without the need for parental permission, a longtime legal method called judicial bypass.

The method requires judges to hold hearings, receive testimony, and assess the “maturity and voluntariness” of a request to bypass parental permission via the courts.

In April, Engler filed a request with the Ohio Supreme Court claiming that the reproductive rights amendment “is being applied to eliminate parental-consent requirements for minors and to render judicial-bypass proceedings unnecessary or unavailable,” according to the court document.

Engler is in his first year as a judge on the county court, but said that in the five years before he took the bench, Trumbull County’s juvenile court saw about two judicial bypass requests per year.

Since he became a judge on the court, Engler said the court has seen none, according to an affidavit submitted to the Ohio Supreme Court.

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As a result, the judge claimed his judicial office “has been stripped of a statutory and historically exercised judicial function.”

The law requiring minors to have the consent of a parent before seeking an abortion goes back to 1998, when the law also allowed minors to utilize judicial bypass proceedings. The law was challenged, and eight years later, a federal appeals court upheld the law.

Engler asked the court to order that the amendment be administered and enforced “in a manner that preserves and does not eliminate or interfere with juvenile-court jurisdiction over judicial-bypass proceedings.”

He also asked the court to render the amendment “unenforceable to the extent it is construed or applied to eliminate or interfere” with juvenile courts and judicial bypass cases.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office filed a motion on May 11 asking the court to dismiss the request, calling the challenge to the amendment “untimely” because the judge “has not alleged an injury that is fairly traceable” to the state.

“Even if (Engler) correctly asserts the amendment ‘eliminates or interferes with juvenile-court jurisdiction over judicial-bypass proceedings,’ the constitutional provision prevails over any conflicting statute,” wrote Julie Pfeiffer, on behalf of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, in the motion to dismiss.

In their response, the ACLU of Ohio and the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at Case Western Reserve University School of Law made a similar argument.

Attorneys wrote that the data presented by Engler does not warrant a change in the constitution, or provide evidence that the amendment should not be enforced.

“(Engler) has alleged only that fewer judicial bypass cases have happened to arise in Trumbull County recently,” wrote Margaret Light-Scotece, staff attorney for the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative.

“That allegation is manifestly insufficient to support an inference that parental consent laws for abortion are no longer being enforced in Ohio.”

The Ohio Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will take up the case.

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Eleven-year-old Amya Frazier was shot and killed by her 14-year-old cousin weeks before Christmas this past December. 

Amya went over to her cousin’s house on Dec. 5 to play a video game when her cousin picked up his father’s unsecured gun. 

“Her cousin grabbed his father’s gun and decided to play with it due to his father’s negligence of leaving his gun lying around,” Amya’s mom Hope Frazier said during a recent press conference. 

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“His child grabbed it and shot my 11-year-old daughter in the head and ended her life.”

Amya Frazier died on Dec. 8, 2025. 

“It is our responsibility as adults to store our guns correctly, place them in a safe place, and unloaded,” Hope Frazier said.

“Place the ammunition elsewhere, hidden so children can’t find it. Place the clip out of the gun.” 

Ohio state Rep. Darnell T. Brewer, D-Cleveland, is introducing Amya’s Law — a bill that would penalize adults who leave firearms accessible to minors. 

“This bill does not create a storage mandate,” Brewer said. 

“It does not restrict lawful self defense. It does not penalize gun ownership. Instead, it imposes accountability only when a minor gains access to a neglectfully stored firearm and harm results.”

The gun owner would face a fourth-degree felony if a child accesses a neglectfully stored firearm and causes serious harm, and it would be a first-degree misdemeanor if a child gains access to a neglectfully stored firearm and causes physical harm, Brewer said. 

“There is no violation unless the child actually gets a hold of the gun,” Brewer said. 

The bill would also have a sales tax exemption for firearm safety devices and a nonrefundable income tax credit of up to $250 for gun safes, lockboxes, and trigger locks.

This bill is not about punishing gun owners, but about preventing tragedies, said Amya’s grandmother Amy Zahrani. 

“A child finds a gun in a drawer, a friend brings a weapon into a home, a moment of curiosity turns into a lifetime of grief,” she said. 

“These are not criminals. These are children. … We must do more to ensure firearms are stored safely.”

The Columbus Division of Police indicted 33-year-old Matthew Seymour on involuntary manslaughter and endangering children charges after Amya’s fatal shooting.  

Seymour’s 14-old-son was charged with reckless homicide, according to Columbus Police. 

“Gun violence doesn’t just happen somewhere else,” Zahrani said. “It doesn’t just happen to other people. It doesn’t just happen to certain people. It is happening even in middle class homes and safe neighborhoods.”

Amya Frazier loved butterflies and wanted to be both a doctor and a professional soccer player, her family said. 

“She had her whole life ahead of her, and it was cut short,” Hope Frazier said.

“Don’t let my daughter be just a headline. Help her name mean something.” 

There were more than 48,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Firearm injuries were the leading cause of death among children and teenagers ages 1-19, according to the CDC.

Brewer is also planning on introducing a bill that requires foster caregivers to safely secure firearms in their home and another bill that would require the state to create an Office of Violence Prevention within the Ohio Department of Health. 

“It’s now time to make this known — gun violence should be eradicated here in Ohio,” he said.

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In the much bandied aphorism, “A society grows great when men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”

What happens to a society when selfish, short-sighted, narrow-minded, egomaniacal, power-obsessed men cut down every tree in sight? And future generations will never know their shade?

History will recognize this generation of America as the one that rolled back the Civil Rights era. 

Our time will be known to posterity as a generation that did not plant trees of liberty and justice for all, but struck them down.

It’s shameful. It’s pathetic. And all of us, individually and collectively, must reckon with that.

And if we are ever to recover from this vicious injustice on future generations, we will have to spend the rest of our lives fixing the damage and rebuilding something better.

We have a long way to go. 

The destruction process is ongoing, and there’s no telling how much longer the destruction will last or how much worse it will get.

The U.S. Supreme Court in just the last 16 years has gutted campaign finance regulations, gutted regulation against gerrymandering, and gutted the Voting Rights Act, to name a select few and fundamental.

If you were setting out a plan to rob American voters of power and destroy representative democracy so that elections can be rigged, bought, and sold, and politicians run amok without consequence or accountability, you couldn’t do better.

If we can’t regulate obscene amounts of money buying elections, and we can’t regulate politicians from open partisan gerrymandering, and we can’t have the basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, American democracy is effectively neutered in favor of a rigged game.

Rich people and corporations spend unlimited money to buy candidates and elections. The politicians rig election outcomes with gerrymandering and eliminate competition. States and cities, town and country, carved into fiefdoms for political machines. Shameless propaganda propagated: At best, conditioning; at the least, mass confusion. The politicized courts a rubber stamp on the system. And representative democracy dies.

No individual policy or issue can overcome the primary injustice of rigged districts and bought-and-sold elections.

The pillars of the Republic are corrupted beyond legitimate function.

The “Republic” becomes in-name-only, a veneer masking corruption, oligarchy, lawlessness.

As I have long written, gerrymandering and the campaign finance/public corruption loop are the two central poisons in the bloodstream of America’s body politic.

If legislative outcomes are predetermined by gerrymandering, and all other races are tainted by the unlimited spending of hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money by nefarious backroom actors, true representation of the people’s interest becomes a quaint ideal, instead of a foundational value that can never be compromised.

Faithful and honest representation of the people becomes the central lie instead of the central promise of our social contract.

Cynicism, corruption, backsliding, misrepresentation, abuse, carelessness, recklessness, deprivation, degradation, division, ignorance, hatefulness, these become our cultural and political masters.

The U.S. Supreme Court has unleashed a cascade of gerrymandering across the nation: Brazen public corruption of our elections in a rush of unprecedented scale and fury.

We are in a frenzy of blatantly cheating millions upon millions upon millions of voters out of fair elections in America. Tens of millions, twenties of millions? Thirties of millions? Hundreds?

It turns out that Ohio’s experience in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 with open unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering was not just a horribly embarrassing episode of cynical, feckless Ohio politicians debasing themselves in their lust for power, it was a trial run for the entire nation doing the same.

Ohio was a primer to measure how degraded politicians could get and get away with it.

Now they’re going hog wild, in some cases bringing voters along as accomplice, and in others politically assaulting and insulting voters outright.

Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, California, Washington; it’s actually almost difficult right now to keep track of how many of our nation’s state leaders have willfully fallen to prostrate themselves and crawl through the moral muck and patriotic treachery of cheating voters with gerrymandering.

But alas, in existence the only constant is change, and one day this destruction too will end.

We will eventually, collectively have to deal with the damage done.

One can only hope that some semblance of our constitutional Republic can be saved from the poisons and the depravity of our lawmakers and elected officials.

This generation of America has squandered our birthright.

At 250 years of age, we’ve turned the world’s oldest democracy into a jalopy for the next generation.

We’ve forsaken those who came before us, and the blood and tears they shed to win us the rights and freedoms that we now betray.

While the short-sighted cynics, the ignorant, and the debased celebrate, the rest will have to spend the rest of our lives trying to scrub away this awful stain, seeking solemnly to establish something somehow more just and honest and true than it’s ever been before.

Either we will, or some future generation — at likely great cost — will surely be forced.

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In a nearly 10-hour committee hearing that spanned overnight, Louisiana lawmakers advanced a congressional redistricting bill that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, giving Republicans another seat in their bid to maintain control of Congress. 

The Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee met from 7 p.m. Tuesday to 4:30 a.m. Wednesday to discuss two redistricting bills. Republicans prevailed in a 4-3 party line vote to approve Senate Bill 121 by Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, which keeps a single majority-Black district that stretches from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.

The first steps to overhaul the state’s congressional makeup comes two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s existing U.S. House districts an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The 6-3 decision from conservative justices in the case Louisiana v. Callais has prompted Republicans leaders in Southern states to adjust their congressional maps as well. 

The new district in Morris’ proposal is essentially the same as the one U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, won in the 2022 election, though its inclusion of Baton Rouge means it would pit Carter against U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge. The net result would put Republicans in five of Louisiana’s six U.S. House seats. 

“This 5-1 map is a political power grab,” Sen. Sam Jenkins, D-Shreveport, said. 

The committee rejected another proposal, Senate Bill 407 by Sen. Ed Price, D-Gonzales, which created two districts competitive for Democrats, though none of the districts were majority Black. Price said that since the Callais decision limited the extent lawmakers could take race into consideration, he primarily used party demographics. 

The day after the Callais ruling, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the U.S. House party primaries, which take place Saturday, to give lawmakers enough time to adopt new maps for the 2026 midterm elections. 

The Louisiana Senate is expected to vote Thursday on Morris’ bill, with a House committee taking the bill up next week. The proposal must get approval from both chambers by June 1. 

Most of the marathon hearing featured public testimony from dozens of people supporting the Price map and opposing Morris’ version, with just one person who held the opposite viewpoint appearing before lawmakers. Hundreds more voting rights advocates packed other Senate committee rooms to watch a video feed of the meeting. 

At times, the exchanges got heated. Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, asked a series of pointed questions to Morris that he declined to answer, including whether he believes racism still exists in America. Morris would only respond that the question was not relevant to his bill. 

Sen. Blake Miguez, R-New Iberia, who is running for the 5th Congressional District, repeatedly took jabs at Democrats speaking on the bills. He told Dadrius Lanus, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, after his testimony that “hatred and anger are a great representation for the Democratic Party.” 

Though many advocates who spoke earlier in the night left by the time Morris’ bill was being discussed, several dozen remained in the committee room all night, occasionally stepping into the hall to dive into fast food bags other activists shared. 

“I’m personally here because I can’t think of a single thing that’s more important than this,” Britain Forsyth told the committee. “I can’t think of anything more important than ensuring that everyone in my home state is able to elect someone who represents them and will listen to them and answer to them. And I’m here because Jim Crow maps like this have no place in our state.” 

Ahead of Tuesday’s Senate and Governmental Affairs hearing, Sen. Gary Carter, D-New Orleans, announced he was taking a “voluntary leave of absence” from the committee. 

His announcement followed a verbal clash with Morris and the panel’s chairman, Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen, at Friday’s public hearing on the congressional maps. Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, replaced Carter with Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, for the remainder of the legislative session.

“My voice in this process will remain strong, steady, and unwavering,” Carter said in a statement. “But now is the time for clarity and purpose. We cannot afford distractions when the stakes are this high for our democracy, our representation, and the people we serve.”

Carter’s uncle is U.S. Rep. Troy Carter.  

At Friday’s hearing, Gary Carter pointedly called out Morris for the “totality” of his work and its impact on Black elected officials in New Orleans. Morris is also the author of a new law that eliminated the Orleans clerk of criminal court position as well as advancing proposals to reduce the number of judges in the city.

The rancor peaked when Carter demanded Kleinpeter turn his microphone back on after the chairman paused the meeting. Morris then exited the room, telling the people sitting behind him “y’all need to shut up.” 

Lanus, who is Black, was directly behind the senator, claimed Morris used the derogatory term “boy” toward him. In a statement Friday, Morris denied having used such language, and the term cannot be heard in the legislature’s online video of the meeting .    

Morris told the USA Today Network his office received a mass shooting threat after the Democratic Party leader’s claim. The senator accused the state party leaders of fomenting the hate they profess to oppose.

Attorney General Liz Murrill issued a statement Tuesday alleging that Morris was “misquoted by individuals with their own motives” and called on lawmakers to condemn the incident.

This story was originally produced by Louisiana Illuminator, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The NAACP Tennessee State Conference added a state representative and a U.S. House candidate as plaintiffs Tuesday in a new version of its lawsuit challenging the state’s redrawn congressional district map.

Gov. Bill Lee signed the new map on Thursday, May 7, carving up Memphis, the state’s only majority-Black, majority-Democrat district.

NAACP Tennessee President Gloria Sweet-Love filed the initial lawsuit within hours, asking the Davidson County Chancery Court to halt the use of the new map before this year’s election. 

The updated lawsuit adds arguments against another law approved during last week’s three-day special session that rewrites rules for the 2026 election, extending candidate qualifying deadlines and removing requirements that county election commissions mail notices to voters whose precinct and district boundaries change.

The qualifying deadline for U.S. House District candidates passed in March, but lawmakers’ new rules allow candidates to qualify by Friday, May 15. The change “will have a significant detrimental impact on the work of our state and county election officials, risks voter confusion, and potentially compromises the integrity of Tennessee’s elections,” according to the lawsuit.

Candidate Devante Hill, one of the new plaintiffs, had already mounted a campaign for District 9 before redistricting, investing about $100,000 in nonrefundable payments for marketing and voter outreach to communities within the former district boundaries, the lawsuit states. Now, Hill is pivoting his campaign to what is now District 5 in the final 100 days prior to the election, and many of the voters he spent money and time reaching are carved out of the district, equating to unrecoverable financial loss. 

The redrawn map has thrown Hill’s campaign “into a state of chaos and paralysis” as he faces additional previously unknown opposing candidates and has not yet received updated voter lists, creating “a significant competitive disadvantage,” according to the lawsuit.

Hill also no longer lives within the boundaries of the district he seeks to represent, so he cannot cast a ballot for himself, “a foundational act of political expression for any candidate,” the lawsuit states.

An injunction is necessary, according to the plaintiffs, because “the ticking clock of an election cycle means that this injury compounds daily, creating a disadvantage that cannot be undone after the fact. An election lost due to a paralyzed campaign is an injury that can never be redressed.”

Gov. Bill Lee’s proclamation for the special session “provides that action is being taken to ‘comply with mandatory election qualifying timelines,’ rather than changing any deadlines” that already existed, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit argues that Lee did not specifically state that the special session’s purpose included the repeal of a long-standing law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, nor the suspension of residency requirements for the 2026 election. State law requires special legislative sessions to be limited to the purpose stated in the governor’s proclamation.

Tennessee House Rep. Jesse Chism, a Memphis Democrat and chair of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators, is another new plaintiff. Chism sits on the House Calendar and Rules Committee, which schedules bills for final readings and considers merits of legislation recommended for passage by committees.

To Chism’s knowledge, the lawsuit states, no member of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators were notified prior to the special session’s start that specific legislation was set to be repealed or suspended during the session, nor did they receive copies of that targeted legislation.

The new version of the lawsuit also adds defendants Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Elections Coordinator Mark Goins, an apparent answer to the state’s argument that original defendants Lee and the Tennessee General Assembly cannot be sued because they do not conduct elections.

A three-judge panel will hold the case’s first hearing on Thursday, May 21, at the Tennessee Supreme Court Building, six days after Tennessee’s new qualifying deadline for U.S. House candidates.

amended complaint - naacp

This story was originally produced by Tennessee Lookout, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Editor’s note: This was updated following the governor’s order at 5:30 p.m.

COLUMBIA — With just 12 days before early voting polls open, legislators will begin a special session for the purpose of redrawing South Carolina’s congressional lines.

Gov. Henry McMaster called a special session beginning 11 a.m. Friday. He did not dictate what legislators should do, as the governor lacks that authority. But the prelude section of his executive order alludes to the purpose.

“Whereas, the General Assembly began debating South Carolina’s congressional districts … but that debate was not concluded when the General Assembly adjourned sine die,” the order reads, referring to state law’s mandated end to the regular session at 5 p.m. Thursday.

“An issue of such public importance and interest should be not only debated but also decided by the People’s representatives,” it continues.

He issued the order online without a statement. He did not hold a news conference to take questions.

GOP leaders said McMaster informed them of his plans Wednesday.

The self-imposed deadline for passing a new map of congressional districts is May 26, House Majority Leader Davey Hiott told reporters Wednesday evening.

“We’re fully aware” that’s when early voting starts, said the Pickens County Republican. “We believe that’s the deadline.”

McMaster’s order comes under pressure from the White House, the state GOP and Republicans who want to replace him in the Governor’s Mansion — including the candidate he endorsed, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who told a House Judiciary panel Tuesday to get it done “by any means necessary.”

It also comes two days after the Senate refused to add redistricting to a resolution setting the rules for what the Legislature can do after the regular session concludes.

The 29-17 vote fell two “ayes” short of the two-thirds majority approval needed, as five Republicans joined 12 Democrats in rejecting the White House push.

McMaster has previously said redistricting is a matter for the Legislature to decide and that he didn’t expect to call a special session.

But at some point this week, he did “a complete 180 on this issue,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey told reporters after the session adjourned Thursday.

“If you’re going to flip-flop on something like that, it would have been a whole lot better for everybody if you’d have just done it a few months ago,” Massey said. “I talked to the guy four or five times last week.”

Massey suggested McMaster’s switch was due to the White House.

“Based on what I’ve seen this week, I think the governor’s going to do whatever he’s told to do,” Massey said. “There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of pushback or backbone downstairs this week.”

Massey was among the five GOP senators who voted “no” Tuesday.

The failure of that resolution also created a window for the governor’s order. No law in place for the off-session enabled McMaster to call the Legislature back.

Legislators sent to his desk a separate bill limiting off-session work to the budget and negotiations on differing versions of bills that have passed both chambers. But he has until Wednesday to sign it into law.

Zoom in on the differences

For an interactive map of South Carolina’s existing congressional districts, click here. For the proposed map, click here.

It will govern future off-sessions, to include a separate special session to wrap up work on the budget that takes effect July 1. Hiott said that might not be scheduled until after the June 9 primaries.

‘Best scenario’ timeline

While McMaster’s order can’t limit the special session’s agenda, Hiott said the sole purpose will be redistricting.

The process will start in the House with legislation adopting the White House-endorsed map and delaying congressional primaries. The House Judiciary Committee’s party-line vote to advance the bill Tuesday followed the Senate’s rejection of the effort.

Legislators will have access to the House “map room” over the weekend to draft proposed changes in the lines.

Senators won’t do anything until the House sends them that bill.

The House GOP’s goal for doing so is this Tuesday. That’s the “best scenario,” following what’s expected to be a very long and likely confrontational debate, Hiott said.

That would give the Senate one week before early voting to pass a bill that would nullify part of voters’ ballots. While delaying U.S. House contests, the House bill keeps all other primaries — including statewide offices, state House seats and the U.S. Senate — on schedule for June 9, with runoffs June 23.

If the congressional primaries are pushed to August, the candidates who have been campaigning for months will still be on June 9 ballots. Any votes for congressional candidates simply wouldn’t count.

Outside the Statehouse on Thursday, more than 50 people protested the push to redistrict, holding signs reading, “this is what democracy looks like” and “Black voters matter.”

Half a dozen speakers said they worried about the cost to taxpayers of holding a second primary election and that they didn’t want legislators to bow to pressure from President Donald Trump.

Senators’ reasons earlier this week for rejecting the push included the confusion it would cause among voters, the thousands of absentee ballots already mailed, and the hundreds already returned.

“Those concerns are heightened every day we get closer,” Massey told reporters. There will be active military overseas who won’t be able to vote in a second set of primaries, whether because they’re on the move or just don’t know to ask for another ballot, he said.

Massey said he believed the deadline for overhauling the congressional map passed about three months ago — before candidates filed to run for districts that may look completely different.

“It’s all problematic, based on what’s right,” he said, noting he also expects legal challenges if the lines are changed. “I think we’re already too late in the game.”

Why now?

The push from Trump is to pick up a Republican seat in November, in hopes of helping Republicans hold on to their already thin majority in the U.S. House.

The map created by the National Republican Redistricting Trust would draw U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s lone Democrat in Congress, out of the seat he’s represented since the lines were gerrymandered in 1992 to create a Black-majority district. The court-drawn map enabled Clyburn to become the first Black South Carolinian in Congress in 95 years.

Due to population changes and required post-census redistricting since, the 6th District is no longer a majority-minority district, though it remains reliably blue.

The effort to redraw South Carolina’s lines to create seven Republican seats followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that threw out Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. While Republicans pushing for the overhaul say that’s why South Carolina needs to overhaul its map, Republicans who oppose the quick rewrite say the Louisiana ruling doesn’t apply to South Carolina.

As Massey has pointed out, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that upheld South Carolina’s map rejected arguments that the lines were racially gerrymandered. They were upheld as partisan gerrymandered. The goal in packing Democrat-heavy precincts into the 6th District was to ensure the coastal 1st District stayed Republican, as Massey has acknowledged repeatedly.

Massey’s political concern about the proposed map is that it could ultimately result in two Democrats getting elected or at least igniting enthusiasm and an influx of money for Democrats, making it tougher for Republicans to hang on in races from Congress down to county councils.

2026-05-14 FILED Calling Extra Session of the General Assembly

 

This story was originally produced by SC Daily Gazette, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Alabama Republican officials moved swiftly Tuesday to implement an order from the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the use of a 2023 congressional map as plaintiffs who challenged those maps as violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act sought to restore an injunction against them.

Following the Supreme Court’s order, which instructed a lower court to reconsider the case in light of last month’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Gov. Kay Ivey called a special primary election in the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th congressional districts. The special primary election will be on Aug. 11. There will be no runoff, as required by legislation passed by the Legislature and signed by Ivey on Friday. 

“As I said at the close of our special session last week, Alabama now stands ready to quickly act,” Ivey said in a statement Tuesday morning. “I thank (Alabama House) Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter and (Senate President) Pro Tem Garlan Gudger for their focus last week that has allowed us to be in this strong position to move forward with our 2023 Alabama-drawn congressional map.”

The special primary is estimated to cost $4.45 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Office, in reimbursements to the counties affected from the state’s General Fund budget.

Plaintiffs in Allen v. Milligan, Alabama’s redistricting case, Monday filed for a temporary restraining order to prevent the state from using maps drawn by the Legislature saying “the court has created chaos for Alabama election officials and voters.”

“The court’s decision is designed to entrench power in the hands of the few at the expense of Black voters who have been denied equal rights at every turn,” plaintiffs and their counsel said in a statement Tuesday. “It also flies in the face of the decision it issued in this case less than three years ago. This order is also contrary to longstanding precedent that has, until yesterday, forbidden changing the rules too close to an election.”

The U.S. District Court, Northern District of Alabama Tuesday set briefings on the order. 

Uncertainty ahead of the primary

The new primary schedule adds uncertainty and the potential for complications just a week before the May 19 primaries, which will continue for all other federal and state offices on the ballot.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that the state will count all votes in the coming primary election but will invalidate the votes cast for the party nominees in the districts that were affected by the recent Supreme Court order.

Ballots that were cast for the other offices by voters, including for residents in the affected congressional districts, will be tallied and counted just as they have in previous elections. The votes for the party nominees in congressional districts 1, 2, 6 and 7 will be tallied and made available, but soon invalidated in lieu of the special primary in August.

“That means Alabama will now move forward using its own 2023 legislative-enacted congressional map,” Allen said. “The May 19 primary includes many important races, including numerous statewide constitutional offices, local races, state legislative and judicial races, as well as statewide constitutional amendments. All of these will proceed as normal and the results will be tabulated, canvassed and certified.”

However, the votes for the congressional districts that are affected by the court’s decision will be voided after the numbers are made public. 

The Supreme Court’s decision will especially affect the 2nd Congressional District, drawn in 2023 to include the southern Black Belt and a Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) of 48.7%, reflecting court orders requiring the state to have two congressional districts where Black voters had the opportunity to elect their preferred representatives. 

Using the 2023 map would put more of the district in the Republican-leaning Wiregrass and reduce the Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) from about 49% to under 40%, making it more likely to be won by a Republican nominee.

Candidate shifts

Despite a final decision from the lower court, candidates have already begun planning if they will shift districts. 

Rep. Rhett Marques, R-Enterprise, who had been running for the Republican nomination in the current 1st Congressional District, said in a social media post Tuesday that he would run in the 2nd Congressional District under the 2023 maps. 

“I am running hard to be the next Congressman from this district to deliver President Trump’s agenda by supporting Senator Britt and the rest of the Alabama delegation in making life more affordable for hardworking Alabama families and fighting tirelessly for our Christian conservative values,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, who currently represents Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that he has not decided if he will switch districts and he remains focused on his job.

“The Supreme Court did not dismiss the case, so we still do not know what the district lines will ultimately be. I ran for Congress to be a voice for the people and places who made me who I am. I am as committed to doing that today as I was the day I decided to run,” he said. 

Hampton Harris, the only Republican to qualify for the 2nd Congressional District prior to Monday’s order, said in a statement Tuesday that he would remain in the district. 

“While others sat on the sidelines, I got to work knocking doors across District 2, listening to families, small business owners, farmers, and veterans, and fighting every day for the conservative values that built Alabama,” the statement said. “That hard work did not depend on favorable maps, and it will not stop now that the lines have improved.”

Keith Pilkington, a Democratic candidate for the 6th Congressional District said in a statement Tuesday that he will continue to run in his current district and called the new special primary election “chaotic.”

“I fear that this chaotic process will cause many to doubt the democratic process and stay home. This entire process of redistricting and haphazard elections is an assault on democracy itself,” he said.

Messages seeking comment were left with Marshall and the Baldwin and Mobile counties probate courts on Tuesday.

The Alabama Republican Party said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon that it is “closely monitoring” developments in redistricting.

“We want voters to know that races impacted by redistricting will remain on the May 19 ballot; however, pursuant to the legislation passed by the Alabama Legislature, those results will not determine the party nominee if a special primary election is required for the affected districts,” the statement said. 

Alabama Democrats have spoken out against the court’s decision to remand Milligan to the lower court in light of Callais.

Tabitha Isner, vice chair of the Alabama Democratic Party and candidate for Senate District 26, said in a text Tuesday morning that Democratic candidates will likely not be making district decisions as quickly as their Republican counterparts. 

“While the Republicans are chomping at the bit to implement these new maps, Democrats are still busy fighting them and reminding voters why the Voting Rights Act exists in the first place. I don’t think you’ll hear any such premature announcements from Democrats,” she said. 

Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, said Tuesday he’s disappointed but not surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision.

“When it got referred to Clarence Thomas, I was not surprised with what may have come out of the court but I thought that there would be at least some rational thoughts at the Supreme Court level that would not allow them to lift the stay,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

Singleton is a plaintiff in the redistricting case, and laughed when he heard about the order on Monday evening. At the time, he had not read it yet, but was not surprised.

“I think that they are overlooked in a lot of factors in terms of what the state constitution says in terms of about the six months prior to the election,” he said in a phone interview Monday evening. 

The 2023 map would likely result in an Alabama U.S. House delegation with six Republicans and one Democrat. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a candidate for U.S. Senate, said in a video posted to social media Monday evening that his “job in this office was to put the Legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans 7-0.”

As of Tuesday evening, Ivey has not indicated that she will call a special session to redistrict in order to give Republicans an advantage, as Marshall and other state officials have urged.

Challenges

Opponents of last week’s special session are counting on a 2022 constitutional amendment to provide a legal challenge to the special primary election bills passed by the Alabama Legislature should Alabama be allowed to redistrict. The amendment, known as Amendment 4 during the election, requires any election law passed by the Legislature to be enacted at least six months before a general election.

 Rep. Pebblin Warren, D-Tuskegee said in an interview Tuesday she wasn’t shocked by the court’s ruling.

“That’s today’s politics,” she said. “There was a time when I grew up I thought if you wanted some help and need some help you go to the court. That’s where you get your relief from. But nowadays with the appointments and who we’ve got sitting in these seats and where things are, it didn’t surprise me.” 

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Selma, who represents Alabama’s 7th Congressional District, said the special primary would cause confusion. Using the 2023 congressional map would reduce the BVAP in Sewell’s district from about 52% to 50.6%.

“We are one week away from Alabama’s primary elections. Numerous voters have already cast absentee ballots,” Sewell said in a social media post Tuesday. “Yet the State of Alabama is charging ahead with NEW ELECTIONS, sowing confusion among voters and wasting taxpayer dollars in their effort to suppress Black representation. The people of Alabama deserve better!”

This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakening a key enforcement tool of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is fueling new concerns in Virginia over the future of Black political representation, particularly if Republicans regain full control of state government after the next census. 

In a 6-3 ruling last month in Louisiana v. Callais, the court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map containing a second majority-Black district, concluding the state relied too heavily on race in drawing district lines. 

The decision significantly narrowed how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be used in redistricting disputes and made it more difficult to challenge maps that dilute minority voting strength. 

The ruling stopped short of invalidating Section 2 altogether, but critics across Virginia say it represents the most consequential rollback of federal voting rights protections since Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 ruling that eliminated the federal preclearance system requiring states with histories of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing election laws.

“When my great-grandfather registered to vote, he was forced to take a literacy test and find three white men to vouch for his character,” said U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, the first Black woman elected to Congress from Virginia. 

“My father and grandfather were forced to pay poll taxes to register to vote. My family has felt the weight of voter suppression for generations.” 

McClellan said the new ruling “makes it nearly impossible to ensure minority voters have a fair opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice and threatens Black representation across the country.”

But in Virginia, legal experts and political leaders say the fallout could reach much further. 

Eric Claville, director of the Center for African American Public Policy at Norfolk State University, said the decision could eventually reshape congressional, state legislative and local political maps if Republicans regain unified control of state government after the 2030 census.

“The ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais is the most devastating decision of the court as it relates to turning back voting rights of African Americans and other people of color,” Claville said. “And I would even dare say what state legislators could do, it would take us back to the pre-Civil War era.” 

A law born from the Civil Rights movement

Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the Voting Rights Act followed decades of racial violence and white-led efforts in the South to keep Black Americans from the ballot box. 

The law followed bloody confrontations between voting rights activists and law enforcement in places like the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and helped dismantle barriers such as literacy tests, poll taxes and other racially discriminatory voting schemes. 

Claville said the law dramatically expanded federal oversight of elections in the South. 

“There were three things that the Voting Rights Act did,” he said. “Number one, it basically prohibited any type of discriminatory practice used to disenfranchise Black voters, like literacy tests, intimidation, poll taxes, suppression, and the like.”

The law also established federal oversight and preclearance requirements for certain jurisdictions, including Virginia, before those protections were weakened by later Supreme Court rulings. 

“Keep in mind,” Claville added, “many people lost their lives fighting for the right to vote.”

Over time, Section 2 became one of the law’s strongest remaining enforcement mechanisms. It allowed minority voters to challenge electoral systems and district maps that diluted their political influence, even absent specific evidence of racist intent. 

But the court’s conservative majority in the Callais ruling said that race cannot be the predominant factor in drawing districts, even when states are attempting to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said Louisiana’s effort to create a second majority-Black congressional district violated constitutional equal protection principles because race played too large a role in the process. 

The ruling suggested that racial disparities alone may no longer be enough to successfully challenge many voting maps in court. 

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the decision effectively hollowed out one of the nation’s most important civil rights statutes. 

Virginia leaders warn of widespread consequences

Democrats and civil rights groups in Virginia condemned the ruling.

“The Voting Rights Act has long protected minority communities from disenfranchisement,” said U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Newport News. “This latest decision by the Supreme Court sets voting rights back decades.” 

Scott, currently one of two Black members of Virginia’s congressional delegation, warned that the ruling gives GOP-controlled states more latitude to redraw maps that dilute the electoral strength of minority communities. 

“By creating a nearly impossible standard to challenge racial gerrymandering, the court has opened the door for Republican-led states to draw new maps that weaken the ability of minority communities to elect candidates of their choice,” Scott said. 

Attorney General Jay Jones, Virginia’s first Black top law enforcement official, tied the ruling to “the determination and perseverance of Black citizens who fought tirelessly and gave their lives over the course of a century so that their children and future generations could cast their vote and participate in our democracy.”

He added: “For over 60 years, the law has served as an essential tool for combatting the legacy of Jim Crow. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s decision today ignores that precedent and further undermines the already fragile state of our democracy.”

Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, the first Black House speaker in Virginia history, called the ruling a direct assault on democratic representation. 

“The United States Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the Voting Rights Act,” Scott said. “This decision guts a core part of that protection — silencing communities that have fought and bled to be heard.” 

Scott also linked the ruling to Virginia’s recent redistricting battles and ongoing debates over political power in the commonwealth. 

“This is exactly why Virginians fought back and voted YES,” he said, referring to the redistricting referendum that Virginia voters advanced April 21. “We made it clear — we’re not going to let politicians rig the system and steal our voices.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., described the ruling as “a very dark day in our history,” saying it threatens decades of civil rights progress.

“The court’s latest ruling will make it extremely difficult to challenge racially discriminatory congressional maps,” Kaine said. 

Virginia remains ‘an enigma’ among other states — for now

Despite the alarm from voting rights advocates, NSU’s Claville said Virginia occupies a different political position than many Southern states because Democrats currently control both the executive and legislative branches and because of the state’s demographic shifts over the past two decades.

“For the rest of this decade it doesn’t change at all,” Claville said. “Virginia is an enigma in this situation.”  

He pointed to the growing diversity of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads, as well as the record size of the Black delegation in the General Assembly.  

“As a matter of fact, the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus has increased to its largest membership in its history,” he said. 

That political balance, however, could change after the next statewide election and the 2030 census. 

“In the event that Democrats lose power and Republicans gain power and have the numbers, they can redraw districts,” Claville said. “They now have the Supreme Court backing to do so.”

The concerns are already playing out in other GOP-led states, where lawmakers moved quickly after the ruling to revisit congressional maps and election timelines ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

“Louisiana eliminated the primary to redraw district lines,” Claville said. “In the next couple of days, Alabama followed, then Tennessee followed.”

In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers moved within days of the Callais ruling to redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district centered in Memphis. The proposal triggered heated floor debate, with Democratic lawmakers invoking the civil rights movement and accusing Republicans of weakening Black voting power.

The proposed map would split Memphis across several Republican-leaning districts and could leave Tennessee with an all-Republican congressional delegation despite the city’s large Black population.

Claville added that the ruling’s effects extend congressional districts and could influence state legislative and local government maps nationwide. 

“This case does not specifically emphasize congressional districts,” he said. “Which means that states can now utilize this decision to draw statewide districts and local districts in order to limit Black representation.”

The ruling came less than two weeks before the Supreme Court of Virginia struck down the commonwealth’s voter-approved redistricting amendment, halting a plan by Democrats that would have allowed mid-decade congressional map changes ahead of the 2026 elections.

Claville said that if Republicans eventually regain full control of state government, districts in Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads could become targets for GOP-led redraws designed to reduce Democratic and minority representation. 

However, he added that Republicans likely could not engineer an overwhelming congressional advantage because of Virginia’s increasingly diverse electorate. 

“But they’ll try to get as close as they can,” Claville said. 

State protections gain new importance

In 2021, Virginia became the first Southern state to enact its own Voting Rights Act, legislation advocates say could now become more important as federal protections weaken.

McClellan, the congresswoman from Richmond who sponsored the legislation as a member of the state Senate at the time, pointed to that law as part of Virginia’s response to what she called a broader erosion of federal safeguards. 

“I’ve fought to expand voting rights for decades,” she said. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia said that the Callais ruling makes the state’s own voting protections even more important.

“In light of Callais, there is now greater urgency than ever for states to enact their own Voting Rights Acts,” said Executive Director Mary Bauer. 

Bauer warned that restoring lost federal protections will require political and legal battles far beyond the courtroom. 

“The Voting Rights Act has been foundational in the creation of a multiracial democracy,” she said, “and rectifying the Supreme Court’s decision … will require a fight in the courts, in statehouses, in the streets, and most of all, at the ballot box.” 

Advocates with the New Virginia Majority and the Advancement Project said Virginia’s state protections could become one of the few legal tools left to challenge discriminatory election practices. 

“It is clear that states need to protect voters from the federal judicial branch that is obliterating the basic tenets of democracy,” said Tram Nguyen, co-director of Virginia New Minority. 

Still, Claville said that no state law can entirely replace the federal protections that once existed under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

“Section 2 eliminates and misinterprets how race can be used in voting,” he said. “The majority-conservative court believes that no longer should the Voting Rights Act utilize race as a reason to draw any districts.”

He argued that the court’s embrace of what he called “color-blindness redistricting” ignores the continuing racial polarization that still shapes Southern voting patterns. 

“The Supreme Court said we live in a colorblind society,” Claville said. “But that’s not the case.”

Claville also pointed to renewed efforts in Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation supporters say would restore some of the protections weakened by recent Supreme Court rulings.  

“But in the commonwealth, the only thing that you can do is continue to vote for the party that’s going to be the most inclusive.”

This story was originally produced by Virginia Mercury, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Georgia lawmakers will reconvene in June for a special session to redraw the state’s political maps, Gov. Brian Kemp announced Wednesday. The move comes in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakened key protections under the Voting Rights Act.

Lawmakers will also be tasked with addressing an upcoming deadline to change the state’s current election system, which relies on a ballot QR code to count votes. Under a state law passed in 2024, QR codes cannot be used for the official ballot count after July 1.

Kemp broke with many other Republican-led states in the South when he announced that the state would not pursue redistricting ahead of the 2026 general election. Other states, like Alabama and Tennessee, have rushed to break up Black-majority districts since the ruling. 

But the governor, who said the ruling “restores fairness to our redistricting process,” notably left the door open for redistricting ahead of the 2028 election. 

“Voting is already underway for the 2026 elections, but it’s clear that Callais requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle,” Kemp said in a statement earlier this month, referring to the Louisiana v. Callais decision. 

In a Wednesday proclamation announcing a special session, the governor called for redistricting to take place for Georgia’s maps for state Senate and House, Congressional districts and “any other state office elected by district.”

Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones, an Augusta Democrat, condemned Kemp’s push to redistrict.

“If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities,” he said in a statement. “When Republicans strip Black people’s power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. They’re stripping political power from every single middle and working class person and handing it over to billionaires and big corporations.”

House Minority Leader Carolyn Hugley, a Columbus Democrat, also vowed to advance a constitutional amendment that would ban partisan gerrymandering during the special session.

“Nobody has said our maps are illegal, and the speed and urgency that Republicans have moved to redraw maps to lock-in single-party rule, indefinitely, shows why the Voting Rights Act was needed in the first place,” she said.

But Josh McKoon, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, said the special session presents an opportunity to do away with gerrymandering based on race and draw new maps that are “rooted in traditional, race-neutral principles,” such as compactness and respect for county and municipal boundaries.

“Georgians deserve fair districts that reflect the will of the voters, not artificial racial quotas or outdated mandates that divide our state along racial lines,” McKoon said.

ACLU of Georgia policy and advocacy director Christopher Bruce said that his organization had been pushing for a special session to address the issue of ballot QR codes, but was disappointed to see that Kemp had included redistricting in his proclamation. He urged voters to cast their ballots during the primary election, and to contact their elected officials to condemn the redistricting push.

“This is not something that’s new, but this is something that is nefarious beyond belief,” he said. “It is incumbent upon us, as voters in Georgia, to fight back and say, ‘we do not need new maps. We need fair maps.’”

Georgia lawmakers revised the state’s political maps in a 2023 special session after a federal judge ordered the maps to be redrawn to include one additional Black-majority congressional district, two additional Black-majority state Senate districts and five additional Black-majority state House districts. That case was appealed and is currently pending in the 11th Circuit Court.

But in the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s ruling, plaintiffs must prove there was “intentional racial discrimination” in order for gerrymandered districts to be overturned, meaning that voting rights advocates will likely have very little recourse if the state moves to eliminate those districts.

Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, said she expects states across the South to draw new maps under the guise of creating a partisan advantage rather than a racial one.

“It allows these states to use ‘partisan’ as the fig leaf to cover racial gerrymandering, because there is a correlation of race and political parties,” Anderson said in an interview. “You can draw the lines and say, ‘Oh no, this is about party. We just wanted to make sure that Republicans have the political power,’ when what you’re doing is basically diluting Black votes.”

But Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, said that splitting a solid Democratic district into Republican-leaning ones could come at the cost of making those Republican districts more competitive. For the past 35 years, Bullock added, Republicans have been working to consolidate minority voters into a few districts.

“This is an entirely different strategy now where [Republicans are] trying to crack rather than pack the minority vote,” Bullock said.

Bullock said that the 2nd Congressional District, currently held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, is likely a target, and that the Black population in Macon and Columbus could be split into two neighboring districts, as they were in 2010 when Bishop narrowly won against a Republican challenger.

“There is a potential risk depending upon how large a share of the Black population they removed from the 2nd district, and that it might make either the 3rd or the 8th district more competitive,” Bullock said, referring to districts currently represented by GOP U.S. Reps. Brian Jack of Peachtree City and Austin Scott of Tifton.

Attaching a redistricting proposal to a special session aimed at updating election ballot laws was likely an attempt at saving state money and lawmakers’ time, Bullock said, and at securing Republican control over redistricting in the event that Democrats make gains during November’s midterm elections.

The special session will begin on June 17, 2026, which is the day after the state’s primary election runoffs. 

This story was originally produced by Georgia Recorder, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Desperate to get a handle on rising property insurance costs driven by natural disasters, some state lawmakers are opening up a new line of attack in the effort to force oil companies to bear the cost of climate change effects. 

In three states, Democratic lawmakers introduced bills this session that would allow insurance companies or state attorneys general to take action against oil companies to offset the rising costs of insurance. 

While none of the measures became law this session, they signal the increasing urgency in states where wildfires, floods and other disasters have driven up the cost of insurance premiums and led some insurers to stop writing new policies. 

The proposals follow other state-led efforts to demand payment from fossil fuel producers for the mounting damages caused by climate change. States and municipalities have filed more than three dozen lawsuits over the industry’s role in the climate crisis, claiming companies violated a variety of laws, including consumer protection, public nuisance, failure to warn, fraud and racketeering.

Meanwhile, a handful of states have passed or introduced “climate Superfund” bills that use attribution science — a new field of research — to calculate the cost of disasters and charge fossil fuel companies for their role in causing them. 

Those efforts have drawn fierce opposition and legal challenges from oil companies and conservative groups. 

Now, some Democrats are using a similar premise to try to put large oil companies on the hook for the fast-growing insurance crisis. 

In many states, property insurance costs have skyrocketed as insurance companies have paid out increasing claims for wildfires, hurricanes and floods. Some insurers have stopped writing policies in certain areas. 

California and some other places have seen a surge of new policies on state-backed “last resort” insurance plans after residents failed to find coverage on the private market. California’s program, known as the FAIR Plan, was hit with billions in losses and sought a massive rate hike following the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025. 

A bill in California would empower the state attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover insurance costs. That measure failed to advance out of committee last month, with Republicans and some Democrats expressing concerns about fuel prices among other issues. 

A bill in Hawaii would allow insurance companies to seek damages from fossil fuel companies for their role in causing disasters worsened by climate change. Any proceeds gathered from actions against polluters would be factored into insurance rates. 

The bill passed both the House and Senate, but failed to advance when a conference committee ran out of time before a deadline earlier this month, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. 

“[T]he largest oil and gas corporations, who knowingly contributed to the drought conditions that made the Maui fires worse, pay nothing while continuing to rake in billions of dollars in profit every year,” Democratic state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole wrote in a Honolulu Civil Beat op-ed. “Hawaiʻi taxpayers should not be forced to foot the bill for Big Oil’s deception.”

Meanwhile, a similar bill in New York, allowing both insurance companies and the state attorney general to take action against oil companies over insurance costs, has been introduced but has not yet had a hearing in committee.

As with all legislation targeting the fossil fuel industry, the insurance bills have encountered fierce opposition and powerful lobbying campaigns. If enacted, the proposals would undoubtedly face lawsuits. Fossil fuel companies have long argued that they extracted and sold their products while following a suite of federal regulations, insulating them from state claims of harm. 

States have countered that the companies knew about the dangers of climate change but lied to the public, noting the successful campaign to hold tobacco companies accountable for deception even though their products were sold legally. 

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The fiscal leaders of several states are demanding transparency and consumer fairness as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to refund billions in international tariffs following a recent Supreme Court loss. 

In a February decision, the high court dealt a blow to the president’s trade agenda, ruling by a 6-3 margin that the tariffs he issued under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act were illegal.

Last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection began accepting applications from importers and brokers who are owed an estimated $166 billion in import tax refunds. While companies are receiving those refunds, it appears that many don’t intend to share those funds with consumers, who paid for much of the tariffs through higher prices. 

“We’re the ones who paid it. We’re the ones that need to get it back, and so any system that doesn’t get it to the little guy doesn’t get it to the right place,” Minnesota State Auditor Julie Blaha said on a press call Wednesday.

She was among eight Democratic state fiscal leaders who urged the White House to publicly disclose which firms are receiving tariff refunds and to ensure consumers are not left out.

Blaha said government agencies are well equipped for that task, noting the public websites set up during the coronavirus pandemic that disclosed which companies received pandemic grants and loans. There is currently no public database of tariff refund requests or agency determinations.  

“We’re not asking the federal government to do anything they don’t ask of states and local entities or nonprofits to do when they are using some of their funds,” she said. “We know how to do this kind of oversight.”

Blaha said transparency is particularly important since the White House is opposed to repaying the tariffs in the first place. The president has said his administration would “fight” the refund effort, though reports indicate more than $35 billion has already been sent to companies. 

Illinois State Treasurer Mike Frerichs said American consumers are suffering from high prices as the president and his inner circle enrich themselves. 

“No one trusts the federal government anymore,” he said. “They feel like the deck is stacked against them, and this example just adds further proof to their beliefs.”

State leaders estimated the tariffs cost Illinois consumers nearly $9 billion. But the current process does not ensure that those funds will be returned to consumers. 

“Trump’s system is opaque by design, with no guarantee of the $9 billion owed to Illinois families and businesses returning home,” Frerichs said Wednesday. “…Millions of Americans and businesses deserve every penny back.”

The president blasted conservative Supreme Court justices who nixed his tariffs, saying their decision earlier this year was a “disgrace to our nation” as well as “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”

He has remained committed to tariffs on foreign imports, believing that they will incentivize manufacturers to build products in the United States rather than overseas. 

After the Supreme Court loss, Trump ordered a 10% global tariff, which has also been challenged in court. Last week, the U.S. Court of International Trade granted a permanent injunction to a Florida-based toy manufacturer and a New York-based spice importer that sued the Trump administration over those tariffs. 

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Housing shortages have eased in most states since 2020, as new construction has made apartments and houses more affordable.

Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island are the only states that have lost housing units per capita since 2020, according to a Stateline analysis of housing data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Most other states have built more than enough housing to account for population growth.

The increase in the supply of apartments helped drive down the nation’s median rent in April by 1.7% compared with the same month last year, according to a May report from Apartment List, a company that posts rental listings online.

Single-family homes also are starting to get more affordable, according to a May report from the National Association of Realtors. The group determines “affordability” by calculating whether or not a typical family earns enough income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced, existing single-family home.

The improvement in affordability is especially dramatic in the South and Midwest, while affordability is lagging but improving in the West and Northeast.

In analyzing the housing supply, one housing unit for 2.5 residents is considered a healthy balance, though the ratio can be lower in places with large families or higher where there are many young singles or older people living alone.

Nationwide, the ratio ranges from 1.8 people per unit in Maine to 2.7 people per unit in Utah, according to the Stateline analysis. In most places, the ratio of people to housing units is shrinking, as the housing supply grows.

Some states have added far more housing than residents since 2020. Vermont, for example, has added nearly 10 times as many housing units — around 12,000 —  as new residents. The District of Columbia and New Mexico have added five times as many new units as new residents.

The story is different in Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island. In those three states, the housing supply is lagging behind population growth, with about three new residents per new housing unit in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and almost four residents per unit in New Jersey.

New Jersey has added about 260,000 new residents since 2020, but only about 66,500 new housing units. The state is seeking to impose affordable housing quotas on towns, but has run into strong resistance from suburban residents.

In February, a group of New Jersey towns, led by Montvale in Bergen County, a New York City suburb,  asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a March deadline for a new phase of affordable housing plans to start, but were rebuffed without explanation later that month by Justice Samuel Alito.

In court papers, town leaders said their residents don’t want the denser housing required by the 2024 state law, and that residents would likely vote them out of office if they implemented it.

At a February public hearing about the plan in Ridgewood, a town in Bergen County, “elected officials continued to receive objections from residents…ranging from accusations against local leaders of conspiracies, accepting campaign donations and personally benefitting from the rezoning,” according to court papers filed by the towns.

Apartment List does not consider Bergen County separately from the New York City area, where home prices have increased 5.6% from last year as of April 30, according to Zillow, to a median $773,069. A one-bedroom apartment in the county can command $2,400 or more according to Rentometer, a rental market analysis site.

In contrast, Travis County, Texas — which includes most of Austin — has added about 99,500 new residents and 120,000 new units since 2020. That disparity helps explain why the Austin area had the largest drop in median rent between 2025 and 2026 in the new Apartment List estimates, declining 5.7% since last year and 22% since 2022.

Along with Austin, apartment-building has driven a decline in rents in Sun Belt metros such as Denver, Orlando, Phoenix and Tampa, according to the Apartment List report.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

When Jacqueline Perez started experiencing symptoms of menopause in her early 50s, the brain fog was so severe, she thought she had early-onset dementia.

Perez, who founded a website dedicated to normalizing aging for women, said she gained more than 30 pounds and struggled with depression for months before she found a health provider who tested her hormone levels and recommended hormone replacement therapy for low estrogen.

That was nearly a decade ago, and in the years since, Perez said the culture around menopause treatment has changed dramatically.

“We still have a long way to go, in my opinion, but I think at least we’re on the path,” she said.

Menopause refers to the time when a woman stops having menstrual periods, which typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55, according to the National Institute on Aging. The associated changes in hormones can cause hot flashes, night sweats, joint problems, bone density loss, insomnia, mood changes and more.

Lawmakers and advocates alike told Stateline the topic of menopause used to be taboo, but there has been a generational shift in recent years that has led to more legislation in statehouses around the country, providing more access to treatments and preventive care as well as more educational opportunities for healthcare providers.

Claire Gill, founder and president of the National Menopause Foundation, started the nonprofit in 2019 and said over the course of the past seven years, public awareness of the issue and interest from clinicians has noticeably increased.

And in November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration removed its most severe “black box” warning from hormone replacement therapy for menopause and perimenopause after new research that the presumed risks of cancer, stroke and dementia from its use, once thought to be high, came from a flawed study. In the months since, the demand for the therapy has led to a nationwide shortage of certain products such as the estrogen patch.

Gill said more than 60 pieces of legislation related to menopause have been introduced nationwide this year, and 26 states have enacted a menopause-related law since 2019. There tend to be four categories of the legislation: mandating insurance coverage for treatments, workplace accommodations, awareness campaigns and healthcare provider education.

“They said, ‘Oh my god, I had no idea about any of this.’”

– Rhode Island state Sen. Lori Urso, describing her male colleagues' reaction after a hearing on her legislation

The subject is bipartisan: Lawmakers in liberal-leaning Illinois, Oregon and Washington have approved bills requiring insurance coverage, but so has conservative Louisiana.

Gill said the insurance conversation is especially significant, because bone density tests are only covered in existing laws when a person reaches the age of 65 and is eligible for Medicare. But women lose up to 20% of bone density in the first five years after menopause, which happens at an average age of 52. That’s a big gap that puts a woman at increased risk for fractures.

“I’m excited that we’re taking time and focusing more on the role that estrogen plays from head to toe in women, and not just looking at it as, ‘Oh, women get hot flashes,’” Gill said. “It’s so much more than that, and we can do more to protect our hearts and our brains and all of our organs — and prevent hot flashes.”

Getting providers to listen

In June 2025, Democratic state Sen. Lori Urso sponsored a bill that made Rhode Island the first state to require workplace accommodations, such as a modified work schedule, for menopause and its related conditions. It was added to the same part of employment law about women who are pregnant or nursing.

Urso said she had a challenging time personally with menopause, and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to continue functioning at the necessary level to keep doing her job. When she introduced her bill in committee last year and detailed why symptoms could make it difficult to work, several of the men who were present at the hearing followed her out of the room, stunned by what they’d heard.

Menopause coverage bills meet mixed fates in state legislatures

“They said, ‘Oh my god, I had no idea about any of this,’” Urso said.

In the year since, Urso has watched a flurry of bills spread to other states. Many of them, including another bill from Urso that’s under consideration this year, would mandate insurance coverage for treatments related to menopause and perimenopause, the years leading up to menopause when some symptoms can start.

Others are proposing bills similar to Urso’s workplace accommodations law, with the aim of instituting more education requirements for doctors, directing health departments to conduct a public awareness campaign, or telling agencies to study the issue and make recommendations.

“I don’t think I invented something, I think I just made it okay, and helped open up a necessary dialogue out there,” Urso said.

Urso’s bill to mandate insurance coverage is still pending in the Rhode Island Legislature, but others have already made it law, including in New Jersey.

A new generation

Democratic Assemblywoman Heather Simmons said she was looking at legislation in other statehouses around the country and found the insurance mandates to be inconsistent. She decided to draft a version for New Jersey that she wanted to be the most comprehensive bill in the country, covering hormonal, non-hormonal and preventive treatments for perimenopause and menopause on state-regulated insurance plans.

It was signed into law in January, passing alongside another bill that allows healthcare providers to earn continuing education credits for menopause-related topics.

Although Simmons said her healthcare providers are generally very good and her insurance is excellent, she faced an uphill battle when going through menopause. She said she would ask about symptoms and whether they could be related to menopause, and her providers would shrug their shoulders. Not for a lack of caring, she said, but lack of knowledge.

“I’m just so grateful that my generation and the generations that follow me are saying no, we deserve better than that, we can do better than that,” Simmons said. “We’re not afraid to talk about it anymore.”

Simmons’ bill also includes behavioral health services for those diagnosed with depression or other conditions, and counseling for those who don’t have a formal diagnosis. It also covers pelvic floor therapy, and bone health screenings and treatments.

Her next step, she said, is to make sure that insurance carriers can’t deny testosterone prescriptions for women who need it just because it’s an off-label use.

Testosterone was a hormone replacement therapy that Pennsylvania Democratic state Rep. Melissa Shusterman needed to help her feel like herself again.

Shusterman has introduced four bills this session related to perimenopause and menopause, including insurance coverage for preventive  care for hip fractures and a joint government study to review workplace policies for state employees. Four other related bills are pending from other representatives, including one that would mandate Medicaid coverage for menopause treatments.

“All of this is going to help women in the long run, which means mothers are happier, women are happier and partners are happier, and that makes us healthier as a society,” Shusterman said.

Advocates like Gill, who is also CEO of the Bone Health & Osteoporosis Foundation, say their goal is to stay committed to pushing the boulder up the hill when it comes to passing more laws and creating more awareness of this phase of life. Too many women still think they have dementia or cancer before they realize it might be perimenopause, she said.

Gill noted the entire budget for women’s health research under the National Institutes of Health has long been about 10% of its total budget — that includes juvenile and post-menopausal ages. The gap in health research was already wide, she said, and amid cuts to federal agencies and projects under President Donald Trump’s administration, a recent report from the Washington Post showed a 31% decrease in projects funded in 2025 that contained the word “women.”

“There’s always been a need to increase that (budget) … and now we’re cutting the dollars,” Gill said.

“The important thing is that there are both immediate and long-term things that can be done at the local, state and federal level that can bring about not just better quality of life and symptom treatment for women, but also longer-term health benefits for women,” she said.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Large, immigrant-rich cities saw population fall back between mid-2024 and mid-2025 after nation-leading increases the year before. 

Mid-sized cities led the pack in U.S. Census Bureau estimates to be released May 14. The largest numeric increases for the year were in Charlotte, North Carolina (up 20,731); Fort Worth, Texas (up 19,512); the Dallas suburb of Celina, Texas (up 12,710); and Seattle (up 11,572). 

Charlotte has been emphasizing affordable housing in recent years, including a city-sponsored 72-unit building on the site of a former mall, opening in late 2024. It was designed for older adults, people with incomes from 30% to 80% of the area’s median income, about $82,000 at the time. 

Morgan Dunn, 26, moved to Charlotte in 2024 for a banking job after growing up in California and living in Georgia and Utah. He and his wife are expecting their first child in September, and he said he likes having an affordable house with a half-acre lot where his four dogs can run.

“It’s a great city for the younger generations for the sake of job opportunities combined with the cost of living,” Dunn said in a message to Stateline.

New York City, which led the nation in growth between mid-2023 and mid-2024 with 162,991 more people, fell to dead last in population change — a decrease of 12,196 last year.  

Also near the bottom were Memphis, Tennessee (losing 4,575 people); Los Angeles, down 3,621; St. Louis, down 2,301, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, down 2,290. Like New York City, Los Angeles ranked high the year before with an increase of 24,421, seventh-highest in the nation before falling to third-to-last.

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Part of the reason for New York City’s fast-changing population shifts is that population growth was revised up for 2022-2024 to reflect more immigration, especially from asylum seekers, some of whom were bused from Texas. Parts of Queens had some of the largest influxes in the nation from asylum seekers, especially from Ecuador, according to a Stateline analysis. 

But immigration fell off in late 2024 and early 2025 as both the Biden and Trump administrations sought to put a lid on asylum seekers. Between 2024 and 2024 immigration “retreated from recent historical highs to more typical levels experienced before the pandemic,” according to a March report by New York City. Of the city’s five boroughs, only the Bronx and Staten Island gained population. 

“Big-city growth slowed significantly between 2024 and 2025, with some major hubs even seeing small declines,” Matt Erickson, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division, said in a statement. “In contrast, midsized cities found a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where domestic and international migration, paired with new housing, helped prevent the sluggish growth seen in small towns and larger metropolitan centers.”

In some states smaller cities had the big increases, such as the contrast between New York City’s decline and an increase of 2,933 in suburban Kiryas Joel village, a Hasidic Jewish enclave in Orange County, or New Mexico, where Albuquerque lost population but its suburb Rio Rancho gained 1,972. 

Louisiana’s Baton Rouge gained while New Orleans lost, as did Everett, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb that grew as the city lost population.

Some urban areas did well anyway: Atlanta had the biggest increase in Georgia, as did Chicago in Illinois, Detroit in Michigan, Kansas City in Missouri, and Newark in New Jersey. 

Other milestones: Austin, Texas, became the 12th city with more than a million residents, and Raleigh, North Carolina, became the 39th city of more than 500,000. The South had 11 of the top 12 numeric gains. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Health officials from the U.S. cities hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup say they are preparing to deal with infectious diseases, heat-related illness, and an array of other health threats when millions of fans, many of them from overseas, come to watch the games.

The World Cup is expected to draw between 5 million and 7 million soccer fans to the 11 U.S. host cities, which are Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City (in partnership with East Rutherford, New Jersey), Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle.

The newly formed Big Cities Health Coalition, a consortium of health officials from 36 of the nation’s largest health departments, says it has been formulating a strategy to mitigate any negative health impacts from such a large influx of people entering the country at once.

At a news briefing on Wednesday, health officials from Atlanta, Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Jose said they are preparing for disease monitoring and contact tracing during the weeks of soccer matches, which begin on June 11.

The officials said they aren’t concerned about the hantavirus, which is very rare. However, they are worried about the spread of measles after recent outbreaks around the country.

“Somebody might be here for a game in Atlanta and be exposed to something — let’s say measles, since that’s been so prevalent lately,” said Marcus Plescia, district health director at the Fulton County Board of Health, which includes the Atlanta region, “But by the time we realize that and start to look at who might be at risk, that fan might have traveled to Dallas to see their team playing there.”

“Something that happens here may actually have its impact somewhere else, and we’re going to have to think about how we handle that and hand off information.”

Alister Martin, commissioner of New York City’s health and mental hygiene department, said health officials also are concerned about extreme heat, alcohol and drug use, and sexually transmitted diseases.

“Relevant teams from disease control to mental health have been preparing to work in new capacities for months, and most recently, we tested our emergency capacity at our healthcare facilities,” Martin said.

At the briefing, the health officials said they are strapped for resources as a result of the expiration of COVID-19-era public health funding, and that host cities have gotten federal dollars for security and infrastructure needs but not for public health.

“In Atlanta, at least, there’s been some significant investment in infrastructure improvements, and those are very important things,” Plescia said. “We’ve not received a lot of direct funding for specific public health services.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House Thursday rejected a proposal to rein in President Donald Trump’s months-long military actions in Iran that have left dozens of U.S. military members dead, while killing thousands of civilians and displacing millions in the Middle East, according to third-party monitors. 

The measure, known as the War Powers Resolution, is a tool for Congress to limit the president’s ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad. The resolution failed in a 212-212 vote. Most Democrats voted for the measure, though three opposed it. One Republican also crossed party lines to vote in favor. The roll call was not immediately available following the vote.

Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey sponsored the measure, H.Con. Res. 75. 

During Wednesday’s debate on the House floor, Gottheimer said that Congress has still not been briefed on the progress or objectives in the Iran war, and argued it’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution. 

“Oversight is a key constitutional responsibility of Congress,” he said. 

Pentagon officials testified before Congress this week that the war so far has cost $29 billion, not including Iran’s drone and missile damage to U.S. military installations in the region.

Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued on the House floor that Iran was an “imminent threat.” He added that he was satisfied with the briefings from the Trump administration’s top military officials. 

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday rejected an identical measure, its seventh vote on the matter. Three Republicans joined nearly all Democrats, a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the president’s own party amid the war. 

GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined Democrats. Sen. John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, joined Republicans. 

The Iran war started on Feb. 28 and so far, at least 13 U.S. military members have died. Human Rights Activists in Iran, a nongovernmental organization based in Fairfax, Virginia, estimated that at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children have died because of the war. 

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in late March that up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced due to the U.S. and Israel attack on Iran.  

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate approved a resolution Thursday that will prevent lawmakers in that chamber from receiving their paychecks during any government shutdowns that begin after this year’s midterm elections. 

The voice vote on the measure from Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy will not impact members in the House of Representatives since each chamber of Congress is able to set its own rules and procedures. 

The two-page resolution requires the secretary of the Senate to disperse but then hold onto lawmakers paychecks if Congress fails to fund any agency within the federal government on time. 

Kennedy said during a floor speech Wednesday he hoped the resolution would reduce the likelihood of future government shutdowns, following three within the last year. 

“It’s got to stop,” he said. “Shutting down government should not be our default solution to our refusal to work out our issues and our differences.”

Similar to how federal employees receive back pay after a shutdown ends, Kennedy said his resolution would do the same for senators.

“The senator’s salary just would not be available to that senator while we’re in a shutdown but once a shutdown is over you’ll get your money,” he said. 

In order to get the votes to adopt the resolution, Kennedy said he “had to make a few accommodations,” including that it did not apply to the House and wouldn’t take effect before the elections to comply with the 27th Amendment.  

Members of Congress earn $174,000 annually, with those in leadership positions making more. The Constitution allows lawmakers to set their own salaries, which are covered by a permanent, mandatory appropriation. 

Lawmakers and the president, unlike the staff who work for them or those throughout the rest of the federal government, received their salaries during past shutdowns unless they took action to halt their paychecks. 

Several members asked either the House Chief Administrative Officer or the Senate Finance Clerk to hold onto their paychecks during the first shutdown. 

Congress is supposed to pass the dozen annual government funding bills before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 but hasn’t completed all of its work on time in three decades. 

Lawmakers regularly approve at least one stopgap spending bill to keep federal programs running mostly on autopilot while the House and Senate work to finalize those appropriations bills during the fall, typically sending them to the president sometime in December. 

Policy differences and heightened political tensions, however, led to three shutdowns of varying impact during this fiscal year. 

The first began last October and lasted through Nov. 12 as Democrats tried unsuccessfully to force Republicans to extend enhanced tax credits for people who buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. 

Lawmakers were able to pass six of the spending bills before a brief partial shutdown took place from Jan. 31 through Feb. 3. The law that ended that funding lapse included five more of the spending bills, leaving Homeland Security as the only department without its annual appropriations bill. 

Democratic demands for constraints on immigration enforcement after federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis led to a third shutdown for many of the agencies within DHS. That lasted from Feb. 14 through April 30 when Congress approved their last funding bill without new spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. 

Republicans plan to use the complex budget reconciliation process to approve $72 billion that would cover three years of immigration enforcement activities. GOP lawmakers can do that without Democratic votes in the Senate as long as they stick to the rules.  

Lawmakers in both chambers have also begun work on the next fiscal year’s batch of 12 government funding bills, though it’s highly unlikely they all become law before the end of September. 

That presents the possibility of yet another government shutdown just weeks before voters head to the polls during November’s midterm elections to decide which political party will control Congress for the next two years. 

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday suggested to a federal appeals court that upholding a lower court decision blocking the Trump administration’s access to sensitive voter data would weaken its ability to investigate racial discrimination in voting.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held oral arguments on whether to reverse a district court judge’s opinion that Michigan doesn’t have to provide the Justice Department with its unredacted voter list that contains dates of birth, driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers. 

At the core of the case is how federal courts should interpret the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which grants the U.S. attorney general broad access to documents and records that “come into the possession” of election officials. Congress passed the law to empower investigations into voting discrimination against Black citizens. 

A lawyer for the Trump administration on Wednesday sought to discredit the logic behind the district court judge’s decision. He said the decision would have hampered 1960s era investigations into discrimination against Black voters if it had been in place at that time. An assistant Michigan attorney general called that a major misreading of the law.

The judges did not meaningfully suggest which argument they found persuasive.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal to turn over the data. At least 15 conservative states have voluntarily provided the information, which the Trump administration plans to feed into a Department of Homeland Security computer program to identify potential noncitizen voters.

Democrats and voting rights advocates have raised privacy concerns about the Trump administration’s plans for the data. They also say Homeland Security has wrongly flagged voters as potential noncitizens and that the administration is seeking to build a national voter list.

The Justice Department’s courtroom argument on Wednesday came amid the backdrop of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision two weeks ago to severely weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was intended to stamp out discriminatory voting laws in the South. Trump has cheered the ruling and Republican state lawmakers in Southern states are rushing to draw new congressional maps that could oust Black Democrats.

Debate over Civil Rights Act

U.S District Court Judge Hala Jarbou, an appointee of President Donald Trump, in February ruled that the Justice Department isn’t entitled to voters’ data. Michigan’s voter registration database is a record created by state officials, not a document that comes into their possession, she reasoned.

On Wednesday, Justice Department attorney David Goldman told a panel of three appellate judges that Jarbou had created a “carveout” in the Civil Rights Act not rooted in the law. 

“It carves a hole in the attorney general’s investigative authority so gaping that the most blatant civil rights violations of the 1960s could have marched right through it,” Goldman said.

Michigan Assistant Attorney General Heather Meingast, representing Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, told the judges that the Justice Department’s demand is unprecedented and unsupported by federal law. 

The state’s voter registration database includes voter information but isn’t a document under the Civil Rights Act, Meingast argued. The database is dynamic, she said, constantly changing as voters are added and removed.

“It doesn’t seem to meet the test of what the (Civil Rights Act) was talking about in the 60s,” Meingast said. “And the purpose was voters turning in their documents, their applications, their poll taxes.”

Judges don’t tip hand

The case is being heard by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole, Jr., a Clinton appointee; Judge Andre B. Mathis, a Biden appointee; and Judge John B. Nalbandian, a Trump appointee.

Much of the judges’ questions centered on what it means for records to “come into the possession” of election officials. The judges posed skeptical questions to both sides, leaving it unclear who will prevail.

One judge likened the voter database to baking a cake, an image used in a brief filed by voters and civic groups in the case. Anyone baking a cake wouldn’t say they “came into possession” of a cake, the judge said.

“What about common sense?” the judge said.

The 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, provided an audio-only livestream of the arguments and the judges didn’t identify themselves when speaking. Courthouse News Service reported the judge who made the remark was Nalbandian.

The oral arguments lasted about 40 minutes. The three-judge panel gave no deadline for issuing an opinion.

Other cases

In the Justice Department’s voter data lawsuits, six district court judges have ruled against the Trump administration — in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Rhode Island, in addition to Michigan. The Michigan case is the first to reach oral argument before an appellate court. Oral arguments are set for next week in appeals of the DOJ’s losses in California and Oregon.

The appellate cases mark the next stage of the Justice Department’s year-long campaign for state voter data. DOJ attorneys have urged appeals courts to move quickly, arguing that the security of the November midterm elections is at stake.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department released an opinion from its Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to executive branch agencies, that supports the DOJ’s efforts to obtain state voter data. DOJ attorneys immediately filed the opinion in the Michigan appeal in a last-minute bid to bolster their case before oral arguments.

“It’s memorializing advice that was given in early to mid-September,” Goldman said — the same time period when the Justice Department began suing states for refusing to turn over voter data.

Aria Branch, an attorney at the Elias Law Group representing voters and a civic group in the case, noted that six courts have already ruled against the Justice Department. 

“DOJ’s attempt to exploit the Civil Rights Act for its current dragnet simply resembles trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” Branch told the judges. “It simply doesn’t work.”

WASHINGTON — Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday the risk of a member of the general public contracting hantavirus remains low despite several passengers on a cruise ship becoming infected with the disease. 

Dr. Brendan Jackson, an epidemiologist and the agency’s team lead in Nebraska, said Americans who were on the MV Hondius cruise ship after others were diagnosed with the illness were flown to the National Quarantine Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Healthcare providers at the site have been talking with each passenger about whether they may have been exposed to any of the people with confirmed cases. They’re also monitoring the Americans for fevers or other symptoms. 

“This particular virus has a long incubation period, so the monitoring period is 42 days,” Jackson said. “And the 42 days started with the departure of the ship, so May 11 was day one.” 

Any cruise ship passengers who traveled on commercial flights, leading to possible exposures for others on those planes, left the ship before the infections were diagnosed, he said.  

“The passengers that are being monitored who were on shared flights were separate from the passengers who were on the ship at the time the outbreak was detected. So they had actually left the ship before the outbreak was detected,” Jackson said. 

“All the passengers that were on the ship after that detection phase were transported just several days ago on a private plane directly from the Canary Islands to here in Omaha, Nebraska,” he added. 

CDC officials are working with local and state public health officials to ensure anyone who may have been exposed outside of the cruise ship isolates at home and monitors themselves for symptoms. 

The officials on the call declined to say how many people are being monitored for possible exposure or where they are located in the country, citing privacy concerns.

They also declined to talk about the two cruise ship passengers taken to Emory University Hospital’s Serious Communicable Diseases Unit in Georgia. 

Dr. David Fitter, incident manager for the agency’s hantavirus response, said that unlike the coronavirus pandemic that spread around the world in 2020, hantavirus is not new to public health officials. 

“At this moment I want to emphasize that the risk to the general public is low,” he said. 

In addition to monitoring Americans who were on the cruise ship and anyone they may have come into contact with, CDC officials have been talking frequently with lawmakers.

“We’ve held two Hill briefings and have just completed a call with the governors from the states of repatriated Americans,” Fitter said. “We’ve also held daily calls with state health officials. 

“Our role now is to continue our conversations with each passenger about their potential exposure and work with partners to ensure appropriate monitoring.”

CDC officials have encouraged the people at the Nebraska facility to stay there throughout the quarantine period but there are not currently any state or federal quarantine orders in place.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday pressed for increased funding for the Secret Service, arguing most of the money Senate Republicans included for the agency in their immigration enforcement bill is for security needs, not building a new ballroom at the White House. 

But the Louisiana Republican added during a morning press conference he didn’t want to “prejudge” the $72 billion package before the Senate approves a final version this month and sends it to the House. 

“I don’t have the pen in the Senate. They’re writing the bill,” he said. “We’ll see what we get.”

Johnson noted there are several more steps the legislation must go through in the Senate, including a review by the parliamentarian to make sure all of the provisions fit within the strict rules of the reconciliation process, committee debate and a marathon amendment voting session on the floor. 

Johnson said that President Donald Trump “is excited about building a ballroom with private funding,” though that project comes with some additional needs that will likely require taxpayer dollars.  

“The Secret Service says that as we enhance the White House grounds and the modernization there that obviously we have to think differently about security,” he said. “We live in a very dangerous time and there are new and increasing threats that we have never faced before. And so Congress has a role in funding that and we’ll have to see how it all works out.”

‘Urgent request’

Johnson asserted the bill Senate Republicans released last week “very specifically defined” how the Secret Service could use the additional funding.  

The legislation would provide $1 billion that would be available until Sept. 30, 2029 for “security adjustments and upgrades … to support enhancements by the United States Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project.”

The bill would limit the Secret Service from using any of the funding “for non-security elements.” 

Johnson said GOP lawmakers added the funding to the immigration enforcement spending bill after the Secret Service “put in an urgent request for additional security measures.”

“We’ve needed some of these security measures for a long time,” he said. “And that’s what this is all about.”

Congress provided the Secret Service with $3.25 billion in the annual funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that lawmakers passed in late April.  

Republicans approved an additional $1.17 billion for the Secret Service in their “big, beautiful” law that the agency can use through September 2029 for personnel, training, technology as well as performance, retention and signing bonuses. 

Normally, the White House budget office would publicly send Congress a supplemental spending request, asking lawmakers to approve the additional money. That would then be vetted by the Appropriations Committees, though that didn’t happen in this case. 

The Trump administration also could have included a boost in funding to the budget request officials sent Congress in early April that asked members to approve $3.5 billion for the Secret Service in the annual funding bill for the agency that’s due by the end of September.  

Funding breakdown

Secret Service Director Sean Curran gave Republican senators more details about how the agency plans to use the additional funding during a closed-door lunch this week, though the bill wouldn’t actually require the agency to spend the money as outlined. 

A breakdown obtained by States Newsroom showed: 

• $220 million would go to “hardening” the East Wing Modernization Project with additional bulletproof glass, drone detection technologies and filtration systems designed to detect chemical or other contaminants. 
• $180 million would go toward construction of a “long overdue” White House visitor screening facility. 
• $175 million would bolster Secret Service training as well as its training facilities. 
• $175 million would help the agency “secure frequently visited venues facing heightened risk due to their public visibility and static nature.”
• $150 million would go to the branch of the Secret Service that focuses on drones, aircraft incursions, biological threats and “other emerging threats through investments in state-of-the-art technologies.”
• $100 million for “high-profile national events that require significant planning.”

Republican senators said after that meeting they wanted more information from the Secret Service on exactly how the agency would spend the additional funding before they vote on the package. 

Thune predicts passage next week

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Wednesday morning most GOP senators will ultimately support the additional funding for the Secret Service “that’s needed to enable them to do their jobs.” 

“Obviously there are security implications related to the modernization of the East Wing. And that represents, I think, of the total request that Secret Service made, about 20%,” he said. “The balance of it, I think, are things that they’ve been putting off for a long time, but need to be done, especially in a modern threat environment where you’ve had, you know, now, three assassination attempts in the last two years.”

Thune said his “aspirational timeline” is to have committees debate their bills early next week, followed by floor action on the full package later in the week.  

“It can always be affected by other factors,” he said. “But I think at least right now, that’s the goal.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during a floor speech that Trump’s focus on building a “gilded ballroom” shows the president “is living in the theater of the absurd.”

Schumer said Americans don’t want to see government leaders focused on the ballroom project when inflation, food costs and gasoline prices have all increased. 

“I would say Trump has completely lost touch with the American people, but that would assume that Trump was ever in touch with the American people to begin with,” he said. “And on this issue he sure as heck isn’t.”

WASHINGTON — Long-time federal immigration official David Venturella will lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency spearheading President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson.

Venturella will replace outgoing ICE acting Director Todd Lyons, who last month announced he would leave his position by May 31, the DHS official told States Newsroom on Wednesday. Venturella will also take on the role on an acting basis. ICE has been without a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump first took office in 2017.

Venturella will oversee an agency that has come under intense congressional and public scrutiny after federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. 

The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti led to a months-long shutdown of DHS, after Democrats pushed for constraints on federal immigration officers. The shutdown ended last month, and Republicans are moving forward with funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection for the next three years, through a complex legislative process that does not require Democratic votes. 

Venturella worked at DHS during the Obama administration, when he led the Secure Communities program in which local law enforcement shared fingerprints and booking information with federal immigration officials to identify immigrants in the country without legal authorization. The Obama administration eventually ended the program, but Trump revived it in 2017.

Venturella has also worked for the private prison company GEO, which earns billions in government contracts to detain immigrants across the country. He retired from GEO in 2023 after serving as the vice president of client relations.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Data centers, wind, and solar. The Dayton Daily News’ Bryn Dippold reports, “Could wind and solar projects have fueled Ohio’s data center growth? Advocacy group says ‘yes’.”

There are 1,000 megawatts in 1 gigawatt 1 gigawatt can power approximately 800,000 homes, roughly the population of Seattle 1.2 gigawatts is roughly the output of a nuclear power plant A hyperscale data center, like the ones planned for communities in Ohio and drawing public opposition, can use more than 100 megawatts of energy Roughly 100 MW of electric power can support 80,000 U.S. households (for comparison, the city of Hamilton’s population is about 63,000)

A new report from the advocacy group Save Ohio Parks argues that wind and solar projects canceled in Ohio could have generated nearly enough electricity to meet the growing demand from data centers.

• Voter privacy. Cleveland.com’s Sabrina Eaton reports, “Ohio voter records sent to DOJ spark Democratic lawmakers’ concerns.”

Ohio’s Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Frank LaRose on Tuesday that demanded he explain what sensitive voter information he turned over to the federal government, what legal authority he relied on and what safeguards — if any — are in place to protect it from misuse.

The letter accuses LaRose of exposing nearly eight million Ohioans to “unnecessary risks, including misuse, unauthorized access, leaks, and identity theft, without any clear safeguards or accountability.”

• Radiation. WVXU’s Nick Swartsell reports, “Decades after UC radiation experiments, students and families call for better memorial.”

A UC radiologist named Eugene Saenger headed up a Department of Defense-funded project between 1960 and 1972, studying the effects of radiation on the human body.

It’s unknown exactly how many people Saenger experimented on over the course of more than a decade. Records show it’s at least 90.

Many participants thought they were undergoing treatment for their late-stage cancers when Saenger put them in a machine and exposed their bodies to high levels of radiation.

• Gun storage. NPR reports, “About 7 million kids live in a home with a loaded and unlocked gun, a study finds.”

An estimated 32 million children in the United States live in homes with firearms, nearly 7 million of whom have at least one firearm in the household that’s unlocked and loaded. That’s according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.

• Cleveland cops. The Cleveland Scene’s Mark Oprea reports, “As Cleveland Seeks to End the Consent Decree, Do Residents Trust the Police?”

The city’s Police Accountability Team, as well as the federal monitor team and the Cleveland Community Police Commission, will soon each be surveying Clevelanders on that very question.

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A panel of Ohio judges questioned the state’s attorneys Tuesday about why taxpayers are footing the bill for private school tuition.

Leaders of public schools, including Cleveland Heights-University Heights, headed to Columbus for an early morning hearing before the 10th District Court of Appeals.

More than 300 public school districts are suing over the state’s private school voucher program, named EdChoice by lawmakers. It allows any family, regardless of income level, to get taxpayer dollars to attend nonpublic schools.

A trial judge ruled last summer that the program was unconstitutional.

The state appealed the majority of the ruling, while the schools are pushing back against the one charge that was decided against them. The schools complain that the voucher program creates segregation in schools, but the judge said there was no evidence of that.

Schools are currently experiencing cuts to jobs, classes, and athletics as many face budget shortfalls.

“The damage that’s being done to Ohio’s amazing public schools is undeniable,” Cleveland Heights-University Heights school board member Dan Heintz said.

Some, like Heintz’s still don’t have air conditioning.

Public schools deserve more money, he and Cleveland-based attorney Miriam Fair said.

“The General Assembly has abdicated its constitutional obligation to public school students and instead prioritizes private education,” Fair said while speaking to the court.

Nonpartisan research group Policy Matters Ohio found that K-12 schools are being underfunded by nearly $3 billion over the next two years.

In the fiscal year 2025, more than $1 billion of taxpayer dollars went to private schools. Private schools are set to get more than $2 billion over the next two years.

Some supporters of the private school vouchers claim that public schools are wasting money, some of which they said they need, on the lawsuit.

“When they come begging for more taxes, ask them why they spent the money you already gave them on losing lawsuits,” Attorney General Dave Yost said, in response to a post on X about the hearing beginning.

Heintz said each participating school has spent $2 per student for the past four years.

Based on that number, the coalition has spent $1.7 million on legal fees. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the $3 billion they say they were underfunded.

Judges David Leland, Kristin Boggs, and Shawn Dingus will be deciding whether or not they completely agree with Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page in her ruling.

But the state and a coalition of families that use private school vouchers are fighting back, claiming that the education funding isn’t coming from the same pool of money.

“There’s no inherent connection between the EdChoice funding and the public school funding,” Deputy Solicitor General Stephen Carney said.

Carney is joined by Keith Neely of the Institute of Justice, who is representing a group of private school families.

There is no way to say that if the private school vouchers went away, the money would go to public schools, he said. It could go to other priorities like Medicaid.

Conversely, money could also be given to public education by canceling the handout that the lawmakers gave to the Cleveland Browns for their new stadium, Carney said.

“Just to add some more controversy to today,” he said.

The judges seemed to agree with this sentiment, repeatedly asking the attorneys for the school coalition, called Vouchers Hurt Ohio, how ending the private school voucher program would help them.

Attorney Mark Wallach responded that there is a “laundry list” of other ways that the program “erodes” public education, such as violating the Equal Protection Clause.

But it’s the lawmakers’ right to fund both public and private education, Neely claimed.

“(Families are) going to be forced to send their children to a public school environment that might not have worked for them,” he said.

The judges continually interrupted the state’s team.

Data shows the majority of people using private school vouchers were already sending their kids to nonpublic schools.

“What’s the purpose, counselor, of having an admission policy where students who can afford private tuition to private schools are nonetheless subsidized by EdChoice vouchers?” Judge Leland asked. “What is the governmental purpose of that?”

“Well, it’s to provide choice to parents,” Carney said.

“Why are we subsidizing wealthy students who can afford to go to private school? Why are we paying for their tuition with tax dollars?”

Carney tried to explain that the private school voucher program was not just for the wealthy, but also was started for lower-income families and students with disabilities. Allowing for choice is the crux of the issue, Neely said.

Judge Dingus asked the state how this is a choice for “parents” when really, it’s the school deciding who they let in.

He offered a hypothetical of an LGBTQ+ child not being let into a private school. Carney conceded that the “choice” is being able to apply.

“The argument this morning, I think, went well for us,” Neely said after the hearing. “Ultimately, I think we all recognize that this case is going to go to the Ohio Supreme Court one way or the other.”

The Ohio Supreme Court, which Republican state lawmakers made openly partisan starting in 2022, has a 6-1 Republican advantage.

The appellate court judges will eventually rule on the case, but Neely expects the panel, all of them Democrats, to side with the schools.

He believes eventually, the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court will rule in his favor.

“From that perspective, I think today’s argument is a success,” Neely said. “It moves us closer to that goal, and we’re excited to have that opportunity when the day comes.”

Heintz still holds out hope for victory.

“When the Supreme Court eliminates the EdChoice vouchers, the money will be there, and the statewide expectation will be there, that Ohio’s public schools will be funded to the promise of the Constitution,” he said.

The voucher program remains in effect as litigation continues.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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May 1 was the deadline under a 1973 law for President Donald Trump to get a consent from Congress for his war against Iran. But it’s come and gone without Trump asking for it — or with most congressional Republicans demanding it.

Ohio Republican U.S. Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno have voted to block such resolutions, but they have both repeatedly ignored requests to explain their thinking.

The war is costing Americans more than $1 billion a day and has driven gas prices over $4.78 a gallon in Ohio, and is expected to drive grocery prices significantly higher than they are now. 

At the same time, it hasn’t achieved regime change or forced Iran to abandon its nuclear program — two of Trump’s shifting goals.

Meanwhile, with access to the Strait of Hormuz severely restricted, the United States and much of the rest of the world are worse off than before the United States and Israel started dropping bombs on Feb. 28.

The war is historically unpopular. For example, a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll released last week said that just 33% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of it.

Most Democrats in Congress — and a few Republicans — have repeatedly tried to force a vote on whether to support the war under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. 

It was passed after years of U.S. involvement in an undeclared war during which presidents often lied about how well it was going. It was an attempt by Congress to reassert its constitutional power to decide whether the nation goes to war.

“The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations,” it said.

However, the current war goes on, with Trump claiming a ceasefire even as the sides launch attacks on one another. And the president continues to hint that a deal with Iran is near — after weeks of such promises and apocalyptic threats have failed to produce a resolution.

The 60-day deadline for congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution passed at the start of the month.

The law says that after that time “the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces… unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States.”

Despite that, Husted and Moreno voted four times to block a war-powers vote by mid-April. On April 30, on the eve of the legal deadline, they voted that way again.

Neither senator’s office responded when asked why he supported the war, and to explain what about it justified forcing Ohioans to pay so much for gas. 

Former Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is running against Husted in a November special election, said it was in Ohioans’ interest to end the war now.

“Ohioans are struggling to make ends meet, yet Jon Husted is choosing to send tens-of-billions of dollars overseas rather than using them to help hard working families here at home,” Brown said in an email.

“Too many American service members, including three Ohio soldiers, have lost their lives. Gas and diesel prices are soaring. It is past time to put an end to this conflict and focus on helping people here in Ohio instead of supporting a war that is making their lives harder.”

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Petitioners who tried to get a hemp and marijuana referendum on Ohio’s November ballot are saying they either never got paid or only got partially paid for the signatures they collected. 

Lisa Flagella and Amanda Ward say they — along with several other petitioners — did not get paid for the signatures they collected for the Ohio Senate Bill 56 referendum effort.

The referendum would have overturned the lawmaker-passed overhaul of the adult-use marijuana law passed by voters in 2023. Ultimately the referendum effort did not gather enough signatures to move forward within the necessary timeline for the ballot.

Thomas Miller and Pat Manning said they only got partially paid for the signatures they collected. 

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“We made the decision at one point in the campaign to suspend paid signature collection as we assessed how many signatures we had collected at that point because we did have a large grass roots movement of unpaid volunteers collecting signatures,” Dennis Williard, campaign spokesperson, said in an email. 

Ohioans for Cannabis Choice had more than 5,000 people and businesses pledge to sign, collect, or host places where people could sign the petitions, Williard said. 

If the referendum made it to the ballot, it would have given voters a chance to overturn a law that went into effect on March 20 that changes Ohio’s voter-passed recreational marijuana law and bans intoxicating hemp products, including THC-infused beverages. 

Ohioans for Cannabis Choice would not say how many signatures were collected. They needed to collect 248,092 signatures and also needed to gather 3% of an individual county’s gubernatorial turnout in 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties to get on the Nov. 3 ballot. 

The S.B. 56 referendum collected about 208,000 signatures, said Mark Fashian, formerly the president of hemp product wholesaler Midwest Analytical Solutions in Delaware, Ohio. 

Fashian, who said he helped raise money for the referendum effort, said the number of signatures while testifying during a May 4 injunction hearing of an ongoing lawsuit in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas. 

The new law reduces THC levels in adult-use marijuana extracts from a maximum of 90% down to a maximum of 70%, caps THC levels in adult-use flower to 35%, and prohibits smoking in most public places.

It also bans possessing marijuana in anything outside of its original packaging and criminalizes bringing legal marijuana from another state back to Ohio.

“I believed in the cause,” Flagella said. 

Ohioans for Cannabis Choice hired ​​Arno Petition Consultant as the lead consultant, a California-based firm run by Michael Arno — who hired Larry Laws of L&R Political Consultants to get petitioners to collect signatures. 

The Ohio Capital Journal left messages and sent questions to Arno, but he did not respond. 

Ohio Petitioning Partners, which is owned by Pam Lauter, was hired as a sub-contractor. Lauter said she has not been paid either. 

“I’m infuriated,” Lauter said in an email. 

“This was the biggest debacle I have ever been involved with. I am in the same exact boat as everybody else is. I was not in control of this petition drive.” 

She said her job was to hire people to collect signatures. 

“The whole thing is shameful,” Lauter said in an email. “The whole thing is embarrassing. And my heart is broken over at (sic) all.” 

Ohioans for Cannabis Choice didn’t pay people what they were supposed to be paid, claimed Laws, who has been involved in petition work for 30 years. 

“I don’t think (Ohioans for Cannabis Choice) put out more than $100,000,” he said. 

“We took care of a lot of people as best we could, but certainly there wasn’t enough money there to take care of everything.”

Laws is not optimistic people will be paid. 

“If it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen,” he said.

The petitioners were reportedly told they would get paid $9 per valid signature.

Flagella collected 1,012 signatures for the S.B. 56 referendum in 10 days and has not gotten paid. 

“Where’s our money?” she said. Flagella could have been paid about $9,000, depending on how many signatures were valid. 

“I worked really hard, and I want to be paid in full,” she said. “I drove hours away from my house, spent ten hours on my feet, then drove another hour back to my house.” 

Flagella, Miller, Manning, and seven other people sent a demand letter for immediate payment to Lauter, Laws, Arno, and several other people involved in Ohioans for Cannabis Choice on March 27. 

“This letter serves as a formal demand for the immediate payment of all outstanding wages owed to myself and 9 other petitioners for services rendered during the Ohio SB 56 referendum signature-gathering campaign. … Professional petitioners were brought in from California and Florida as well as Ohio that were instructed to stop work and have subsequently been denied their earned pay.” 

The Ohio Attorney General initially rejected the referendum’s summary language in January, but certified it Feb. 3 after Ohioans for Cannabis Choice made changes to the language. 

“That really limited our ability to get our signatures,” Fashian said. 

Ohioans for Cannabis Choice stopped collecting signatures when the money ran out, Laws said. 

“I was all for shutting it down when I seen (sic) that they were delaying (payments),” Laws said. “If I had it my way, I would have shut it down a week earlier.”

The paid petitioners were pulled off collecting signatures for the referendum on Feb. 25, Flagella said, even though the deadline to collect signatures was March 19. 

“We just got started,” Flagella said. “I was ready to pump it up.” 

Pat Manning said he got paid for most of his signatures, but not all of them. 

He collected about 1,000 signatures and he said he got paid about $7,000 from Ohio Petitions Partners.  

“The first two weeks, everybody got paid,” he said. “The last (signature) turn in, nobody got anything.” 

He turned in about 100 signatures during the last turn in, so he was expecting to be paid an additional $1,000, but he has not received any of that money. 

“I’m still baffled as to what happened,” Manning said. “I’m very disappointed in the whole thing.” 

He has been doing petition work for 10 years. 

“It’s a ridiculous amount of money for the people that really know what they’re doing,” he said. 

Flagella has been doing petition work for more than 20 years and said she’s “never been so burned.” 

“I’ve never experienced anything like this before,” she said. “I’ve always gotten paid. I’ve always done an excellent job and I hold myself to very high standards and in the work that I do.” 

Flagella remembers signing a contract, but has not been able to track it down. The other petitioners the Ohio Capital Journal talked to also said they are unable to access the contracts they signed. 

“I signed the contract onboarding through this site, and the site is broken,” Flagella said. “I should be able to see my validity. I should be able to retrieve my contract that I signed.” 

Thomas Miller — who has previously done marijuana petitions in Missouri and Florida — saw a Facebook post about getting involved with the S.B. 56 referendum.

“It’s great money when you get paid,” said Miller, who lives in Mansfield. 

He collected 101 signatures in one day in eight degree temperatures in front of Beyond Hello Cannabis Dispensary in Mansfield to get the initial signatures needed to submit the initial proposal to the Ohio Attorney General.

He got paid $540 for those signatures, but he said he should have received $900. 

“I know my signatures were good because I checked,” Miller said. 

He then went on to collect an additional 311 signatures and estimated he should have been paid $2,800. 

“I need my $2,800,” Miller said. “That’s why I got involved in this. It’s quick money, easy money.” 

Amanda Ward collected about 100 signatures in 16 days and expected to be paid about $900. 

“It’s very frustrating,” she said. “I felt like I put myself out there for nothing.” 

Ward planned on using the money from collecting signatures to go take her family on a summer trip to Connecticut and Pennsylvania. 

“I don’t see that happening,” she said. “It really sucks, but at this point, it’s not even necessarily about the money. It’s about that we were promised something and those conditions weren’t met. I know I’ll probably never see the money.” 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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We’re going to save this country.

That’s not an aim or a goal. That’s a promise.

It’s what the men and women rebuilding Jim Crow should fear. And it’s what we Americans owe each other.

The Supreme Court made the law an arm of Republican policy. It spat on the blood shed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And it is doing all it can to nullify the 14th and 15th amendments.

Alabama’s state officials no longer bother with the pretenses of democracy. Just look at how they greeted the news of the nation’s high court beclowning itself to allow the state Legislature o revert to a previous map and reduce the state’s Black congressional representation.

“My job in this office was to put the Legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans 7-0,” said Steve Marshall, apparently a private lawyer for the GOP and not Alabama’s attorney general.

Or how about this pathetic statement from Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger?

“The Supreme Court’s action removes the thumb from the scale in legislative and congressional elections and allows Republicans to once again have a fair chance to compete,” he said.

This is a party that controls every state office, seven of Alabama’s nine congressional seats and 103 of the 140 seats in the state Legislature. It’s hard to tell what conservatives want more: power or pity.

I know what I want. Representative government. I don’t want a new authoritarianism rising on the foundations of Jim Crow. I want that foundation destroyed down to the last pebble. Public issues — real issues like education and public safety — should be debated and addressed by people in good faith, whatever side of the aisle they’re on.

And I’m tired of being ruled by those who soak their heads in right-wing media that every minute gets crueler and more detached from reality. I’m sick of elected officials flooding our state with firearms while preaching about the alleged threats of transgender teenagers. I’m disgusted by men swinging their Christianity around like a scythe and calling it religious freedom. And I despise politicians who take badly needed money from Alabama’s public schools, give it to rich families in private ones, and have the gall to label it choice.

This is what living under a cabal is like. We have to waste our time with their obsessions because they don’t have to pay attention to our needs. By and large, our elected officials have no interest in public service. Only power.

That’s Alabama. That’s what it’s been for centuries. And thanks to the high court, it’s spreading like a virus around the nation.

But don’t despair. The issue before us is clear, in every election and in every action: Who stands for democracy, and who stands against it?

Every other concern flows into that. Women will not have control of their healthcare until we make it politically impossible to treat them like children. Alabama schools will continue to struggle with funding until we can remove the rich man’s veto over responsible taxation. All of us will continue fearing for our children’s safety until the political shields around gun maniacs fall down.

I have no illusions that getting to that place will be easy. Our blatantly apartheid constitution celebrates its 125th birthday this year. Amid surging disgust with their performance, federal and state regimes subvert law and destroy common decency to entrench themselves. As Frederick Douglass once said, power concedes nothing without a demand.

But neither do I doubt the willingness of our friends and neighbors to make those demands. Or to make it difficult for the people who would oppress us. Alabamians have shown unconquerable bravery in the face of violent tyranny. And from the protests I saw at the Statehouse last week, that spirit still remains.

This is not a battle that can be won in a day or a single election. This is the campaign of a lifetime, of a hundred small victories and resolve in the face of reverses. It is one that we will hand to future generations to finish. That’s a sobering fact. Maybe a distressing one.

But I think of Langston Hughes, reaching out to us from another time of oppression and fear:

I look at my own body    With eyes no longer blind— And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind. Then let us hurry, comrades, The road to find.

The hopes for our nation feel dim in the face of a cynical and narrow-minded judiciary. Petty men are attacking the democratic legacy won through the blood of ordinary Alabamians. Alabama’s shameful legacy of oppression feels heavy today.

But we also have a legacy of courage to stand on and a path of resistance to follow until the day democracy triumphs again. And however long it takes, however hard the struggle, we will prevail.

This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

An increasing number of conservative states are mandating that state and local social service providers verify and report the immigration status of the people they serve — in some cases threatening stiff penalties for public employees who fail to comply.

Under federal law, immigrants who are in the United States illegally are generally barred from receiving public benefits such as nonemergency health care, food aid and housing help, though a handful of left-leaning states use their own money to provide such benefits.

Supporters of the new verification and reporting laws say they will help curb illegal immigration by making it more difficult for people who aren’t eligible for public aid to receive it.

Government-funded health care, housing aid and the right to have a driver’s license are a “pull factor that encourages illegal immigration,” said Cooper Smith, director of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that has worked on policy development with the current Trump administration.

Government benefits, Smith said, are “an incentive for (immigrants) to come here and cross the border and make this their home, and we don’t want to see that.”

In Tennessee, legislators this week sent a bill to Republican Gov. Bill Lee that would require all state and local agencies to verify the immigration status of people who apply for federal, state or local government benefits, and to report those who are here illegally to the legislature and the state’s new immigration enforcement agency.

The measure, which the governor is expected to sign, authorizes the state attorney general to investigate possible violations, and threatens jail time or a loss of state funding for workers or agencies that fail to comply.

The potential penalties in Tennessee’s law are especially strict, but this year Indiana, Utah, and Wyoming also enacted laws requiring state and local agencies to verify the immigration status of people applying for certain benefits. In Indiana and Wyoming, agencies also must report immigrants who are here illegally to federal authorities. Louisiana enacted a similar verification and reporting law last year.

The Indiana and Wyoming laws go beyond the specific individuals applying for aid.

In considering an application for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Indiana law requires agencies to notify federal authorities if they cannot verify the immigration status of any member of an applicant’s household. Similarly, the Wyoming law requires the state health department and the state department of family services to notify federal immigration authorities if they determine that anyone applying for public benefits resides in a household that includes a person who is here illegally.

Critics say the new state laws will dissuade many people who are eligible for benefits — especially those with family members who are here illegally — from getting help they are entitled to, and force state and local officials to perform an immigration enforcement role for which they are ill equipped.

“They have to do this verification process for everybody that walks in the door. This is something that slows down services for every Tennessean in the name of collecting data and trying to make assessments that folks are not trained to make,” Democratic state Sen. Jeff Yarbro said last month during the floor debate on the bill.

“There’s probably no one who understands enough of the rules to make that determination,” he said. “But we are forcing that decision upon every single government office in the state of Tennessee — it’s just a little bit insane.”

Tanya Broder, an attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for immigrants, said the new laws represent an escalation of state anti-immigration efforts. She said the measures demonstrate that conservative states are moving in lockstep with the Trump administration.

“There are many, many states that impose restrictions on access to public to state and local public benefits, but some of these reporting requirements that states are proposing now likely do violate the law,” Broder said. “I think they are sowing a campaign of fear and misinformation.”

Broder added that the fear of penalties might prompt agency workers in Tennessee to overreport and potentially engage in racial profiling.

The Tennessee bill is part of a sweeping package of immigration enforcement measures the state legislature approved this year. Tennessee’s broad immigration agenda was crafted in coordination with the White House, specifically with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Earlier this month, Lee signed a measure that requires state judges to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. And last month, the governor signed a bill that makes it a crime under Tennessee law for an adult to refuse or fail to leave the state within 90 days of a final order of removal. The law also makes it a crime for immigrants to try to enter the state if they have an outstanding deportation order.

Other bills that would require local sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration agents and make it illegal for people who are living in the U.S. illegally to operate a commercial vehicle or truck in the state are on Lee’s desk awaiting his signature.

Smith, of the America First Policy Institute, said Tennessee is “serving as a model for other states to follow.”

Republicans struggled this year to secure funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Smith noted, “so they know that their ability to get meaningful legal immigration reform, through both houses of Congress and signed by the president, is very, very unlikely,” he said. “So the next step is to do as much as you can at the state level.”

Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, agreed with Smith’s assessment of the political situation.

“There are things that the federal government can’t control, or that may be harder to achieve at the federal level, particularly with a Congress that isn’t passing bills,” Gelatt said.

“We know that Stephen Miller advised Tennessee on their immigration bills, and I think that his philosophy is that the federal government and state governments should make life in the United States so hard for people who don’t have legal status that they decide to go home.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

A growing number of incarcerated people across the country now have access to free phone calls and other communication services, a shift some advocates say is strengthening family connections, improving prison conditions and easing reentry after release.

A new report from Worth Rises, a nonprofit that advocates in opposition to the prison industry,  found that an estimated 330,000 incarcerated people nationwide now have access to free prison or jail communication services, including phone calls, video calls and electronic messaging in some jurisdictions.

For decades, incarcerated people and their families often paid steep rates for phone calls and other communication services through contracts between correctional facilities and private telecom providers. In recent years, several states and local governments have moved to make those services free, arguing that regular family contact can improve rehabilitation and reduce recidivism.

The group examined six prison systems — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and the federal prison system — along with more than a dozen county jail systems, including facilities in Los Angeles, New York City and across Massachusetts.

The researchers found that the free communication policies reduced average costs by about 62% for state prison systems and 68% for jails after agencies negotiated contracts directly with providers. The report’s authors argue that finding could make free calls an appealing cost-saving strategy for states and local governments.

The free communication policies have generated nearly 600 million additional phone calls and 6.4 billion more minutes of connection between incarcerated people and their loved ones, according to the group’s estimates. In prisons included in the study, average daily call use per person increased from about 25 minutes to nearly 45 minutes after communication became free. In jails, daily usage more than doubled, from roughly 27 minutes to nearly 57 minutes a day.

The report also found the policies have saved incarcerated people and their families more than $622 million to date. Most of those savings flowed to Black and brown families, who are disproportionately affected by incarceration, according to the report.

Correctional staff at the facilities included in the study broadly supported the changes, according to the report, describing free communication as a tool that reduced tensions inside facilities and improved safety for both staff and incarcerated people.

The report also found that removing the cost of calls changed the nature of communication between incarcerated people and their families. Instead of limiting conversations to urgent or financial matters, people were more able to maintain regular contact, help care for children, coordinate housing and employment plans, and prepare for release.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Tennessee filed a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to block the state’s new congressional district map, citing intentional racial discrimination and First Amendment retaliation against Black voters. 

This marks the third lawsuit to challenge the redrawn map, which eliminated the state’s only majority-Democrat, majority-Black U.S. House district. On Thursday, the NAACP Tennessee Conference sued in state court. The Tennessee Democratic Party, four Democratic congressional candidates and four voters are together seeking to halt the map’s use in the 2026 election in a separate federal case.

The ACLU’s lawsuit seeks to stop the map from taking effect before the August primary election. 

“Black voters in Memphis did exactly what the Constitution empowers every American to do, which is to choose their representative,” ACLU of Tennessee Executive Director Miriam Nemeth said in a news release. “The legislature’s response was an effort to ensure that those votes never carry the same weight again. The law has a name for this, and it’s not redistricting, it is textbook First Amendment retaliation. And it is, at its heart, racism.”

The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of three Memphis voters, the Black Clergy Collaborative of Memphis, the Memphis A. Philip Randolph Institute and the Equity Alliance.

Gov. Bill Lee called a special legislative session to draw new U.S. House districts at President Donald Trump’s instruction after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened part of the Voting Rights Act. Members of the state legislature’s Republican supermajority repealed a long-standing Tennessee law that forbade mid-decade redistricting, passed the new map and approved new rules for the upcoming 2026 election in the span of three days.

Sen. John Stevens, a Huntington Republican and the new map’s state Senate sponsor, repeatedly said the districts were drawn to “maximize partisan advantage.”

Secretary of State Tre Hargett, Elections Coordinator Mark Goins and the members of the Tennessee Election Commission are named as defendants. Hargett’s office, which houses the Division of Elections, declined to comment on pending litigation.

The ACLU’s lawsuit says that process was “unprecedented and suspect,” noting that this marks the first time in modern history that the Tennessee General Assembly redistricted mid-decade. The map’s sponsors refused to answer “even basic questions about their own legislation or Tennessee’s demographics, such as who drew the map, what data was used, and whether Memphis was majority Black,” the lawsuit states. 

Before the Senate’s final vote on the map, Sen. London Lamar, a Memphis Democrat, asked Stevens, who attended law school at the University of Memphis, if he was aware that Memphis’ population is predominantly Black.

“I am not,” he said.

The lawsuit argues that the redistricting process is part of a pattern in the Tennessee Legislature, alleging “discriminatory motive” is clear in recent history. 

The filing points to the 2017 removal of $250,000 intended for Memphis’ bicentennial celebration after the city bypassed the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act by selling two parks so Confederate statues could be removed, the expulsion of two Black lawmakers in 2023, a 2026 law authorizing the takeover of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, and another 2026 law authorizing the state’s Attorney General to request audits from the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office and seek the replacement of the county’s elected district attorney, among other examples.

“Repeated, recent efforts by the White-dominated political faction controlling the General Assembly to target the Black-majority City of Memphis and strip Memphis of the ability to elect its own officials and set local policy, which leaders of the White-dominated political faction advanced based on anti-Black stereotypes,” the lawsuit states.

The plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgement that the May 2026 congressional map was passed with “discriminatory purpose in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments” and “unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment.” The 2022 congressional map should remain in effect for the 2026 election, the lawsuit says.

ACLU Lawsuit May 11 2026

This story was originally produced by Tennessee Lookout, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

WASHINGTON — The seventh effort to stop President Donald Trump’s military campaign in Iran until he obtains congressional approval failed Wednesday in the U.S. Senate.

The vote marked the first test for Senate Republicans’ support for a War Powers Resolution after the expiration of the statute’s 60-day period granted to the president for military operations.

The vote failed 49-51, though notably Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, flipped for the first time to support limiting Trump’s unfettered war on Iran. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, for a second time since April 30, voted in favor.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted yes, and Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., opposed the measure, as they both have done on previous votes.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., did not vote.

House lawmakers are expected to take up a similar War Powers Resolution as soon as Thursday.

The war, which Trump launched on Feb. 28 in conjunction with Israel, cost the lives of 13 American service members. The latest Pentagon figures reveal 404 service members were injured during Operation Epic Fury, the administration’s name for the conflict.

Ceasefire on ‘life support’

Despite a recent exchange of fire between Iran and the U.S. in the Strait of Hormuz, the administration maintains the operation is over, and claimed a 60-day clock on hostilities paused when the two countries agreed to a ceasefire in April. 

However, Trump told reporters Monday that any ceasefire between the two nations was on “massive life support.”

Iranian leaders have contested the existence of a ceasefire because of an ongoing U.S. Naval blockade on Iran’s ports.

Pentagon officials testified in both chambers of Congress Tuesday that the war to date has cost $29 billion, without accounting for Iran’s drone and missile damage to U.S. military installations in the region.

Hostilities ongoing, Dem says

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who sponsored the resolution, said Wednesday morning the Iran war has turned out to be “nothing like” the victory Trump promised.

“Both sides are still engaged in hostilities. And so I don’t accept that the 60-day clock is suspended,” Merkley said.

When asked Wednesday morning whether Republicans were whipping votes ahead of the War Powers Resolution, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that lawmakers should support the president while he’s overseas conducting high-stakes meetings with Chinese officials, including China’s leader Xi Jinping.

“He’s negotiating with the Chinese on a whole range of issues, some of which bear on national security, and I think it would be best if everybody hung together and supported the president,” Thune, R-S.D., said. “But we’ll see. … People have their own minds about some of these issues.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Kevin Warsh will officially take the lead at the Federal Reserve after U.S. senators voted Wednesday to confirm the economist and former central bank governor to replace Chair Jerome Powell.

Senators approved Warsh 54-45 nearly along party lines. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., broke ranks with his party to join Republicans in support of Warsh’s nomination. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., did not vote.

Warsh, of Florida, takes the helm after President Donald Trump spent most of his second term haranguing and threatening to fire Powell if he did not lower interest rates.

Trump is also tangled in litigation over his firing last summer of Fed Governor Lisa Cook. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing whether Trump’s dismissal of Cook exceeded his presidential authority.

Dropped investigation

Trump’s ire for Powell escalated into a Department of Justice investigation in January that even angered some in Trump’s own party.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who sits on the narrowly divided Senate Committee on Banking, House and Urban Affairs, withheld his support for Warsh’s nomination until the administration dropped its probe into Powell’s handling of a multiyear renovation of the Fed’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia scrapped the investigation on April 24, but said the Fed’s inspector general would continue to examine cost overruns. The administration had accused Powell of lying to Congress about the price of renovations.

A federal judge dismissed DOJ’s criminal subpoenas into the Fed and Powell in March, citing in his order “abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair.”

Powell’s term as chair expires Friday. He will stay on as a sitting governor on the central bank’s board.

Democratic critique 

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized Warsh on the Senate floor ahead of Wednesday’s vote. Van Hollen said Warsh has done a “180-degree flip” on inflation since his time of arguing for higher interest rates as a Fed board governor during the 2008 financial crisis. The Maryland senator said Warsh is now a “super dove on interest rates.”

“Markets need confidence that monetary policy decisions are being made on the basis of economic evidence, not on the basis of political pressure or convenience,” Van Hollen said.

“That is especially important now, as prices are rising too fast and President Trump is still demanding a big cut in interest rates,” he added.

Inflation data released Tuesday showed a 3.8% increase year over year, the highest jump since 2023.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• School layoffs. Ideastream’s Conor Morris reports, “Akron Public Schools approves 17 layoffs. More cuts are coming.”

Districts across Northeast Ohio have been cutting staff, reducing programs and closing school buildings in recent months as advocates say state funding has not kept up with rising costs. Critics, meanwhile, argue schools are due to cut back on expenses after enrollment declined due to birth rates and other factors. The majority of levies in Ohio and across the region also failed in the May 5 primary as residents deal with rising property taxes and increased costs of living.

• Young and old. Cleveland.com’s Kaitlin Durbin reports, “New SNAP work rules hitting older residents, former foster youth hardest in Cuyahoga County.”

Raven Wolfe has done everything expected of a young adult working toward full self-sufficiency: she went to college, she found a job and when that fell through, she found another job.

But unlike many young adults, the 24-year-old hasn’t had family members to fall back on to help cover groceries or order pizza during late-night study sessions. Instead, the former foster youth has largely relied on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to help feed herself while using her paychecks to cover rent and utilities.

Now, she is at risk of losing that support too.

• Hunger. Signal Ohio’s Celia Hack reports, “Cleveland food banks, pantries are seeing pandemic-level demand as SNAP enrollment drops and inflation grows.”

Need for food assistance in Cleveland and surrounding counties is reaching pandemic-level demand as residents are roiled by rising gas prices and fewer get federal food benefits.

The Greater Cleveland Food Bank served 404,000 people last year throughout Cuyahoga, Ashland, Ashtabula, Geauga, Lake and Richland Counties. That’s slightly more than it served in 2020, when the pandemic caused demand to spike. And so far this year, the food bank is on pace to surpass that number, said Kristin Warzocha, the CEO of the food bank.

• ICE’d out of graduation. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Patricia Gallagher Newberry reports, “Guatemalan teen has wish for high school graduation: release from ICE.”

An 18-year-old high school senior, Nelbi Chun De Leon, is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. De Leon, a Guatemala native seeking asylum, was arrested in Northern Kentucky on April 15.

His teacher and sister believe he was racially profiled when arrested for alleged traffic violations.

• Feud. The Columbus Dispatch’s Bethany Bruner reports, “Columbus FOP head’s ‘poverty pimp’ comment sparks community reaction.”

A feud between the heads of the Columbus NAACP and the local Fraternal Order of Police has intensified following the conviction of a former deputy.

Brian Steel of the FOP accused NAACP President Sean Walton of profiting from Casey Goodson Jr.’s death.

Walton, who represented the Goodson family, accused Steel of using divisive rhetoric and racist tropes.

• $20 million. Spectrum News’ Ryan Johnston reports, “Ohio launches statewide campaign to educate on marijuana risks.”

The Ohio Department of Commerce (ODOC) and the OneOhio Recovery Foundation are pushing for more statewide education about the risks of marijuana. The entities are funding a $20 million statewide campaign to better educate the public.

• Renewable energy? The Toledo Blade’s Danny Eldredge reports, “Ohio environmentalists say renewables should power data centers.”

The state of Ohio should make it easier for data centers to be powered with solar and wind, environmentalists with Save Ohio Parks said Monday.

“We’ve tried to propose a pragmatic route forward — one that will allow Ohio to leverage data center investment to support advanced manufacturing and a modern energy grid while protecting our environment and our public health,” said Rachel Kutzley, a governing board member of the nonprofit organization.

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WASHINGTON — The cost of the Iran war has increased to $29 billion to date, Pentagon officials told lawmakers in both chambers Tuesday.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Department of Defense acting comptroller Jules Hurst faced questions from House and Senate appropriators over several hours of testimony on the administration’s Pentagon budget request and the direction of the U.S. operation in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.

The hearings began just as the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest inflation figures that showed skyrocketing fuel costs drove overall inflation to the highest level since 2023.

Rep. Betty McCollum, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, said she remains skeptical of Pentagon spending, as it has lacked “sufficient transparency with gas prices and inflation numbers increasing.”

“The American people just want to afford the basic necessities for everyday life, but this administration is not doing anything to help them with the cost of living crisis,” the Minnesota lawmaker said.

Inflation

Similarly, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and serves as the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Armed Services, said “vague generalities are not helping this committee make critical judgments.”

“And the tradeoffs are significant. The deficit is increasing dramatically. We have to be conscious of that. We also have to be conscious (of) helping American families just get by, and inflation just hit 3.8% today,” Reed said.

The latest Consumer Price Index reached 3.8% over one year ago, according to the Department of Labor, up from 3.3% last month.

Fuel and energy costs largely drove the inflation increase, with gasoline up 28.4% compared to last year.

Oil and gas prices have soared since the U.S. joined Israel in launching strikes against Iran on Feb. 28. The protracted conflict has led to a near standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, a key maritime passageway off the coast of Iran where one-fifth of the world’s petroleum crossed prior to the war.

‘It comes with cost’

Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., questioned the Pentagon’s estimate that the war has cost $29 billion, calling it “suspiciously low.”

When pressed, Hurst said the figure does not include the cost of damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East. Iran launched retaliatory strikes in March on multiple American installations in the region, including a strike on a base in Kuwait that killed six U.S. troops.

“Your acting comptroller suggested that damage to U.S. facilities was not factored into that figure,” Murray said to Hegseth. “It is clear that there has been extensive damage to American military assets.”

The secretary said he could not divulge details on damage to U.S. assets.

“I think an important point is, considering what the president is undertaking, what is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon? And the fact that this president’s been willing to make a historic and courageous choice to confront that, it comes with cost. And we recognize that,” Hegseth said.

Congressional authorization

Despite continued tit-for-tat attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, Hegseth told lawmakers that a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is still in effect.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, asked Hegseth whether he believes President Donald Trump will need congressional authorization to continue military activity against the Islamic Republic.

“It doesn’t appear that hostilities have ended, and so the question to you is whether or not the administration has considered or had intended to seek an authorization of the use of military force from the Congress?” she asked.

Hegseth replied: “Senator, our view is that should the president make the decision to recommence that we would have all the authorities to do so.”

Efforts to pass a War Powers Resolution to rein in Trump’s military operations in Iran have failed multiple times in the the Republican-led Senate and House.

A vote is possible this week in the House on a bipartisan War Powers Resolution.

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri — Control of the U.S. House may run through a courtroom in Missouri.

In a red brick courthouse across the street from the state Capitol, the seven black-robed judges of the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday morning weighed the fate of a Republican gerrymander aimed at ousting U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a 11-term Democrat from Kansas City.

In the afternoon, they upheld the map.

Its opponents “failed to show the 2025 Map clearly and undoubtedly violates the requirements” of the state constitution, the court ruled hours after holding oral arguments.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s late April decision sharply curtailing the use of race in redistricting, much of the legal fight over gerrymandering is moving to state courts. The decision, Louisiana vs. Callais, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which limited states’ ability to divide districts where a majority of residents belong to a racial minority group.

Southern Republican states have rushed forward new maps over the past two weeks that take advantage of the landmark opinion, adding to a handful of others, including Missouri, that already drew new lines in recent months at President Donald Trump’s behest before the midterms elections this November. Another wave of gerrymanders across the rest of the country will likely follow next year ahead of the 2028 election.

State supreme courts may have the final word on some of the maps. Even if the maps don’t involve issues decided in Callais, like the challenge in Missouri, many states have constitutional or statutory provisions that curb gerrymandering and limit last-minute changes to elections — providing gerrymandering opponents with grounds to challenge new district boundaries.

With federal redistricting lawsuits increasingly difficult, state laws offer gerrymandering opponents another path. 

Thirty states have some form of a constitutional requirement for free elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And at least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, according to a 2024 review by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

“I think state courts are primarily going to be the place where future fights around these maps are playing out in a post-Callais landscape,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Legal challenges abound

The elevated importance of state courts was on full display Friday, when the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated an election in which voters narrowly approved a Democratic map. The decision leaves a new map in California as the party’s only successful response so far to the GOP redistricting onslaught. Democrats have made a longshot request to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Virginia ruling.

Lawsuits have already been filed in state courts over new maps in Florida and Louisiana. Alabama’s new map could also face a legal challenge in state court, even after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the gerrymander to take effect. 

At stake in these courtroom fights is which party will control the U.S. House over the next two years, earning the power to advance or thwart legislation. While Democrats remain generally favored to retake the chamber in the November midterm elections, Republicans will likely emerge from the gerrymandering war with at least a handful of seats secured.

Suddenly, every state supreme court decision — including over a single seat in Missouri — takes on greater significance.

Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which is helping challenge the Missouri map, told reporters on Monday that the state’s high court had a “spotlight on” it.

“Is the court going to do what it has done in the past in a nonpartisan way that is faithful to their own precedent,” she asked ahead of the decision. “Or are they going to roll over?”

Missouri case

The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly in September approved a map intended to leave the state with just one Democrat in Congress, in the St. Louis area. Kansas City was divided among three districts, splitting apart its Democratic-leaning and racially diverse core. 

The Missouri Supreme Court considered three challenges to the map. Two similar lawsuits argue that some of the congressional districts don’t follow the state constitution’s requirements that districts be as compact as possible.

A third lawsuit argues that the map shouldn’t be in effect for the 2026 election because opponents in December submitted more than 305,000 signatures seeking to force a statewide referendum vote on the lines. In the past, state officials have paused the implementation of measures subject to a referendum until a vote is held, but in this instance they say the new lines are active.

During Tuesday’s oral arguments, the judges sat almost entirely stone-faced as they listened. Only one judge asked a single question during arguments that stretched for more than an hour, offering no sense of how the court would rule.

“There is no such thing as a perfect map or a perfect district,” Missouri Principal Deputy Solicitor General Kathleen Hunker said.

Jonathan Hawley, an attorney representing Missouri voters who argue the referendum means the map isn’t in effect, said his case will decide whether the people of Missouri “still have a meaningful referendum.”

“The referendum right is the people’s veto,” Hawley said.

The Missouri Supreme Court hours later ruled against both challenges to the maps — allowing the new lines to be used this year.

“Had the drafters intended a referendum petition filing to automatically suspend any act of the General Assembly at issue in the referendum petition, they would have so stated,” the court’s opinion says.

Florida’s GOP gerrymander

Only two Southern states, Florida and Kentucky, allow courts to decide partisan gerrymandering cases.

Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, hasn’t taken up redistricting this year. But a Florida Supreme Court decision striking down a new map there would effectively offset Democrats’ loss at the Virginia Supreme Court.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a map passed by the state legislature during a special session on the same day as the Callais decision. The new congressional boundaries are designed to hand Republicans up to four additional seats.

Several voting rights groups have sued, alleging the map violates the Florida Constitution. A 2010 amendment approved by voters prohibits districts drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.

“Instead of abiding by this law, the Legislature is defying the will of voters and backing a map that was crafted entirely with partisan intent,” Simone Leeper, senior legal counsel for redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. 

The Campaign Legal Center and the UCLA Voting Rights Project have sued jointly over the map.

DeSantis’s office told state lawmakers ahead of this year’s special session that the 2010 amendment requires the state legislature to account for race when drawing districts — and that the provisions regarding race can’t be severed from the rest of the amendment. In effect, DeSantis contends the whole amendment must be thrown out.

The Florida governor’s pitch, coupled with the Callais decision, persuaded GOP lawmakers.

“I have a ton of comfort because the Callais decision came out,” Florida state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican, said. “I got to read it, and it perfectly summarizes exactly why we could, and should, change our 2022 maps.”

Map opponents’ chance of success at the Florida Supreme Court is unclear. The court as recently as 2015 blocked a congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, but it has moved to the right in the years since. Six of the seven current justices were appointed by DeSantis and the other was appointed by a different Republican governor.

“The composition of the Florida Supreme Court has changed dramatically since that earlier ruling,” Bannon, the Brennan Center expert, said. “So I think there are questions about will the court be as open to those arguments.”

Process challenges

In other Southern states, map opponents are turning to arguments beside partisan gerrymandering.

The Tennessee chapter of the NAACP has sued Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the state General Assembly to block a gerrymander passed last week from taking effect. The organization alleges Lee violated the state constitution in how he called a special session for a new map. 

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has urged a court to dismiss Lee and the legislature from lawsuit because they don’t conduct elections.

Alabama Democrats and voting rights groups are weighing a legal challenge to a new map that would focus on a 2022 amendment to the state constitution. The amendment requires election law changes to be made at least six months before a general election — a deadline of May 3 this year. Alabama’s redistricting special session began the next day.

In Louisiana, state lawmakers have not yet passed a new map after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s current lines as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the legislature had previously created a second majority-Black district. Lawmakers are expected to advance a map aimed at ousting one of the state’s two Democratic House members, who are both Black.

After the Callais decision, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s congressional primary elections although roughly 42,000 absentee ballots had already been cast. Lawsuits challenging the suspension have been filed in both federal and state court.

Too late to change?

In Missouri on Tuesday, lawyers for Republican state officials took the opposite approach, urging the state supreme court to keep the map in place for the 2026 election, even if the judges strike it down. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, told reporters afterward that preventing the state from using the map now would lead to confusion, even as 12 weeks remain before the primary election.

“It’ll be disarray for the people that have been going to town halls and listening to candidates,” Hoskins said. “It would be disarray for the candidates that are running and going out and meeting voters in their district. And it’d be disarray for the local election authorities and county clerks that have already started instituting” the new map.

Hoskins’ fears turned out to be unfounded, as the court upheld the map.

Cleaver, who is running for reelection, has said that his work ethic or commitment to voters won’t change regardless of his district boundaries. 

“If I have to serve the people who live just outside of Columbia and Jefferson City, then I’ll do that,” he said when he filed to run earlier this year.

Attorneys for the ACLU of Missouri, which supported challenges to the map, said it was unfair to Missouri residents for the state to create a problem and then argue it’s too late to change it. 

At a rally outside the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday, ACLU of Missouri Policy Director Tori Schafer expressed confidence the judges would side with map opponents — hours before they allowed the lines to move forward.

“But let me clear,” Schafer said, “democracy did not begin in a courtroom and it will not be saved in a courtroom.”

Florida Phoenix reporter Mitch Perry contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary on Tuesday became the latest member of President Donald Trump’s administration to leave their post this year. 

“I want to thank Dr. Marty Makary for having done a great job at the FDA. So much was accomplished under his leadership,” Trump wrote on social media. “He was a hard worker, who was respected by all, and will go on to have an outstanding career in Medicine. Kyle Diamantas, a very talented person, will be put in the Acting position.”

Diamantas was working as the deputy commissioner for food, leading the program that focuses on nutrition and food safety.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in a social media post that Makary “pushed forward critical reforms and helped advance our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”

“I also want to thank Kyle Diamantas for stepping in as Acting Commissioner — his leadership has already delivered remarkable wins on the MAHA food agenda, and I have full confidence in his continued work,” Kennedy added. “We have an outstanding team at FDA, and the work continues without pause. The search for a new Commissioner is already underway, and we will move forward with urgency.”

Makary’s resignation marks the fourth time a senior member of the Trump administration has either left or been forced out during the last few months. 

Kristi Noem was ousted as Homeland Security secretary in early March, moving to a different job as a special envoy. Pam Bondi resigned as attorney general in early April to move back to the private sector. And Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down as Labor secretary in late April, following scandals.

The Senate voted to confirm Makary to lead the FDA in March 2025, with Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois as well as Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire supporting him. 

Medication abortion

Makary’s decision to leave the FDA comes several months after anti-abortion organizations and some Republicans in Congress called for Trump to fire him over his record on access to medication abortion. 

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and Lila Rose, founder of Live Action, both released statements in December pressing for the FDA to restrict access to mifepristone. 

“The FDA needs a new commissioner who will immediately reinstate in-person dispensing as it existed under President Trump’s first term and immediately conduct a comprehensive study,” Dannenfelser wrote in a statement at the time. “Commissioner Makary is severely undermining President Trump and Vice President Vance’s pro-life credentials and their position that states should have the right to enact and enforce pro-life protections. Makary must go.”

Missouri U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley sent a letter to Makary the following day urging him to wrap up a review of the current prescribing guidelines for mifepristone. 

Their frustration followed a Bloomberg Law news article that said Makary didn’t want to release the results of the study until after November’s midterm elections, which will determine which political party controls Congress for the next two years.

WASHINGTON — Several Republican U.S. senators left a closed-door lunch with Secret Service Director Sean Curran on Tuesday saying they still have questions about how the agency would spend an additional $1 billion. 

“I’ve asked for a lot more data,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine. “If there are needs for new training ranges, for example, that should have been in the president’s budget.”

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, tucked the significant increase into a larger immigration enforcement bill, leading to concerns from some of his GOP colleagues and criticism from Democrats the money will go toward construction of a White House ballroom.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said after the lunch meeting the additional funding is predominantly for regular Secret Service activities, not to support the creation of a new ballroom.  

“The ballroom is being financed privately but the security associated with it represents about 20% of what this request was,” Thune said.

A breakdown of how the new funding would be used by Secret Service, obtained by States Newsroom, showed: 

• $220 million would go to “hardening” the East Wing Modernization Project with additional bulletproof glass, drone detection technologies and filtration systems designed to detect chemical or other contaminants. 
• $180 million would go toward construction of a “long overdue” White House visitor screening facility. 
• $175 million would bolster Secret Service training as well as its training facilities. 
• $175 million would help the agency “secure frequently visited venues facing heightened risk due to their public visibility and static nature.”
• $150 million would go to the branch of the Secret Service that focuses on drones, aircraft incursions, biological threats and “other emerging threats through investments in state-of-the-art technologies.”
• $100 million for “high-profile national events that require significant planning.”

Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott said he wants the Secret Service to share more information. 

“I think the bottom line is, people want to be supportive, right? They want security for the president, but they want more detail,” he said. 

The $1 billion for the Secret Service would be in addition to the $1.17 billion Republicans approved for the agency in their “big, beautiful” law as well as the agency’s annual funding level.

The White House released its budget request in early April, asking lawmakers to approve $3.5 billion for the Secret Service in an annual funding bill, a $36 million increase. 

Senators want more specifics

Utah Republican Sen. John Curtis said he wants “more specifics” from the administration in addition to what lawmakers saw during the lunch. 

South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said he’s asked for more information from the Secret Service about its needs. 

“They’re trying to make it very clear that what they’re talking about are the security improvements that should be included if we’re making major reconstruction within the White House itself,” he said. “So I think as more of the information begins to come out, I think people are going to feel a lot more comfortable with what they’re requesting.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said he supported the additional Secret Service funding, arguing that security at the White House can be complex.

“I’m fine with that,” he said. “So long as it’s used for security purposes.”

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she wanted to see a detailed breakdown of where the $1 billion would go before committing to supporting the move.

No details from Judiciary chair 

Grassley, who included the line item for “security adjustments and upgrades” for the East Wing Modernization Project in his panel’s immigration enforcement bill, didn’t share details before the lunch about how he landed on the $1 billion figure. 

“It was just kind of a consensus among all of us,” he said, later adding the agreement was among Senate GOP lawmakers, not with the White House.  

Grassley said he didn’t expect to know before the end of the week whether the Secret Service funding would stay in the $72 billion package that is intended to fund immigration activities for the next three years.

The Judiciary Committee bill and one written by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which will be combined in the coming days, would provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement with $38.175 billion, Customs and Border Protection with $26.02 billion, the secretary of Homeland Security’s office with $5 billion and the Department of Justice with $1.457 billion.

GOP leaders in Congress hope to approve the bill next week, sending it to President Donald Trump before the Memorial Day weekend break.

Opportunity for Dems

Senate floor debate on the package includes a marathon amendment voting session that will give Democrats, or even Republicans, the chance to hold up-or-down votes on the additional spending. 

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, said Democrats “will certainly be able to put our colleagues on record” about the additional Secret Service funding. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats will “fight this bill tooth and nail.”

“We’ll offer amendments and we’ll force Republicans to vote again and again on one simple question — are you with working families or are you with Trump’s ballroom,” he said. 

Thune said earlier in the day that Republicans “can’t have a lot of hiccups right now” and still send Trump the package before the president’s June 1 deadline.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services on April 30 notified 12,988 people that their federal nutrition assistance will end because they hadn’t complied with new requirements under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The law was passed last summer by congressional Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump.

The terminations come after 80,000 Ohioans lost benefits between the July passage of the law and January of this year. An advocacy group said it’s likely that older Ohioans are likely the hardest hit by the latest cuts.

The new requirements were imposed as part of a Trump law that cut federal nutrition and healthcare benefits by more than $1 trillion over 10 years while cutting taxes on the richest 1% of Americans by a similar amount. It also added more than $4 trillion to the federal deficit.

A large portion of the cuts to programs for the poor are being done through new work requirements.

While similar requirements for Medicaid don’t take effect until after the November midterm elections, the requirements to get benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, took effect on Feb. 1.

“Under the new law, adults ages 55 to 64 and parents with children 14-18, as well as veterans, homeless individuals, and individuals aging out of the foster system are no longer exempted from work requirements,” Tom Betti, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said in an email.

“These generally require working at least 80 hours per month or pursuing certain educational or training opportunities.”

About 1.4 million Ohioans receive benefits under SNAP, which is available to households with incomes below 130% of the federal poverty level. 

In Ohio, that’s less than $36,000. Benefits are just $6.28 per person, per day.

Even before the cuts, the benefits weren’t reaching many eligible residents.

In Ohio in 2023, SNAP benefits were going to 95.5% of people at 100% of the federal poverty level — even though everybody making 130% or less was eligible. 

But penetration of the benefit is declining further under the new requirements — which ostensibly address a problem of questionable existence. 

An analysis of census data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that in 2015, more than half of able-bodied adult SNAP recipients worked in the month they received benefits. And in 89% of households with children and a non-disabled adult, someone had worked in the previous two years. 

That’s not bad among people who tend to work low-wage jobs that often lack health benefits, sick days and paid leave, the analysis said.

Critics have said the work requirements weren’t imposed to put lazy people to work, but to achieve savings by hassling otherwise-eligible people off the system. Real-world experience seems to support that.

When Arkansas in 2018 experimented with Medicaid work requirements, it didn’t produce the outcome proponents said they wanted. The mandate created confusion, 18,000 residents lost coverage, and the state’s employment level was unchanged, the Urban Institute reported last year.

In Ohio, the new losses of food benefits are expected to land heaviest on people between 55 and 64, who previously were exempt from work requirements.

Policy Matters Ohio last week reported that half of the 1,350 people in Cuyahoga County losing benefits are over 55. That’s the only county it had data for, but Executive Director Hannah Halbert cited some reasons why older recipients are especially vulnerable.

“These federal changes include requiring Ohioans over the age of 54 to work, or qualify for poorly reasoned, narrow exemptions with criteria that may be difficult to prove,” she said in a written statement.

“That includes seniors ages 60-64, unless they are pregnant, living with another person under the age of 14 who is qualified for assistance, or an ‘Indian, Urban Indian, or California Indian.’“

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In Ohio and several other states around the country, lawmakers are weighing the potential benefits of a little-known psychedelic drug called ibogaine.

Prompted in large part by veterans seeking psychedelic-assisted treatment abroad, Republican lawmakers are looking to research its efficacy in treating post-traumatic stress and opioid addiction.

It’s an almost inconceivable turnaround for a party that spent decades aggressively pursuing the war on drugs.

“I think that, looking at the effect it has on veterans,” Ohio state Rep. Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County, said, “and just hearing people talk about how it helped them — it stopped them from committing suicide — I think that’s a message that Republicans are very passionate about.”

Pizzulli chairs the Ibogaine Treatment Study Committee and lobbied for its creation as part of last year’s budget.

Pizzulli represents Portsmouth which he described as “ground zero” for the opioid crisis in Ohio.

“It was the greatest crisis to ever happen to my community in our lifetime, and we’re still paying and recovering for it,” Pizzulli said.

“I made a promise to my constituency to be sure to find alternative methods to help fix and to research things that I think could potentially be helpful.”

Supporters of ibogaine treatment insist their effort is limited to clinical therapies in a controlled setting rather than opening the door to recreational use. And they point to initial studies that show promising results for the treatment.

Right now, a handful of states are pooling funds and working together to develop a treatment that could pass muster with the FDA.

The White House has blessed the effort and kicked in $50 million. Supporters who spoke Wednesday encouraged Ohio to participate.

Still, even some lawmakers who seem open to the approach remain skeptical about the state’s role in funding the effort.

Committee testimony

Initial studies suggest ibogaine rewires neural pathways in the brain and promotes regeneration. Researchers have already seen some effectiveness in treating opioid addiction and PTSD with ibogaine, but they think it might also have applications in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Geoffrey Lawrence from the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation emphasized its potential in treating opioid use disorder.

He noted current medication-assisted treatments, like methadone and buprenorphine, have low success rates in part because they require regular dosing.

The average person winds up going through treatment for opioid addiction several times before achieving long-term remission.

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“Ibogaine works differently,” Lawrence said. “It physically repairs the brain’s architecture and balance of neurotransmitters within a matter of days. As a result, patients are able to move beyond the symptoms of physical withdrawal and get a new lease on life.”

Logan Davidson serves as legislative director for Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. The group funds grants for veterans traveling abroad for ibogaine treatment. He stressed the conservative case for expanding access to the drug.

“The legislation we have advanced does not legalize, decriminalize or expand recreational use of any substance,” he said.

“It funds rigorous scientific research in controlled clinical settings, preserves FDA and DEA authority, demands accountability for every public dollar invested, and reflects a fundamental commitment to those who served.”

With roughly 17 veterans on average committing suicide each day, Davidson said any work at the state level to advance treatment is important.

“If there is an opportunity to accelerate an effective treatment through that process,” he said, “you can count the lives saves by the days shaved off that timeline.”

Who pays?

To that end, Lawrence explained Texas recently approved an ibogaine research program with the goal of developing a treatment that could make it through clinical trials.

And although Texas put forward $100 million split evenly between private and state dollars, that’s nowhere near enough.

And would you look at that — Ohio is set to receive about $2 billion in opioid settlement funds.

Lawrence said several states are already considering proposals to earmark some of those settlement dollars for the effort. Mississippi, for instance, committed $5 million in March.

“Using this money to create access to a drug that works effectively and immediately to help people turn their lives around could be the most impactful legacy of those funds,” Lawrence said.

But Ohio state Sen. Steve Huffman, R-Tipp City, pushed back.

“Is it the state’s job to do that?” he asked.

He noted Ohio put $5 million toward pediatric cancer research in the most recent budget, but it’s not common for state lawmakers to do so.

“Is it not the federal government’s job to financially do that to benefit all citizens?”

Huffman also asked why private industry isn’t leading the charge.

Americans for Ibogaine CEO Bryan Hubbard explained ibogaine isn’t patentable.

“There’s not the opportunity to create 6, 7, 800% rates of return on a medication that can essentially be replicated and produced by anyone,” he said. “The lack of patentability is a significant disincentive to the conventional Big Pharma model.”

He added that the current system of medication-assisted treatment for opioid abuse is often billed through Medicaid. That system serves some companies’ interests just fine, Hubbard said.

“We would be foolish to not recognize that there is a business model at work that is rooted in the daily administration of pharmacology,” he said.

If ibogaine treatment proves as successful as its supporters hope, Hubbard added, it could disrupt that approach to treatment.

Hubbard successfully lobbied the Trump administration to issue an executive order encouraging research into psychedelic-assisted treatments.

As part of that order, the president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to put at least $50 million toward state research efforts like the one Texas announced.

Hubbard encouraged state lawmakers to get on board.

“I hope that stalwart Ohio, part of the blue-collar backbone of America, will be among the states which turn the fulcrum of history to emancipate the mind, body and soul of very person who lives at the end of hope,” he said. “Ibogaine heals.”

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky.

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The number of antisemitic incidents decreased in Ohio last year, according to a new report. 

Ohio had 117 antisemitic incidents in 2025 — a decline from 233 in 2024 and 237 in 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League.  

Antisemitic incidents were down last year nationally. There were 6,274 antisemitic incidents last year in the United States — 33% lower than the 9,354 incidents tracked in 2024, according to the report. 

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Despite the overall decrease, it was still the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the ADL started tracking them in 1979. 

“I think this year it was really impressive to see the numbers finally come down a little bit,” said Kelly Fishman, regional director of ADL Ohio River Valley. 

“It’s not something we’ve seen for over a decade. Unfortunately, the numbers are still up pre-Oct. 7, 2023 levels.” 

There was a spike of antisemitic incidents after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, especially on college campuses. Hundreds of Ohio college students protested the Israel-Hamas war during spring 2024. 

Antisemitic incidents on college campuses decreased last year by 66%, going from 1,694 to 583, according to the report. 

“We know that hate doesn’t stop at one identity group, and it’s the same with anti-semitism,” Fishman said. “We see anti-semitic ideology often bleed into other identities, and universities took that really seriously because they saw that it wasn’t just their Jewish students who were being impacted.” 

Despite last year’s overall decrease, incidents on college campuses were almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021. 

There was an increase in physical assaults this past year — going from 196 in 2024 to 203 in 2025, according to the report. 

Assaults in Ohio went from none in 2024 to two in 2025, according to the report. 

“While we did see incidents go down, we saw the intensity of incidents increase so they were more likely violent, and they more likely involved a deadly weapon,” Fishman said.  “Unfortunately, I do think there is a bit of a correlation to the rhetoric that we’re seeing online manifest in real life.”

Antisemitic harassment went down 39% to 4,003 incidents and vandalism decreased by 21% to 2,068 incidents, according to the report. 

There were 825 incidents at non-Jewish K-12 schools last year, a slight dip from 860 in 2024, according to the report. 

Most of those incidents were antisemitic bullying or vandalizing classrooms with swastikas. 

“We are still seeing incidents with a swastika show up quite a bit in those K-12 spaces,” Fishman said.

Ohio Senate Bill 87 would codify the definition and examples of antisemitism into law, but those opposed to the bill said it would violate free speech and be used to protect speech about Israel.

The bill passed the Ohio Senate in March and is now in the Ohio House Judiciary Committee. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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When signs went up at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, following the Orwellian executive order issued by Donald Trump last year to sanitize the darker chapters of American history chronicled at more than 400 federal sites across the country, it was government thought-control come to life.

The citizenry would align with only politically approved, official truths. Shock gave way to censorship.

National Park Service rangers, steeped in the historical journey of a nation like no other, were pressured to deep-six painful truths about everything from slavery to Japanese American internment camps and focus on the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” 

Posted signs at the national park in northeast Ohio urged visitors to report “negative” content or information shared about our imperfect union or material that fell short of fawning over the country’s “beauty, grandeur, and abundance”   

But that executive order, to erase the discomfiting realities of America’s worst moments — lest they detract from the best — was buried in Trump’s flurry of unilateral directives (at least 259 EOs by last count), from dismantling USAID and other federal entities created by Congress to attacking constitutionally protected birthright citizenship.

News about National Park Service employees being forced to remove or alter hundreds of interpretive signs or exhibits across numerous national parks that explored topics deemed too “divisive” or “disparaging” by the Trump regime was just another dystopian flashpoint.

Government mandated accounts of history were to highlight the good and hide the bad.

That covered a lot of territory for fanciful course correction on documents detailing say, the historical effects of climate change, or turbulent labor history, the slaughter of Native Americans, and clearly enslavement to emancipation to the legacy of Jim Crow. 

Flagged items destined for removal included those that revealed key Civil Rights moments on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, or a reproduction of “The Scourged Back,” the infamous 1836 photo of former Louisiana slave Peter Gordon, with horrific raised scars from an old whipping, taken down at Fort Pulaski National Park in Georgia.

Even an exhibit that examined “the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation” was stripped from the walls of the President’s House Site in Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia.

I had an up-close visceral reaction to that partially empty exhibit last week.

Hoping to beat the crush of the 250th anniversary crowds traveling to the birthplace of American independence this summer, I set out to see the room where it happened.

To go where courageous idealists, forged in the Age of Enlightenment, gathered to conceive of a new, world-changing republic rooted in self-evident truths, inalienable rights, and the consent of the governed.

Enough ground-breaking liberty to convince Americans to put their lives on the line. To be a free people who refused to bow to tyrannical kings. Then and now.

My Philly pilgrimage to historical landmarks that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and early years of a fledgling democracy, taught a cynic like me that the spirit of the colonial era (that ended with the American Revolution) may yet save us.

To my surprise, I discovered the essence of open rebellion at the decimated slavery exhibit that once adorned the foundations of the former home of George Washington and John Adams.

The sign was salve for the soul.

First the backstory.

In January, without warning, National Park Service workers removed several panels from the open-air site that commemorated enslaved people who worked at the nation’s first executive mansion — following Trump’s edict to get rid of displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or promote “corrosive ideology.”

The twisted mandate to present only positive views of American history meant taking a crowbar to panels depicting “The Dirty Business of Slavery” in the making of a new nation.

But Philadelphia fought back.

“Donald Trump will take any opportunity to rewrite and whitewash our history — but he picked the wrong city and the wrong Commonwealth,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

A federal judge ordered the slavery exhibit restored in a scathing ruling that cited George Orwell’s “1984” novel — “as if the Ministry of Truth now existed” with its ‘Ignorance is Strength’ motto, “the court is asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”

But a later appeals court stayed full restoration of the exhibit and 15 panels of the original 30 — that documented the “hidden history” of slavery at the founding site, traced the lives of enslaved workers, the conditions they endured, the resistance they mounted, and ultimately, their paths to freedom—are conspicuously missing.

Yet anonymous keepers of the flame of historical truth have tacked up copies of some of the omitted panels along with related articles on bare exhibit walls to shed light on what Team Trump purged.

One hand-written sign said while the court battle is underway “ordinary citizens are exercising our First Amendment right of free speech to peacefully protest our government’s attempt to whitewash (literally) history.”

Grassroots groups give oral histories of slavery’s stain during the week in defiance of official suppression.

This story will be told.

The revolutionary zeal of we the people that once tore free of tyranny fights on.

Take inspiration from even small sprouts of passioned dissent that truly embody the American ideal.

I do. 

As appeals courts split on the constitutionality of mandatory detention for millions of immigrants, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to decide the matter.

A Trump administration policy threatening imprisonment without bond has been struck down by three appeals courts, which could soon be joined by a fourth, but upheld by two others. The conflicting orders mean the Supreme Court must straighten out the situation as immigrants now could face different fates in different states.

The new detention policy, implemented in a July 2025 memo, threatens millions of immigrants with imprisonment without bond if they crossed a border illegally to get into the United States, no matter how long ago or whether they’ve applied for asylum. Without bond means they must be detained while awaiting court action.

The policy is a key part of the Trump administration’s stated goal to get 1 million removals a year, including deportations and voluntary returns.

So far the pace is about half that, or roughly 460,000 for the current fiscal year, if the daily rate as of mid-April continues, according to an analysis by Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University.

This spring’s mixed appeals court rulings mean that in some states, detainees may be offered bond hearings and a chance to be released pending new court dates. In other states, people can now be held indefinitely.

Most recently, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee,  struck down the policy Monday, saying it “strains reason” to suggest Congress intended to put millions of people into immigration detention. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Alabama, Florida and Georgia, also struck it down last week, saying the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 does not give President Donald Trump “unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country.”

In April, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Connecticut, New York and Vermont, also struck down the policy, calling it “the broadest mass-detention-without-bond mandate in our Nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.”

Judges in another appeals court covering New England states, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, appeared skeptical of the policy in a hearing this month but have not yet ruled.

Meanwhile the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, encompassing Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, upheld the new policy, saying the status quo gives people living here illegally more rights than those at the border seeking legal admission.

“It seems strange to suggest that Congress would have preserved bond hearings exclusively for unlawful entrants,” the 5th Circuit ruling said. Those states have some of the largest detention centers in the country, often accepting transfers from other states. The cross-state transfers complicate legal cases attempting to free those detained there.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Arkansas and several Midwestern states, also upheld the Trump policy.

Conflicting appeals rulings like these, known as “circuit splits,” generally lead to a Supreme Court ruling to settle them, experts say.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a Stateline request for comment. Last July, a department spokesperson told The Associated Press that “President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe.”

The Trump administration policy flies in the face of decades of federal practice that let many immigrants stay free on bond while they pursue their court cases, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group.

“This has done a lot of damage to people who are caught in detention with a very low amount of due process,” Dojaquez-Torres said.

The policy has also flooded federal courts with petitions for release by people denied bond under the policy, she added. Thousands were filed each week from January through late April, compared with a few dozen a week last year before the policy was enacted, according to a ProPublica report.

The threat of indefinite detention can be an incentive for immigrants who have been arrested to agree to the administration’s option of “voluntary departure.”

This has done a lot of damage to people who are caught in detention with a very low amount of due process.

– Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres of the American Immigration Lawyers Association

Hannia Ortega, who left Oklahoma for her native Mexico at age 22 last fall to avoid the threat of detention, said the policy has “helped me not to regret leaving.”

“I’ve had the opportunity to meet people here who were deported and were not given the chance to fight their cases in front of a judge. One of the people I met was an Uber driver who was deported after 36 years in the states,” Ortega wrote in an email to Stateline.

Ortega won an award for leadership and good grades in a Tulsa high school, and said she also earned a community college degree there with the help of a private scholarship for students living in the country illegally.

She decided staying in the U.S. was too risky. Her parents brought her illegally as a 6-year-old and she did not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, a program with some deportation protections.

“It is scary and just speaks to how dangerous it has gotten for every single immigrant in the United States. I pray that better days are ahead for all but it seems unlikely any time soon,” Ortega wrote.

It’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants are threatened with indefinite detention, but of about 14.6 million undocumented residents, the Center for Migration Studies estimates, something like 5.5 million could have entered the country illegally, making them subject to the detention policy.

There are no recent estimates for the percentage, said Robert Warren, senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York. But in 2017 the center estimated 38% of unauthorized immigrants crossed the border illegally either by evading border patrol officers or surrendering to them and getting a court notice to fight deportation proceedings. Others overstayed legal visas and would not be subject to the new policy.

Mustafa Cetin, a New Jersey immigration attorney, said two of his clients from Turkey were denied bond despite a clean criminal record and active asylum cases in court. Both were arrested in October during routine check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he said.

Both won release on bond through federal court decisions, and one has already won an asylum case, he said. Both followed a familiar pattern of seeking asylum in 2023 and 2024.

“They say, ‘Don’t come in,’ but if you come in, they will process you (with a court appearance ticket),” Cetin said. “We’ve seen this play out for hundreds of thousands of people. Then, this administration, instead of trying to deal with those who come to the border, they decided to scare people away.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

A growing number of states are reexamining how the criminal legal system treats pregnant and postpartum women behind bars.

This year, legislators in at least five states, including Kentucky, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia, have considered legislation that would reshape how pregnant people are treated in jails and prisons. The measures vary, but some seek to expand eligibility for alternatives to incarceration during pregnancy, restrict or prohibit restraints during labor and delivery, and strengthen data and reporting requirements.

The Utah and Virginia bills were signed into law in March and April, respectively. In Utah, the new law restricts the shackling of pregnant and postpartum women, and requires state prisons and jails to track the number of pregnant people in their custody, as well as incarcerated mothers of children under 18.

In Virginia, one of the new laws requires correctional facilities to adopt lactation policies for pregnant and postpartum incarcerated people by December 2028. A separate new law allows courts to consider home or electronic incarceration programs for pregnant or postpartum women, with certain exceptions.

The Kentucky legislature adjourned for the year without passing a similar measure there, but the bills in Ohio and South Carolina are still under consideration. Ohio’s legislative session runs through the end of the year, while South Carolina’s continues until mid-May.

The latest legislative activity comes amid growing scrutiny of conditions faced by pregnant people in prisons and jails, as well as increased interest in nursery and community-based programs for mothers.

At least nine states have prison nursery programs, and about a handful of others are considering or developing similar programs.

In Wisconsin, the state Department of Corrections said in early April that the agency is still working to develop a program for incarcerated mothers and their newborns, but has faced challenges due to funding and facility capacity limits. 

The Justice-Involved Women and Children Collaborative at the University of Minnesota this spring launched what the group describes as the first comprehensive national database tracking state policies affecting pregnant people in custody.

The interactive tool documents more than 460 active policies across the country, including statutes on the use of restraints, access to abortion and access to menstrual products. 

The database fills a longstanding gap in information about how state systems regulate pregnancy in correctional settings. Policies vary widely not only from state to state, but sometimes among facilities within the same state. Federal data also is limited. The most recent national statistics on pregnant incarcerated people, which were released last year, reflect prison populations from 2023.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday overturned a 2023 ruling blocking use of a congressional map the courts ruled as racially discriminatory, which could open the way for Alabama to use new district lines this year.

The order from the nation’s highest court in the case, known collectively as Allen v. Milligan, came about a week before the state’s May 19 primaries and about a week and a half after the court significantly weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents racial discrimination in voting laws, in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais.

The ruling said plaintiffs challenging maps under Section 2 must show intentional discrimination to prevail.

As is common practice, the majority did not provide an opinion with Monday’s order.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in the order, joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying there is no reason to reconsider Alabama’s case.

“In addition to holding that Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan violates [Section] 2, the district court held, in one of the three cases before this Court, that Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama,” Sotomayor wrote. “That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais.”

The state currently uses a congressional map drawn by a special master appointed by a federal court in 2023, after the courts ruled a congressional map approved by the Alabama Legislature in 2021 discriminated against Black voters in the state by not giving them a full chance to select their preferred leaders. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2023, after delaying its implementation for over a year, past the 2022 midterms.

A new map drawn by the Legislature in 2023 was also ruled a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Under the current map, the 2nd Congressional District, currently represented by U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, has a Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) of about 49%, while the 7th Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, has a BVAP of about 52%.

Section 2 was considerably weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court in April in Louisiana v. Callais, which said plaintiffs challenging congressional maps had to prove intentional discrimination, a far higher bar than the previous standard of showing discriminatory effects.

“The Court’s decision interferes with the ongoing election and puts the validity of the votes of thousands of early voters into doubt,” said Deuel Ross, director of litigation at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which represented the plaintiffs in the Milligan case. “We will consider all of our options for protecting the rights of voters and reinstating the court ordered map.

A message seeking comment from Gov. Kay Ivey was left Monday evening. Marshall said federal courts had “punished” the state for drawing its own maps, but the Supreme Court “vindicated the state’s long held position.”

“For too long, unelected federal judges had more say over Alabama’s elections than Alabama’s voters. That ended today,” Marshall said in a video posted to social media. “My job in this office was to put the Legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans 7-0.”

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said in a statement Monday that the ruling was a “historic win” for Alabama.

“The May 19 primary election will proceed as scheduled,” the statement said. “My office will remain in close contact with the Governor’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office as this situation continues developing.”

Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, said in a statement Monday that the court ruling “has cleared the path for Alabama to hold free, open, and fair elections using the constitutional maps drawn by the Legislature rather than the unconstitutional maps forced upon the state by activist federal judges.”

“The Supreme Court’s action removes the thumb from the scale in legislative and congressional elections and allows Republicans to once again have a fair chance to compete,” the statement said.

Republicans control all statewide elected offices; both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats; five of its seven U.S. House seats; 76 of its 105 state House seats and 27 of its 35 Senate seats.

Kim Bailey, president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama, said Monday that the decision was “deeply disappointing and creates uncertainty and confusion for voters about the 2026 elections.”

“We encourage voters not to become disillusioned or discouraged,” the statement said. “Your vote matters. Your voice matters. And voter turnout will remain one of the most powerful tools we have to shape our future and defend representative democracy.”

‘An inextricable, permanent feature of this case’

“The Supreme Court has upended our election jurisprudence and done so in a way that severely, and systematically, disadvantages Black voters,” said Dev Wakeley, worker policy advocate with Alabama Arise. “The idea that this is a more level playing field, or that the safeguards against discrimination that we previously had until Callais were ready to be lifted, is absurd.”

The court Tuesday sent the case back to the three-judge panel with instructions to reconsider its ruling in light of the Callais ruling. Using the 2023 map would reduce the BVAP in the 7th Congressional District, represented by Sewell, to 50.6% and reduce the BVAP in the 2nd Congressional District, represented by Figures, to under 40%. That would likely throw the re-election of Figures into doubt.

Figures in a statement Monday called the court’s action “an incredibly unfortunate decision” and said the conservative justices “just literally substituted themselves in to be the defense lawyers for the state of Alabama.”

“I ran for this seat to be a voice for all of Alabama, and I’m not backing down from that mission now,” the statement said. “The fight must and will go on. Beyond the courts, we know what has to be done. We will organize, we will register, and we will turnout people in record numbers at the polls.”

Sewell in a statement Monday called the ruling “a stunning reversal” but said the decision would not be the final word.

“Black Alabamians have fought too hard and sacrificed too much to be dragged backwards by extremist politicians and an activist court,” the statement said. “Black voters make up nearly one-third of Alabama’s electorate and we deserve no less than two seats where we can select the candidate of our choice.”

Sotomayor noted that the court in Callais said its ruling in Allen v. Milligan — upholding a finding of racial discrimination in congressional maps — remained “good law.”

“This Court’s finding of racially discriminatory vote dilution is an inextricable, permanent feature of this case, and Alabama’s willful decision to respond by entrenching rather than remedying that dilution is, as the District Court correctly recognized, evidence of discriminatory intent,” Sotomayor wrote.

After the session

The Alabama Legislature last week approved two bills allowing new primaries to be held in districts that would be affected by the court overturning its prior orders. Lawmakers carried through with the process despite protests throughout the week that culminated with one person getting removed from the statehouse on the final day of the special session.

Plaintiffs in the Milligan case filed briefs on Monday said the injunction should stand because the remedial map currently in does not consider race.

“The district court never held that Section 2 required Alabama to adopt a majority-Black district or otherwise draw districts on the basis of voters’ race,” the plaintiffs said in their response. “The district court’s remedial plan is proof positive: it does not contain a second majority-Black district, and it was ‘prepared race-blind.’”

Opponents have said the primary laws passed by the Legislature last week  could be unconstitutional under a 2022 amendment that requires election law changes to be made no later than six months before an election. The date this year was May 3; the special session began on May 4. Republicans said last week the amendment applies to general elections and not primaries.

This is a breaking news story. Updated at 5:58 p.m. with additional background; at 6:11 p.m. with comment from Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman; at 6:25 p.m. with comments from Secretary of State Wes Allen and plaintiffs’ filings in the Milligan case; at 6:48 p.m. with comments from U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile; and at 7:11 p.m. with comments Attorney General Steve Marshall from a video posted to social media. Updated at 7″08 am to correct BVAP numbers in the 2nd and 7th Congressional Districts and add comment from U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham.

Allen v Milligan order May 12 2026

This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday extended a highly anticipated stay blocking an appellate court’s pause on telehealth abortion access until May 14.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approved medication-abortion regimen remains available via telehealth until then, following a week of uncertainty among abortion patients and providers.

“With this critical temporary administrative stay extended, we hope that some of the chaos and confusion inflicted on patients and providers last weekend will be abated,” said Evan Masingill, CEO of abortion-pill manufacturer GenBioPro, one of the defendants in the case, in a statement.

On May 4, the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling to reinstate the FDA’s in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone that the Biden administration officially lifted in 2023. Over the past week, several doctors groups submitted friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that cutting off access to mifepristone could harm many women seeking abortions and miscarriage management. Republican attorneys general from 23 states, meanwhile, urged the Supreme Court not to allow providers to send mifepristone through the mail. 

People in states with abortion bans or diminished abortion access continue to depend on abortion providers prescribing FDA’s approved mifepristone-misoprostol regimen through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.

According to new preliminary findings from the Society of Family Planning, telehealth abortion comprised 28% of all abortions at the end of 2025, an increase from 25% at the end of 2024.

Attorneys representing Louisiana have argued that in addition to undermining a state abortion ban, the federal rulemaking process allowing telehealth prescriptions of medication abortion was flawed.  

University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at the time the Biden-era rule was implemented, said the policy was well considered and based on evidence. 

“The 2023 update was the result of an incredibly careful, deliberate, time-consuming, painstaking process to make sure that they were following what the evidence was,” Bagenstos said. If, the plaintiffs were to prevail, he added, ending telehealth access to mifepristone nationwide would have “really harmful effects on women across the country, as well as really destabilizing effects on the drug approval system.” 

Louisiana’s lawsuit against mifepristone has nationwide implications and could threaten residents in states with abortion access and so-called abortion shield laws, such as Maryland. 

Regardless of what happens in this case, abortion providers told Stateline they are determined to continue providing telehealth abortions, though potentially without mifepristone. Dr. Angel Foster, a telehealth provider in Massachusetts, a shield law state, said in the past week, about 100 patients have requested pills for future use, compared with 34 in the entire month of April. She said constantly changing rules around abortion access followed by sensational news headlines continue to create confusion for people seeking termination or miscarriage management.

“I live and breathe abortion at this point, and I find it can be hard to keep up with the ever-changing legal environment and the way that things are getting framed and phrased,” Foster said. “When you’re a patient and what you see are just the headlines, and you’ve got to figure out what it means for you, it’s really complicated.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of Republican attorneys general who asked the Supreme Court to keep mifepristone from being prescribed via telehealth visits. It should be 23. 

Stateline reporter Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

On paper it makes little sense. Ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 7,000 miles from the United States, is restricted and gasoline prices in this country soar? 

The strait is the major export route for oil produced by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and Iran, according to the International Energy Agency. But since Feb. 28, when the Iran war began and the narrow passageway between Oman and Iran became a battleground, U.S. gasoline prices have soared — and the prices of consumer products and services are poised to jump as well. 

Most oil passing through the strait goes to Asian markets, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And due to greater domestic production, the U.S. is importing less crude oil from the Persian Gulf than it has in 40 years, EIA said in a March analysis.

So why are U.S. consumers paying so much more for gasoline? Globalization.

“Supply disruptions anywhere in the world can also affect prices everywhere in the world because we live in a global market,” explained Jeff Lenard, a vice president of the trade group National Association of Convenience Stores. “Oil and refined products like gasoline are traded on the commodities markets. Places with short supply are willing to pay more for product. That drives up the global price.”

Gas prices are tied to the global supply and demand for crude oil, meaning a disruption to the supply anywhere can have an effect everywhere, said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, which tracks gas prices.

“It’s because the price of oil is based on how much is available in total. Since oil from there is in short supply, the rest of the oil all around the world becomes more expensive,” De Haan said.

A gallon of regular gasoline Monday cost an average of $4.52, according to AAA up from $4.14 a month ago and $3.14 a year ago. Consumer prices overall were up 0.9% in March, and were averaging 3.3% higher over the past year.

Dissecting prices

While the Middle East oil disruption affects prices throughout the world, retail pump costs can vary dramatically from state to state across the U.S.

California’s average Monday was $6.16, the nation’s highest, AAA reported. Next were Washington, $5.76, and Hawaii, $5.65. The lowest averages were in Oklahoma, $3.95, Mississippi, $3.98 and Arkansas, $4.

The price of crude oil is the biggest part of the price consumers pay at the pump. EIA estimates that it makes up 51% of the retail cost. Distribution and marketing account for 11%, refining costs and profits 20% and federal and state taxes 18%.

That means dramatic changes in the price of crude have a huge impact on retail prices.

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The National Association of Convenience Stores estimates that each dollar the price of oil increases could be 2.4 cents a gallon at the pump.

Brent crude, the world benchmark, was $70.50 the day before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. Monday morning, it was more than $104.

The $34 a barrel increase since the war began would mean a 82-cent per gallon increase. 

Competition can keep prices from rising too much. No gas station wants to be an outlier projecting much higher prices than the one across the street.

Taxes and gasoline prices

There are other factors impacting gasoline prices, notably taxes that vary from state to state. 

The federal tax on gasoline has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. President Donald Trump said Monday he supports freezing the tax, though he offered no timeline. A suspension would need congressional approval, and Republican leaders have in the past been reluctant to embrace any pause.

While the average state tax is 33.55 cents a gallon, it varies widely. California’s taxes and fees are estimated at 70.9 cents a gallon, the nation’s highest. The lowest tax and fee rate is in Alaska, 9 cents a gallon.

California’s costs are also boosted by other factors, including its tough environmental standards. The state requires a special blend of gasoline that aims to help air quality.

“This fuel burns cleaner but is more expensive to produce because it requires more processing steps and expensive blending components,” EIA said.

Another reason for the higher prices is California’s reliance on in-state refineries. It doesn’t have as much proximity as other states to interstate supply pipelines

Ripple effects

About 20% of the world’s oil passed through the strait prior to the war. But reopening the strait would be unlikely to suddenly bring prices down.

“In complex supply chains, a disruption in one critical link, even if only briefly, can cascade through the system, well beyond the initial event,” Pinar Keskinocak, professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, said in an analysis. “As delays persist and compound, interconnected systems often take a long time to recover, rebalance, and return to normal.”

“I don’t expect there to be an open flooding of barrels just leaving the region,” said Jerome Dortmans, co-head of global oil and products trading in Goldman Sachs Global Banking & Markets, in an analysis.

And if the Iran crisis continues and the strait remains restricted, more price pain is probably ahead.

“A prolonged disruption of Middle East oil trade would create oil market conditions for which there is no historical precedent,” said a March report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday nominated Cameron Hamilton to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a former acting chief who was fired in 2025 shortly after he told a congressional panel FEMA should continue to exist.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will likely schedule a hearing in the coming weeks for Hamilton to testify about his goals for the agency as part of the confirmation process. 

The panel will then schedule a vote on whether to send his nomination to the floor, where Hamilton will need to secure approval from a majority of senators before he would become FEMA administrator. 

Taking on that role will be no easy task, especially since Trump has spoken repeatedly during his second administration about reducing the size and scope of the agency. 

“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June. “We’re moving it back to the states so the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”

The FEMA review council that Trump created to review the agency submitted its report last week recommending states shoulder more of the cost and responsibility of disaster relief.

Not ‘in the best interest’ to kill FEMA

The previous disconnect between Trump and Hamilton about whether FEMA should continue led to Hamilton being removed from his role leading the agency last year. 

Hamilton testified before a House panel in May 2025 that he personally did “not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

“Having said that, I’m not in a position to make decisions and impact outcomes on whether or not a determination, such as consequential as that, should be made,” he said at the time. “That is a conversation that should be had between the president of the United States and this governing body on identifying the exact ways and methodologies, in which, what is prudent for federal investment, and what is not.”

One day later he was ousted as the senior official performing the duties of the administrator at FEMA.

David Richardson has been the senior official performing the duties of FEMA administrator ever since. He was previously the assistant secretary of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at the Department of Homeland Security.

Podcast tell-all

Hamilton detailed his time leading FEMA on an episode of the “Disaster Tough” podcast that aired in September, saying he had developed a plan to address that the agency had “become too bureaucratic.”

“I was very clear and poignant that the cause of most of the problems in FEMA is because we keep putting too much crap in FEMA’s rucksack that never should have been there,” he said. 

Hamilton then spoke about the Shelter and Services Program, which provides grant funding to organizations that help to house, feed and assist migrants released by the Department of Homeland Security. 

He argued that isn’t an “emergency management requirement” and that “FEMA has become a functional multi-tool.”

Housing was a “prime example” of where another federal department, like Housing and Urban Development, could take over some of the tasks that FEMA currently handles, he said. 

“I said, we need to aggressively talk to HUD about them having a larger stakehold in that particular missions field because they are more uniquely suited,” he said. 

But Hamilton insisted he was not supportive of plans to completely eliminate the agency. 

“I was not hired to abolish FEMA. That was never a part of the conversation and that’s never something that I would have agreed with,” he said on the podcast. “And I was very clear, I wanted some reform. I wanted to cut wasteful spending. I wanted to downsize the agency. There’s no denying that. And I think most of those things could be done wisely and properly.”

Any offloading of responsibilities from the federal government to states, he said, would include “a gradual phasing out.”

“We needed to give the states some time to see what that entails and to respond accordingly,” he said. “Not just, ‘Hey, the water is now shut off. You’re on your own.’ That’s not wise. That’s not being a good partner.”

‘I wanted to choke some people’

Hamilton also discussed what happened before and after he testified in front of a House subcommittee a year ago, including that he was polygraphed in March.

“One of the more difficult things for me to deal with was when my character was being attacked, and when I was being accused of being a liar and a leaker, and I was polygraphed for it,” he said. “DHS requested that I be polygraphed. And they said in their statement, you know, my character, judgment, my stability, my ethics were all in question.” 

Asked by the podcast host if he wanted to put on his “Navy SEAL hat” when that was happening, Hamilton responded, “I wanted to choke some people, that’s for sure.”

Hamilton said he knew that he was about to be fired and that on the day he testified before Congress, officials “notified my security that my access was eliminated. So before the testimony, I knew it was coming, and I knew it was coming weeks in advance.” 

Later in the episode, Hamilton said he knew he would be asked during the hearing about Trump’s comments regarding FEMA and spoke with former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor to work through how best to answer the question. 

The two then “came to the agreement” that Hamilton would say, “it’s not in the best interest of the American people.” 

“I cannot get behind this position that abolishing FEMA is the answer,” he said. “There are so many things that we can do before we go that extreme and put the American people at what I believe to be extreme risk unnecessarily.”

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Battleground? WFMJ’s Leslie Huff reports, “Is Ohio emerging as a battleground state again? A political expert weighs in.”

Retired professor of political science from Baldwin Wallace University, Tom Sutton believes Ramaswamy’s close ties to President Donald Trump could become a political challenge depending on how national issues develop over the coming months.

On WFMJ Weekend Today, Sutton indicated that if the war overseas continues and prices keep rising, voters could begin to shift their focus toward economic concerns heading into the fall.

At the same time, Sutton says Acton could face hurdles of her own. “With Amy Acton, her healthcare background and as a doctor is an advantage, but there are many conservatives and independents who blame her for the restrictions of COVID during 2021 and so it could go either way,” Sutton said.

• Court allegations. The New Republic reports, “MAGA congressman accused of beating and burning his ex-wife.”

Trump-endorsed GOP Representative Max Miller has been accused of physically abusing his ex-wife Emily Moreno—daughter of GOP Senator Bernie Moreno—for years. Miller has denied the allegations.

Court filings obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that Emily is attempting to change their custody situation due to Miller’s “dangerous physical behavior” while their 2-year-old daughter was present. Moreno stated that Miller hit her during a custody exchange with their daughter in February, bruising Moreno’s arm and torso, as shown in photos obtained by the Daily Mail. Moreno also claims that Miller threw a pot of boiling water on her in 2024 while their daughter was present.

• New school levies rejected. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Karen Kasler reports, “District leaders digging into data after two-thirds of school levies fail across Ohio.”

A little over a third of school levies statewide passed in Tuesday’s primary, which is half of the passage rate last May. But school officials said even with homeowners’ concerns about rising property taxes, they don’t think the two-thirds failure rate shows a voter revolt on levies.

• Rural cops and ICE. The Ohio Newsroom’s Kendall Crawford reports, “Rural Ohio police signed up to help ICE. But staffing shortages limit their role.”

Unlike major cities, who have been rethinking cooperation with ICE, 10 rural Ohio police departments have signed voluntary 287(g) Task Force Model agreements. These Memorandums of Agreement (MOAs) allow rural police officers to aid in enforcing federal immigration law.

These kinds of partnerships have multiplied across the state since last year. Several county sheriffs have also inked agreements. A recent report from the ACLU found partnerships across 17 Ohio counties.

But, for departments in small villages, staffing challenges are limiting their participation.

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Attorneys fighting on behalf of public and private school funding will present arguments before an appellate court today, Tuesday, in a continued battle over Ohio’s private school voucher program.

A lawsuit that has been active since 2022 will now go before the 10th District Court of Appeals, as attorneys for more than 300 public school districts and advocates defend an attempt to force the state legislature to eliminate funding for the private school voucher program.

Public school advocates are against the state funding of private school vouchers, partly because they argue the program funding has overtaken that of public schools.

The Ohio Constitution includes a provision requiring the state to fund a single system of public schools. The lawsuit argues that the private voucher program represents an unconstitutional funding of a second system of education.

The lawsuit also argued that the program violated the equal protection clause in the constitution.

Schools including Cleveland Heights-University Heights, Columbus, Richmond Heights, Lima, and Barberton were signed on to the lawsuit, along with individuals and parents.

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The case landed in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, where Judge Jaiza Page said the legislature has “exceedingly broad powers” in its authority over the state’s education system, but the power does not come with “unlimited discretion.”

Supporters of private school vouchers argued that it is a scholarship program, and does not purport to be a “system” of schools, something Page didn’t buy in the June 2025 decision in which Page said the voucher program was unconstitutional.

Calling vouchers a scholarship program “is mere semantics” because the state pays schools directly, the judge wrote.

“Where EdChoice participating private schools are inexplicably receiving double the per-pupil state funding than public schools, it is difficult to say that EdChoice is simply a scholarship that follows and/or benefits the students, as opposed to a system that benefits private schools,” Page wrote in 2025.

The judge didn’t make a decision on one claim in the lawsuit: that the voucher program created “segregation” in public schools.

Page wrote that there was no evidence of “discriminatory intent,” and denied the request for a summary judgment from both sides of the lawsuit, meaning the claim is still active and awaiting a ruling in the Franklin County court.

Anticipating the rest of the lawsuit would be appealed, Page allowed the program to continue “in recognition that this decision may cause significant changes to school funding in Ohio.”

The parties in the suit have appealed, with the state and private school advocates appealing the rulings that the voucher program is unconstitutional, that it creates more than one “system of uncommon schools,” and that the direct payments from the state allows unconstitutional funding for religious schools.

Attorneys for private school parents maintain their argument that it is “a scholarship program, not a school-funding program,” according to appeals court documents.

“It therefore cannot run afoul of any prohibition against funding ‘uncommon schools,” wrote attorney Keith Neely, of the Institute for Justice, a DC-based law firm representing private school parents.

Public school advocates are cross-appealing, pushing back against the one ruling for which Page sided with the state.

Page ruled that there was no evidence that the voucher program in Ohio creates a disparity in education.

“While it seems inevitable that some Ohio students might be excluded from the EdChoice program by a participating private school, none of student plaintiffs have alleged or provided any evidence of denial of participation in the EdChoice program,” Page wrote.

Cleveland-based attorneys Maria Fair and Mark Wallach argued in a brief to the appellate court that “there is no valid governmental interest in funding private education, much less seeking parity between public and private resources.”

“The cycle never ends: The state insufficiently funds public schools, which are then forced to seek local tax levies or apply for private grants,” the attorneys wrote.

“The state then diverts more taxpayer dollars to private entities, justifying this by citing those very same levies and grants.”

The case is scheduled to go before the 10th District Court of Appeals on Tuesday morning.

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This November, Ohio’s two major parties are backing nominees for governor who’ve never held elective office before. The last time that happened on either side of the aisle was almost 100 years ago when Myers Y. Cooper represented the GOP in the 1928 election.

Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Democratic candidate Amy Acton both insist the contrast between them could not be greater, and for the most part they’re right. In both their priorities, biographies, and demeanor, they offer something very different to voters.

But absent a political record to draw on, voters are left with what the candidates actually say to distinguish them.

Billionaire businessman Ramaswamy emphasizes the success he’s had and hopes to share with Ohio voters.

Physician and public health leader Acton sees echoes of her own struggles as a child facing homelessness in Ohioans barely making rent.

The Ohio they’re promising, though? It looks pretty similar.

Both say they’ll reduce housing costs, health care costs, and taxes.

Ramaswamy’s “lower costs, bigger paychecks, better schools” slogan would fit comfortably on either candidate. Acton meanwhile says she’ll “make Ohio affordable again,” borrowing, intentionally or not, Donald Trump’s now ubiquitous MAGA construction.

Acton promises an Ohio where “everyone gets a fair shot,” while Ramaswamy commits to “revive this quaint idea that we call the American Dream.”

In their victory speeches following last week’s primary election the nominees zeroed in on the same core pocketbook concerns — the cost of housing, utilities, and taxes are all too high. And looking further down the road, voters worry schools aren’t delivering their kids the opportunity to get ahead.

But while the campaigns agree on the diagnosis, they offer very different cures.

Two Ohios

Ramaswamy framed much of victory speech around the Ohio voters could wake up to following November’s election.

Ohioans can wake up to lower utility bills because the state is producing more energy, as well as lower property taxes and income taxes “because it is your money, not the government’s.”

Ohio’s students would be doing better in reading and math because they’re not “indoctrinated with victimhood psychology,” and housing costs would be on the decline because Ramaswamy’s administration is “cutting the red tape.”

“We can wake up to an Ohio where we are more united because it is easier to connect with our fellow neighbors and to be united in a rising economic tide,” he said.

“That is one Ohio where we can wake up to in November, and that is where I will lead this state if you elect me this November.”

In contrast, he claimed if Acton is allowed to win businesses would flee “in droves,” taxes would increase by $21 billion, and public schools would continue “choking the success of our students.”

But a Democrat doesn’t need to be in charge for businesses to leave the state. Ramaswamy’s “anti-woke” investment firm Strive Enterprises moved from Columbus to Dallas, Texas in November 2024.

The purported tax increase Ramaswamy is alleging is driven by Acton’s promise to forgive medical debt. Ramaswamy’s campaign simply multiplied the average debt burden by the number of Ohioans with medical debt to arrive at a figure of $15 billion. But that’s not how Acton’s idea would work. Like a similar program in Illinois, the state purchases debt that has gone to collections for a tiny fraction of its face value. Illinois’ program wiped out more than $1.1 billion in debt with $10 million in state funding.

Vivek Ramaswamy promises largest property tax rollback in Ohio history, but big questions remain

In a statement, campaign spokesperson Evan Machan said, “This election offers Ohioans a clear choice: Liberal Amy Acton wants bigger government and more spending, which means higher taxes, while Vivek will fight for common sense policies that deliver lower costs, bigger paychecks, and better schools.”

But Ramaswamy has been vague about how he’d fund his positive vision of lower taxes, utility bills, and housing costs.

Think tank Innovation Ohio estimated reducing property taxes would cost $6.6 billion. Eliminating income taxes would be costly as well. In the 2025 fiscal year, they generated about $11 billion. With severance taxes already comparatively very low in Ohio, it’s unclear how the administration would promote energy production. If red tape is standing in the way of housing construction, it has gone unaddressed by nearly two decades of Republican leadership.

“It doesn’t add up”

On election night, Acton described a young couple from Clermont County that she’s talked about before on the campaign trail. They stretched to afford a home but then got hit with $300,000 in medical bills after having twins born premature.

“And then it’s the groceries going up, and it’s the gas — we all saw it go over five bucks, right? Her electric bill goes up. Her property taxes go up,” Acton said.

The family’s school district even cut back its kindergarten program, Acton added.

“This is what I am talking about,” she said. “They are doing every single thing right, but it doesn’t add up, and that is why we’re fighting to help make Ohio affordable again.”

To get there, Acton is proposing a working families tax cut — pairing an earned income tax credit with a child tax credit of up to $1,000. Acton’s campaign says a married couple with two kids earning $60,000 a year would get a $1,778 tax break. She also promises to “fully fund” public schools.

Ohio Democratic governor candidate Amy Acton makes pitch for addressing health care costs

The campaign isn’t explicit about how Acton plans to pay for those ideas, but there are hints.

In an emailed statement, the campaign noted state lawmakers have “put the wealthiest Ohioans and corporations first for far too long,” and Ohio’s private school voucher program “is sending billions of Ohioans’ tax dollars to fund private schools with no accountability.”

It’s unclear whether rolling back recent income tax cuts and the expansion of Ohio’s voucher program would accomplish everything Acton is promising, but they would be a start.

Acton criticized Ramaswamy as out of touch and out for himself. She pointed to past comments in which he called Medicare and Medicaid “mistakes,” downplayed affordability as a “buzzword,” and said businesses prize foreign and first generation workers because Americans “venerat(e) mediocrity over excellence.”

“My opponent says people are lazy and mediocre and not working hard enough,” Acton said. “Well, that is not the Ohioans that I know, and I know it’s not the Ohioans that you know. We are all working harder than ever.”

Libertarian agenda

Outside the major party face off is Libertarian candidate Don Kissick, who promises to “break the machine” and “restore freedom.”

His campaign supports both the amendment abolishing property taxes and another protecting same sex marriage, should the U.S. Supreme Court someday overturn its prior ruling.

Kissick wants to reduce government regulation of the marijuana industry, and strongly opposes Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “an unaccountable federal enforcement agency.”

He contends those who are here illegally should have a “straightforward and clear path” to legal status, and be required to make a good faith effort toward that goal.

Kissick’s platform seeks an end to what he terms “corporate bribery.”

“For so long,” the campaign states, “there have been corporate contributions coming to politicians from regulated monopolies in utilities, healthcare, telecom, and insurance.”

Kissick would also ban lawmakers from serving as lobbyists for five years after leaving office.

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky

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The future of public education in Ohio looks different depending on who wins the governor’s race. While Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton wants to fully fund public education so districts can improve, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said schools need to deliver results first.

On May 5, schools asked voters for more money. While many existing levies were renewed, across the board the majority of tax increase levies failed. Those districts face hard decisions.

“Kids having access to a really high-quality education that meets their needs — that is something we must be putting our taxpayer dollars to,” Acton said.

Schools are underfunded by nearly $3 billion over the next two years, according to the nonpartisan research group Policy Matters Ohio. Current school budgets are now experiencing cuts to jobs, classes, and athletics.

Some Republicans say that schools need to prove they deserve more money.

“We need to see an improvement of academic outcomes,” Ramaswamy said.

Ramaswamy proposed adding literacy requirements but wouldn’t answer our direct questions about school districts’ concerns over funding.

“How is the funding situation going to be rectified?” Ramaswamy was asked.

“Well, I want to talk about outcomes, and then what we need to get those outcomes, we’ll talk about for funding,” Ramaswamy said. “But it’s a school debate, school policy debate — (it) should not be an accounting debate.”

Schools argue that it’s a Catch-22 — when districts get less funding, they will perform worse and have less to offer. Lower-performing schools say they can’t get better without funding.

Ramaswamy then brought up an alternative.

“Somebody should not be trapped in a failing school district in the inner city of Cleveland if there’s a better option,” he said.

Ramaswamy has cheered the private school voucher program, known as EdChoice, which allows families to use taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private and religious schools. Lawmakers gave $2.5 billion for vouchers in the last state budget.

“Almost all of the vouchers have gone to kids already in private school,” Acton said.

Our investigations have shown, for years, that the vast majority of voucher-using families have always sent their kids to those schools and never used public schools.

Ohio law allows any family, no matter their income level, to get money.

We asked each candidate the same question — and had to ask multiple times —  in order to get answers.

“Should millionaires be able to get a private school voucher?” we asked Acton.

“We’ve got to get our head around what is happening with these vouchers,” she said, noting that there needs to be increased transparency and accountability. “We would certainly be looking at what would a reasonable income be to get extra support.”

Ramaswamy also avoided the question.

“I think that educational choice is important, and I’m not going to be responsive to slapstick kind of questions that are one-off gotchas,” he said.

Right now, hundreds of schools are in a legal battle with the state, arguing that EdChoice is unconstitutional and taking money from them.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Confusing ballot language could be the reason an Ohio county upheld a ban on renewable energy last week.

An early analysis of exit poll responses suggests a majority of voters likely meant to vote against Richland County’s ban on most large solar and wind projects for 11 of its 18 townships. But the ballot’s wording perplexed enough of them to have flipped the results.

That preliminary finding doesn’t change the outcome of the May 5 Richland County election. The final tally was 53% ​“yes” votes to keep the ban versus 47% ​“no” votes to axe it. But the poll sheds light on how people in the county really felt and can inform future work to roll back clean energy restrictions in Ohio and beyond.

Richland County’s referendum drew national attention because it was a rare case of residents pushing back against limits on solar and wind power. Such state and local restrictions have grown dramatically across the U.S. in recent years.

Meanwhile, skyrocketing demand for electricity is fueling an affordability crisis. Solar and wind, and batteries to store their energy, can generally come online more quickly than natural gas plants to meet some of that demand. Renewables also aren’t subject to fluctuating fuel costs, and they increase competition in electricity markets, which can rein in power prices.

Richland County’s three commissioners relied on a 2021 state law, Senate Bill 52, to pass the restrictions last July. Local residents who opposed the ban quickly began pushing to put it to a vote. SB 52 states that for any referendum against a county’s ban, its commissioners’ resolution needs a majority vote in favor to go into effect.

So, a ​“yes” vote means someone opposes the referendum effort to overturn the ban, while a ​“no” vote means the person backs the campaign to get rid of the ban.

“It’s confusing,” County Commissioner Cliff Mears told Canary Media in March when explaining his support against the referendum and for the ban.

Lots of voters may have been confused, too — about one in five across all political groups, according to early analysis of the exit surveys completed by 1,193 of the 23,042 people who voted on the issue. ​“When we model what the result would have looked like if everyone had voted their stated preference, the outcome flips,” to 54% wanting to reverse the ban and 46% wanting to keep it, said Graham Diedrich, a University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate who oversaw the exit polling at a dozen locations across Richland County.

“We anticipated this would be an issue,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, an organizing group that assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development with the ​“no” campaign. ​“I think we did the best we could on educating folks on this very complicated ballot language.”

Misunderstanding went beyond the ballot language, said Brian McPeek, one of the local leaders for the vote-no group. Those in favor of the ban suggested that repealing it would open the floodgates for projects to come into the area, McPeek said. In fact, the county would simply have returned to the prior system of accepting or rejecting most new solar and wind farms on a case-by-case basis before the projects head to the Ohio Power Siting Board for state permitting.

To further complicate matters, supporters of the renewable energy restrictions tried to cast the referendum effort as driven by outside interests, pointing to the New York headquarters for the NRDC Action Fund, which provided advertising for the campaign.

However, all decision-making for the campaign was handled by local leaders, stressed Bogin at Ohio Citizen Action. People from Ohio Citizen Action and the NRDC Action Fund identified their organizations at public town hall meetings. And Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development disclosed both groups clearly on its finance report. The finance report for the campaign to maintain the ban didn’t highlight its connections to cheerleaders for the natural gas industry, such as The Empowerment Alliance. Canary Media and the Energy and Policy Institute publicized those links only after connecting the dots from other public records and emails.

Bigger picture, Ohio’s preference for fossil fuels is causing renewable energy companies to take many projects elsewhere, said Michael Benson, president of the board of directors for Green Energy Ohio, an industry association. ​“We are losing out on the economic development potential solar provides to a state in desperate need of more energy for our grid.”

Lessons learned

The campaign against the ban did not explicitly stress renewable energy’s role in limiting climate change and its impacts. Yet concern about a warming planet seemed to factor into residents’ votes.

“Voters who were very worried about climate change backed repeal at 75%, while those not at all worried backed the ban at the same rate,” Diedrich said. Separate responses to a 2025 survey analyzed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 53% of people in Richland County said they were worried about climate change. That’s close to the 54% of exit-poll respondents whose answers suggested they opposed the ban.

Party affiliation was also a factor, with 72% of Republicans voting for the ban and 76% of Democrats voting against it. However, Richland County is home to far more Republicans, who outnumber Democrats by more than 3 to 1, meaning many must have voted against the ban in order for the final results to be so close.

“One of the biggest lessons from this campaign is just how important sustained local organizing and trusted community voices are in conversations around energy and land use,” Bogin said. In her view, the movement to reverse the ban in Richland County got as much support as it did ​“because the people making the case were neighbors talking to neighbors.” She remains hopeful that other efforts to reverse prohibitions on clean energy may succeed, and thinks the campaign could trigger a larger discussion at the statehouse about the hurdles SB 52 creates for renewables, which don’t apply to either fossil fuel or nuclear projects.

Although the campaign did not overturn the ban, Diedrich noted that 90% of survey respondents were aware of the renewables referendum before casting their ballot. To him, that shows the group effectively educated voters, despite the ​“structural” problem of the ballot wording.

McPeek said he still feels that most people will ultimately come out against blanket prohibitions on solar and wind when they get all the facts. And adoption of a prohibition against solar and wind does not mean it will go on forever.

“The question of who gets to decide what happens on private land in Richland County did not end tonight,” Morgan Carroll, another leader in the campaign against the ban, said in a statement after the vote was tallied on Election Day. ​“We will continue to stand with farmers and landowners who believe that right belongs to them, not to their government and certainly not to the fossil fuel industry.”

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Despite bipartisan efforts to expand federal student aid eligibility, Ohio imposes further restrictions on state-based funds. Male students must register for Selective Service to be eligible.

The requirement that men ages 18-25 to register for the draft during peacetime goes back to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. Although suspended in the mid-1970s, the law was reinstated under the Carter administration in 1980, linking it to eligibility for federal student aid.

For decades, male students verified their Selective Service registration on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to be eligible for federal student aid, such as the Federal Direct Loan and Pell Grant programs.

As part of a bipartisan effort to simplify the financial aid application process and expand eligibility, the Selective Service requirement was terminated in 2021 under the FAFSA Simplification Act. 

Ohio’s State-Level Requirements

Although the FAFSA technically serves as an application for federal student aid, it is also used by the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE) to help determine eligibility for state grants, especially those for students who demonstrate high financial need.

By extension, state-based aid programs that require FAFSA data have often adopted many of the baseline federal eligibility criteria, including the Selective Service registration requirement. 

However, after the FAFSA Simplification Act eliminated the registration requirement, new state aid regulations were established in 2023 under Ohio Revised Code 3345.32.

The law effectively states that male students, ages 18-26, who cannot provide documentation of Selective Service registration will be ineligible for state-based student aid. 

This legislation affects eligibility across merit-based programs, such as the Choose Ohio First and Governor’s Merit Scholarships; need-based aid, including the Ohio Work Ready Grant and Ohio College Opportunity Grant; and criterion-based programs like the Ohio War Orphans & Severely Disabled Veterans’ Children Scholarship, which supports children of deceased or disabled veterans.

In addition to affecting grant eligibility, the law includes a provision that penalizes students who fail to register, requiring them to pay considerably higher non-resident tuition rates at Ohio’s public universities. 

The Role of the Registration Requirement

Selective Service registration laws have long been a subject of public debate, with many civil rights organizations arguing that the male-only requirement is discriminatory.

Although no longer required for federal student aid recipients, the ODHE must uphold the state’s registration requirement, as stated in the department’s financial aid awarding guidelines.

However, in the context of financial aid, the issue extends well beyond a young man’s civic or legal responsibility to register and raises an ethical question: Should states impose gender-based eligibility requirements on funding that is otherwise awarded based on criteria such as merit or financial need? 

This dilemma calls into question the utility of Ohio’s Selective Service requirement.

The law appears only to create speed bumps in student access to much needed grant funding as college tuition rates continue to skyrocket.

Moreover, because it is no longer reported on the FAFSA, verifying Selective Service registration creates a considerable administrative burden for university aid administrators and additional steps for students to finalize financial aid.

Compared to their female counterparts, these students will likely experience processing delays as they jump through hoops to receive state grants on the basis of merit or financial need.

Simply put, gender inequality is embedded into Ohio’s financial aid awarding practices.

Looking Ahead

The U.S. Department of Education has stated its directive to shift more education responsibilities to the states, which carries implications for greater state involvement in financial aid administration as the Department downsizes.

The federal department’s objectives highlight the need for states to establish laws that promote equity and access in higher education.

Ohio is just one example of how states are doubling down on outdated policies that have been abandoned at the federal level.

Although recent federal legislation will automate Selective Service registration, the state’s approach to verification remains uncertain.

Given recent reports ranking Ohio 41st nationally in higher education, upholding laws that inhibit student access is flagrantly shortsighted. 

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Editor’s note: This is the second article in The 50 vs. The One, an occasional series examining the current fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country. Read the first article here.

President Donald Trump is wielding power in unprecedented ways to bring states to heel, marking a dark new chapter in the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Since taking office last year, Trump has punished Democratic-led states that anger him by withholding federal funding and slow-walking assistance. His administration has denied disaster aid to states whose governors are most critical of him, cut childcare and social services funding, launched investigations into blue states and poured immigration officers and military members into liberal cities.

Presidents and Congress have long leveraged federal power to influence the states, funding everything from welfare to highways. And presidents have long faced legal challenges from political adversaries.

But the Trump administration has begun wielding federal resources as a weapon against states, using dollars to cajole and threaten them into complying with its political agenda. Instead of working with Congress to nudge states, Trump is moving unilaterally, bypassing lawmakers and speaking plainly about punishing political rivals — defining an era in American history that scholars call “punitive federalism.”

“These guys are acting like autocrats and trying to destroy our democracy,” said Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Democrat. “And you have to understand the role that states play in this. There was a reason why our structure was set up the way it’s set up.”

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding on July 4, Stateline is exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the second in an occasional series examining the fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.

“States have rights, and thank God we have those rights and the ability to push back, because this Trump agenda is just destructive for our country,” Welch told Stateline. “And I believe we’re going to survive because of our federalism system.”

The tense political moment has underscored the role of states as Democratic leaders across the country file scores of lawsuits and introduce state legislation in attempts to check the president’s actions. State lawmakers have proposed hundreds of new measures that would limit law enforcement and immigration activities to push back against the White House. But Democratic states have had the most success in the courts, where dozens of federal policies have been challenged.

Since Trump took office last year, Illinois alone has led or joined more than 60 lawsuits against the administration. Those suits run the gamut, challenging deployment of the National Guard, immigration enforcement and the withholding of disaster funding. Democratic attorneys general say they are winning in most of the cases that have reached court decisions.

While some GOP members of Congress have balked at Trump’s targeting of blue states, many Republicans have stayed silent or defended Trump’s actions.

The White House did not respond to detailed questions for this story. In a statement, spokesperson Davis Ingle told Stateline that the administration “faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

But Trump’s punitive federalism strategy has left real people and communities scrambling to respond to White House moves.

Wendy Bobadilla worries she and other California childcare providers will be forced to close their doors if the Trump administration succeeds in blocking childcare funds to a handful of Democratic-led states.

“I don’t think he understands what he’s doing and how he’s affecting our children,” she told Stateline.

A more powerful executive branch

Federalism is a uniquely American system created by the framers of the Constitution that provides for power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states.

Since World War II, the federal government under Democratic and Republican presidents has grown in size and scope. But the White House itself has also accumulated more power, said Nicholas Jacobs, a professor of American government at Colby College in Maine.

“It’s not just that power has shifted from states to the federal government,” he said. “Power has shifted to the executive branch specifically and has become more raw in its overt partisan nature.”

Trump has embraced partisanship in new ways, moving beyond policy differences and into raw retaliation, Jacobs said.

“(President Barack) Obama had blue states and red states, and you can see that clearly, but he didn’t seem to openly celebrate the idea that he was penalizing red states and advancing the causes of blue states,” Jacobs said. “Donald Trump actually uses those terms.”

This increasing partisanship and Trump’s deep cuts to federal agencies has strained relationships between the federal government and states, which administer many federal policies and programs.

State and local governments need certainty to create, pay for and staff programs, said Marcia Howard, executive director of Federal Funds Information for States, which analyzes how federal policymaking affects states. But the Trump administration has injected uncertainty and tested the power of the executive by targeting funds that were explicitly appropriated by Congress, she said.

“They are unprecedented,” she said of the administration’s moves. “In general, an administration takes an appropriations bill at its word, and adheres to it.”

Court challenges

In California, Bobadilla worries about how the president’s actions may harm the hardworking families who rely on her for childcare.

In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was withholding $10 billion in childcare and other social services from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. The agency suggested fraud played a role in the decision, though the administration hasn’t offered evidence.

With part-time help, Bobadilla cares for about 14 children out of her home in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles. About a dozen of those kids’ families pay with the help of subsidy programs. The local poverty rate there exceeds regional, state and national averages.

With families commuting up to 90 minutes per day, Bobadilla sometimes opens as early as 4 a.m. and closes as late as 9:30 p.m. to accommodate working-class parents with fluctuating schedules.

Asked what she would tell the president, Bobadilla said, “I would tell him that I’m working very hard, that I’m not committing any fraud, that I wake up earlier than anybody that I know.”

States have rights, and thank God we have those rights and the ability to push back.

– Illinois House Speaker Emanuel ‘Chris’ Welch, a Democrat

A federal judge in late March ordered the Trump administration not to withhold the funds. A lawsuit over funding is ongoing.

It’s among more than 700 court cases challenging the administration.

“He has decided to break the law. He has decided to be blatant and brazen about it. He has decided to be consistent and frequent in his violations,” California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta told Stateline. “He did some of this in Trump 1.0, but the speed and volume of unlawful actions, particularly vis-à-vis the states, is unprecedented.”

Bonta acknowledged the decisions of past presidents have been challenged in courts.

“But it wasn’t every week, time after time,” he said. “This is a different thing entirely, like this is the plan. The plan is to break the law.”

Trump has maintained his strategy of holding hostage congressionally approved funding despite court losses, according to a New York Times analysis of nearly 200 legal cases. Bonta said more than half of the 60-plus cases his office has filed against the administration aim to retrieve funding that was already appropriated by Congress.

“It’s like he’s a repeat offender,” Bonta said. “He’s incorrigible.”

Democratic and Republican state attorneys general do work across party lines on some bipartisan issues, including consumer protection and artificial intelligence. But the resistance to Trump’s expansion of federal power has almost entirely come from the left.

“Honestly, what I think they think is that they’re secretly cheering for us,” Bonta said of his Republican colleagues.

He said Republican states still benefit when Democratic attorneys general win constitutional challenges or get courts to reverse the administration’s funding cuts to states.

“And they get the benefit without having to dare to challenge their dear leader,” Bonta said.

The Republican Attorneys General Association says its members have remained focused on reducing crime in their states during Trump’s second term.

“Tax paying, law abiding citizens in blue states across America are flooding into red states because people care about their safety and their children’s future,” Adam Piper, executive director of the association, said in a written statement. “Republican Attorneys General have always been both freedom’s front line and America’s last line of defense against radicals seeking to upend the rule of law and the American way.”

Disaster assistance

Last May, floods damaged hundreds of homes in Western Maryland, leaving behind more than $30 million in damages to roads, homes, businesses and utility systems in a swath of Republican-leaning counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied assistance for the floods, which hit a conservative region of a solidly liberal state.

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore — a Trump antagonist and potential presidential contender — noted that an aid request from neighboring West Virginia was approved, despite that conservative state submitting a lower amount of flood damages to the feds. He called Maryland’s denial “petty,” “partisan” and “deeply unfair” to the affected communities.

FEMA has said the law requires the agency to closely examine each disaster and the ability of local governments to respond. The agency told The Hill that Maryland’s flood “was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments to recover.”

It’s not just that power has shifted from states to the federal government. Power has shifted to the executive branch specifically and has become more raw in its overt partisan nature.

– Nicholas Jacobs, American government professor at Colby College

Chas Eby, deputy secretary at the Maryland Department of Emergency Management, said the state’s application to FEMA substantiated more than three times the amount of damages needed to qualify for the federal agency’s assistance.

“We were surprised,” he said, noting that a federal disaster declaration could have made funds available to directly aid in the repair of private property.

Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-led states at the highest rate in FEMA’s history, according to Politico, whose March analysis determined that it was three times harder for blue states to receive disaster aid than Republican-led states.

The Maryland denial not only affected those who suffered property damage, but it also has left the state uncertain about the future of disaster aid at large.

“Where we’ve relied on federal support in the past, this is a clear indicator that it may not be available in the future,” Eby said. “And therefore, how do we as state and local emergency managers meet the need? Because the expectations that I have to support disaster survivors and that Marylanders have in their government haven’t really changed.”

In the absence of federal support, Maryland awarded state disaster relief funding for the first time ever. But the initial funds — less than $500,000 — covered just a fraction of the tens of millions in documented needs, Eby said.

Allegany County, Maryland, which has an annual budget of about $150 million, has spent about $8 million so far to repair public infrastructure damaged in the floods, said county spokesperson Kati Kenney. None of that money has gone to individual households or businesses.

“That money was spent just to make it usable, not to make it back to par,” she said. “It was just like a Band-Aid.”

‘It’s not worse, it’s not better’

Many conservatives see the opposition from blue states as the latest pendulum swing of American politics rather than a more significant evolution in federal-state relationships.

“It’s not worse, it’s not better, it’s largely the same,” said Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh, a Republican.

Walsh said he viewed as more egregious the actions from the administration of President Joe Biden, who he said weaponized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in efforts to push coronavirus vaccinations.

The chair of the Washington State Republican Party, Walsh said many of the elected officials in his liberal state were “deep in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a frequent pejorative description of the president’s opponents. He said Democratic politicians were wasting millions in the courts to challenge Trump, who he said has not encroached on state authorities.

“The problem in Washington state is not that the Trump administration punishes blue cities or blue states,” he said. “The problem in Washington state is we’ve got people just burning taxpayer dollars so they can get a press release out and a headline.”

Still, Democratic-led states continue to push back on the administration.

State legislators have proposed more than 250 bills in response to federal policies, according to State Futures, a nonprofit coordinating hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states. Some of those bills seek to limit federal immigration enforcement in sensitive places such as schools and hospitals, and to allow individuals to sue federal law enforcement for possible constitutional violations.

Democratic state leaders are also emulating some of Trump’s own tactics.

“We have to play their game. And I think the people in my state are beginning to understand this,” said Maryland state Del. David Moon, the Democratic majority leader.

Moon pushed for legislation allowing the state to retaliate against the federal government for withholding funds. The new law, signed by Moore last month, allows the state to place liens on federal property in Maryland or withhold revenue payments to Washington if officials determine the feds are withholding congressionally approved funds in defiance of court decisions.

“It’s going to be weeks of discussion and monitoring with our lawyers and whatever before we do something drastic like that,” he said, noting the ultimate decisions will be left up to the governor. “But we have to be ready.”

Moon acknowledged that the law is “constitutionally dubious” as it’s unclear whether it will be upheld in the courts.

“And I think folks have to admit that,” he said. “But the way this bill works, really, is you take the Trump approach: that you do whatever the F you want within your layer of government.”

Moon said his concerns about the Trump era reach far beyond the usual state-federal spats.

“I think we’re in big trouble, and it’s part of why I am resorting to more unusual thinking and tactics,” he said. “We’re at the 250 mark in the republic. This is when empires fail, and we are having a vast empire decline moment.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. States Newsroom reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@statesnewsroom.com.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Tensions erupted Friday as Louisiana Republican state lawmakers presented new election maps to eliminate one or both of Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional districts.

Hundreds of people came to the State Capitol, filling several overflow rooms, to watch the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, which met to consider new U.S. House district boundaries and give the public a chance to comment. Lawmakers don’t plan to start voting on the maps until at least next week. 

Committee chairman Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen, called the hearing after Gov. Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency and suspended Louisiana’s upcoming U.S. House primary elections April 30, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state’s existing congressional map was  an unconstitutional racial gerrymander against white voters. 

Within minutes of the meeting coming to order, Sen. Gary Carter Jr., D-New Orleans, began questioning Kleinpeter about how many absentee ballots had already been cast in the May 16 U.S. House primaries and whether the votes would be counted.  

“Can you give the public certainty that those ballots will not be discarded?” Carter asked.

Kleinpeter said Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation to the governor, was the appropriate official to answer his question, but she was not in attendance. 

Carter continued his questioning, asking Kleinpeter if he was personally concerned about the status of his own ballot. 

“Have you voted yet?” Carter asked.

“I don’t have to answer that,” Kleinpeter responded. 

Surprised by the rapid-fire questions from the generally soft-spoken Carter, Kleinpeter called for a recess, which eased tensions enough for the meeting to resume after several minutes. 

Kleinpeter told Carter he would make sure the secretary of state was made aware of his questions, and that she or someone from her office would attend the committee’s next meeting, which is scheduled for Wednesday.

Nancy Landry has declined to answer questions related to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, explaining that the case, Callais v. Louisiana, is still in litigation after being returned to the federal district court where it originated. There are also ongoing legal challenges to the governor’s order to postpone the U.S. House primaries.

The rest of Friday’s hearing saw tempers flare among senators and protesters, with chants of “shut it down” heard from attendees watching from the Senate committee hall corridor and adjacent overflow rooms.

The discussion grew particularly heated when state Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, presented his congressional map that eliminates both majority-Black U.S. House districts. Morris, who is white, said his proposed boundaries don’t prevent a Black candidate from winning one of the state’s six seats. 

“I didn’t draw it with the intention to draw it 6-0,” Morris said. “I left race out of it … It’s intended to comply with the Supreme Court in Callais.”

Carter began a fiery exchange with Morris about legislation the West Monroe senator sponsored this session to eliminate the Orleans Parish clerk of criminal court and eliminate several of its judgeships. Gov. Jeff Landry signed the clerk bill into law, preventing exonerated “prison lawyer” Calvin Duncan, who is now an actual attorney, from assuming office. Morris’ measure paring back the Orleans judges’ roster awaits House consideration.  

“Let’s look at the totality of your work,” Carter told Morris. “Your work has eliminated the elected seat of an African American in the city of New Orleans. Your work has eliminated the political power of numerous elected officials in the city of New Orleans.”

Morris said his legislation is meant only to consolidate Orleans Parish’s dual court systems for civil and criminal cases, the only one of its kind in the state.

Carter and Morris began speaking over each other, prompting Kleinpeter to call another recess, which cut off the microphones and the Capitol’s live video feed. 

“Put my microphone back on!” Carter yelled. “He’s suggesting he’s not racist. I suggest we look at his work.”

“You are out of line,” Kleinpeter said.

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The sergeants-at-arms intervened, trying to calm the room as Carter and Morris both stood up to leave. As Morris walked away, he turned to the spectators seated behind him, all against his proposals, and said, “Y’all need to shut up.” 

“I was frustrated when, as I was trying to answer questions from committee members, people in the audience directly behind me were continuing to comment and talk loudly enough so that it was hard for me to concentrate and answer questions,” Morris said in a statement issued after the hearing.  

As Carter and Morris both left the committee room for another recess, the crowd in the hallway  chanted “let him speak,” referring to Carter. Sergeants-at-arms stood guard on each side of the committee room’s two sets of double doors, refusing to let anyone enter or exit. 

@wesleysmuller Protestors try to barge into Senate hearing on congressional redistricting #livehighlights #tiktoklive ♬ original sound – Wes Muller

One protester, Mike McClanahan, the NAACP’s state conference president, managed to open the door and try to enter, but guards physically forced him back into the hall and shut the doors.

McClanahan was eventually allowed into the room once the commotion had settled down. In a later interview, he said he just wanted to see what was going on because the live feed was cut off.

“This is the people’s house,” McClanahan said. “We have the right to hear every single thing, especially while the session’s going on in our house. So I was just trying to tell them, ‘Let the people speak. Let the people speak.’ Because we need to hear. We want to hear.”

Morris did not return to the hearing and did not respond to a phone call later Friday. 

In a meeting that went on for about six hours, the committee heard from several voting rights advocates. 

Before the second recess, all four of Louisiana’s Black congressmen, past and present, since the Reconstruction era spoke to the committee: current U.S. Reps. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans; Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge; and former Congressmen William Jefferson and Cedric Richmond.

Troy Carter’s 2nd District seat would be eliminated in the version of the map Kleinpeter has said lawmakers are most likely to advance. The congressman is the uncle of state Sen. Gary Carter.

“Today, here in Louisiana we’re being tested and the whole world is watching,” Troy Carter said. “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”

This story was originally produced by Louisiana Illuminator, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has chosen Public Safety Director Andy Wilson to replace Attorney General Dave Yost, who is stepping down from office in June.

“We are going to lead with energy and passion, and we’re going to serve each other,” Wilson said at the press conference.

Yost announced he would resign, effective June 7, to take a job with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit law firm.

Wilson has worked closely with DeWine for years.

He has been part of violence-reduction initiatives and the state’s expedited pardon project. In his role now, he oversees a $2.5 billion biannual budget.

Previously, he served as Clark County prosecutor and as an Ohio National Guard member.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost resigning to take private-sector job with nonprofit law firm

As an aside, Wilson and DeWine conducted an “undercover sting operation” together, sending in Wilson’s teenage nephew to buy low-level marijuana from a convenience store.

When Yost announced his resignation, we interviewed Wilson. The Safety Director thanked Yost for his years of public service.

“Attorney General Yost has dedicated his entire professional career to keeping people safe … wish him the best in everything that he’s going to do,” Wilson said.

Yost congratulated Wilson following the announcement.

“Governor DeWine’s appointment of Andy Wilson is a wise selection to ensure that the mission of the office and the great progress we’ve made in the past seven-plus years remains in steady hands,” Yost said in a statement. “As a former county prosecuting attorney, Andy understands law enforcement and the Attorney General’s Office. As director of the Department of Public Safety, our offices have frequently collaborated to keep Ohioans safe.”

Yost has served as attorney general since 2019. Prior to that, he was the state auditor.

His political dreams of being governor evaporated in 2025, when the state GOP endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy. He suspended his campaign soon after, and has since kept a low profile. He is the only statewide Republican besides Gov. Mike DeWine who is not currently running for office.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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WASHINGTON — The man who allegedly attacked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month pleaded not guilty Monday in federal court to four criminal charges, including attempting to assassinate the president of the United States.

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, appeared before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden in Washington, D.C., to be arraigned on charges that he tried to take the president’s life, which carries a possible life sentence, and that he assaulted a U.S. officer, transported a firearm and ammunition across state lines with intent to commit a felony and discharged a deadly weapon during a violent crime.

U.S. Department of Justice officials obtained the indictment on May 5.

Allen’s public defenders delivered the plea to McFadden as they stood on either side of Allen, who wore an orange jumpsuit and shackles and was accompanied by two law enforcement officers.

The arraignment comes just over two weeks after Allen allegedly rushed a U.S. Secret Service security checkpoint and fired a weapon one level above the ballroom where President Donald Trump, numerous Cabinet officials and thousands of other administration officials, journalists and lawmakers were attending the annual event.

Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Cabinet officials safely evacuated from the April 25 dinner.

A Secret Service agent, referred to in court documents as V.G., was hit in his protective vest by a bullet, but court documents do not specify who fired the shot. The agent was uninjured.

According to an affidavit signed April 27 by an FBI agent, Officer V.G. fired five rounds from his service weapon in Allen’s direction, but did not hit him.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, who attended the dinner, and government prosecutors argued Allen traveled across the country by train “armed to the teeth” and was willing to “commit a mass shooting inside a room full of the highest ranking officials in the U.S. government,” according to a memo filed prior to the superseding indictment. 

Prosecutors’ conflict of interest?

Allen’s federal public defenders argued Pirro and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should recuse themselves from the case to avoid a conflict of interest, as both have “made statements indicating that they were witnesses to events,” according to motion filed Thursday.

“These are individuals alleging they are victims,” defense attorney Eugene Ohm said in court Monday, adding it would be “wholly inappropriate for a victim … to be the individuals who are prosecuting.”

Additionally, Ohm said Blanche “has a very close relationship” with the alleged target of the crime — Trump. Blanche was Trump’s personal defense lawyer prior to the president appointing him to the Department of Justice.

Discovery questions

McFadden said the situation would be “very surprising” if either Blanche or Pirro were called to testify at trial, but Ohm said there could be a risk if prosecutors filed additional charges after discovery, the pretrial investigative stage of a prosecution.

Ohm said the defense has not yet been provided with any discovery. 

McFadden gave government prosecutors two weeks to respond to the defense’s request that Pirro and Blanche recuse themselves.

“It would be helpful to have some definitive view” on whether they “see themselves as victims,” McFadden told DOJ prosecutor Charles Jones.

McFadden scheduled the next hearing for June 29, by which time he told prosecutors he “will be hoping we’ve made substantial progress on discovery.”

As President Donald Trump tries to assert power over U.S. elections, he has raged on social media, cajoled Republican lawmakers and unleashed the Department of Justice on his political enemies.

What has he accomplished with all that effort? Not a lot.

Six months before the November midterm elections, the Trump administration’s quest to exercise authority over the contests and impose sweeping restrictions on voters has proved largely unsuccessful. The aggressive campaign — separate from Trump’s more effective foray into redistricting fights — has been stymied by the courts, rebuffed by many state election officials and opposed by key Republican senators.

“I think there’s many out there who are worried about the constant drumbeat of what the administration is trying to do and what they might do in the future. I hear this from voters, I hear this from election officials,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“And what I see is that there is a vast chasm between wanting to do something and trying to do something and actually successfully doing it.”

Months yet to go

Much could change between now and November, of course. 

Facing likely Republican losses in the midterms, election experts warn that Trump could lash out with increasingly brazen attempts to control elections. Or that the Justice Department will conduct more raids targeting election officials, like the FBI seizure of ballots from the 2020 presidential election from Fulton County, Georgia.

Democrats remain braced for federal election interference, especially the prospect of Trump deploying immigration enforcement agents or the military at polling locations — an action prohibited under federal law that some administration aides have nevertheless refused to flatly rule out.

But Trump’s record of achievement up to this point is poor.

The SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship, is stalled in the U.S. Senate despite Trump’s repeated demands for its passage. Federal courts blocked an executive order Trump signed last year that sought to impose a proof-of-citizenship rule unilaterally.

The Justice Department hasn’t secured a single court victory in the 30 lawsuits it’s filed to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over sensitive personal data on voters. A bipartisan group of state secretaries of state is fighting the Trump administration in court — only 13 Republican states have provided the information.

And an executive order signed in March that would limit voting by mail faces five federal lawsuits, with an initial courtroom showdown set for Thursday in Washington, D.C. Federal agencies have yet to finalize plans to implement the directive, which election law experts call illegal and unconstitutional.

“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World. We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social in late April.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told States Newsroom that Trump is committed “to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” 

Jackson named several federal laws that she said provide the Justice Department oversight over states’ election administration. She also noted Trump’s support for the SAVE America Act.

“Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable,” Jackson said in an email.

System under strain

Trump has placed the nation’s electoral system under immense stress before. 

After the 2020 election, the president and his allies worked to overturn the results, with Trump leaning on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes. The effort failed but it led to a mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Today, the system is holding but under strain. An analysis released Thursday by Issue One, a pro-democracy group, likened American elections to a resilient patient with a strong immune system. Yet the Trump administration, rather than boosting the body’s immunity, acts like a virus, it said.

“America’s election system’s immune system is not breaking, but it is actively fighting against the virus of democratic backsliding,” the analysis reads.

The group identified three safeguards it says are in critical condition: Congress, internal checks within the executive branch and the information ecosystem. 

Election officials have watched with particular concern as the Justice Department probes the 2020 election. Trump has long falsely asserted that the election was stolen and in January 2021 pressured the Georgia secretary of state to find him enough votes to overturn his loss in that state.

After the FBI obtained a warrant to seize 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, which encompasses Atlanta, in January 2026, the DOJ last month sent a subpoena for information on the county’s election workers. The subpoena demands the names, positions, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of election workers and poll volunteers who worked the 2020 general election.

Fulton County is fighting the subpoena in court. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the FBI doesn’t have to give the ballots back to the county, though he noted the seizure “was certainly not perfect.”

The Justice Department has also obtained a grand jury subpoena for election records in Arizona and demanded 2024 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit. And the FBI recently interviewed a Wisconsin election official about the 2020 election, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Local leaders have promised that they won’t bend to pressure from the Trump administration.

“This whole thing is designed to harass, intimidate and chill participation in our election process,” Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said in a video statement. “It’s not going to work, it’s not going to happen.”

Blue state action

Some states are pursuing additional safeguards against federal election interference. 

For example, New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that makes intentionally obstructing polling places a felony and prohibits the military or any armed federal personnel from polling locations.

The legislative push, concentrated in Democratic states, comes as Trump administration officials have sidestepped direct questions about whether troops or federal agents could be deployed to the polls.

“It’s yet another gotcha hypothetical,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a recent U.S. Senate hearing.

The Connecticut General Assembly passed legislation May 6 that imposes a 250-foot buffer zone around election sites where warrantless arrests and searches, use of force and ID checks by state or federal officers, including immigration agents, are banned. The measure also bans masked or concealed identities near polling places, among other provisions.

Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, a Democrat who chairs the state House Government Administration & Elections Committee, said that if nothing happens during this fall’s elections, “I’ll say, ‘Good, it worked.’” 

The goal of the bill isn’t to create confrontations between Connecticut law enforcement and federal forces, but to deter intimidation in the first place, he said.

“We have a responsibility to protect all of our residents, but especially our voters, related to our elections — to prevent these sorts of tools of threat and intimidation and terror from being used to shape our political life,” Blumenthal said in an interview.

Connecticut state Sen. Rob Sampson, a Republican, said that he wouldn’t support abuse from the federal government. But Democrats, he said, were spinning a false narrative of voter intimidation for political purposes and attempting to distract from weaknesses in election security.

“In the last few years, I don’t always trust the results,” Sampson said on the Senate floor. “Now, some people will go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re an election denier.’ I’m not saying that there’s tens of thousands of faulty or erroneous or fraudulent votes. I’m just saying that there’s definitely some.”

GOP elections bill stalled

Trump and Republicans in Congress say major action is needed to boost election confidence. 

At Trump’s urging, the U.S. House passed the SAVE America Act in February. In addition to requiring voters to show documents such as a passport or birth certificate that prove citizenship, the legislation also imposes ID requirements at the polls and would require states to bolster efforts to clean voter registration lists.

Polling suggests Americans support at least some of the bill’s provisions. A Politico poll conducted in April found 52% of Americans support requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, while 18% oppose. 

Democrats, election administration experts and some Republicans say the proposal would lead to chaos. Its provisions would take effect immediately, upending voting requirements potentially months or weeks before elections. Married women and others who have last names that don’t match their birth certificates could face additional obstacles registering to vote.

The SAVE America Act hasn’t advanced in the U.S. Senate. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican and major proponent of the bill, attempted to add the measure onto a budget bill in April, but the Senate rejected it, 48-50.

“This doesn’t mean Trump and his allies in Congress will stop,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group, said in a statement.

The Senate has since moved off the SAVE America Act and would need to hold a procedural vote to return to it. Whether that happens is in doubt, but Kennedy indicated to Punchbowl News that he intends to force another amendment vote later this month. His office didn’t respond to an email from States Newsroom seeking confirmation.

Postal Service 

Without the SAVE America Act, Trump’s options to legally restrict voting are limited. 

Trump signed an executive order in March attempting to limit the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery of ballots through the mail. The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” that include the names of voting-age citizens in each state — effectively creating a national voter list.

But the order has come under legal attack from Democratic groups, a coalition of Democratic states and multiple voting rights organizations. Its opponents are hopeful that federal judges will soon block the directive like they did a March 2025 order that included a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

“I don’t have confidence that the Trump administration or Donald Trump will refrain from trying to interfere with our elections,” Blumenthal said. “But I have great confidence that the American people will stand up against it.”

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Water. Cleveland Scene’s Mark Oprea reports, “Cleveland Agrees to $3 Million Settlement in Water Department Discrimination Lawsuit.”

In 2013, after a post-stroke spinal fracture, Albert Pickett, Jr. moved back into his childhood home in East Cleveland. But there was a problem. His mother had about $550 in overdue water bill payments.

On disability, Pickett was denied a payment plan with Cleveland Water. That same year, his water was shut off. He went six years without running water.

A 2019 class action lawsuit against the city detailed his case and those of others that argued residents were denied proper due process: Pickett, like hundreds of other Cleveland Water customers in the past six years, was never directed to the utility’s Water Review Board for a chance to dispute his shut off.

Cop cameras. The Dayton Daily News’ Sydney Dawes reports, “‘This doesn’t feel like public safety’: Daytonians call for removal of Flock cameras.”

Dozens of Dayton residents are calling on city leaders to cancel their contract with an automated license plate reader vendor, remove the cameras from the city, release all audit reports associated with the camera system and hold a public hearing where officials must present facts under oath, among other actions.

Make pollution great again. ProPublica reports, “Trump Exempted Some of the Nation’s Biggest Polluters From Air Quality Rules. All It Took Was an Email.”

The Trump administration has granted more than 180 polluting facilities nationwide a two-year pause on compliance with Clean Air Act rules.

The administration set up an email address through the Environmental Protection Agency where companies simply had to send an email to make their request.

The EPA’s air quality experts played no meaningful role in determining whether a facility should be handed an exemption to the rules, according to the agency.

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As electric bills and executive pay at utility and AI companies spike, Ohioans are questioning why they’re being forced to subsidize data centers.

A panel of economists surveyed on the issue last week said the subsidies are a bad idea. But they also said one of the strongest responses — banning construction of large new centers — is a bad idea, too.

The outsized power of utilities has been a sore spot in Ohio at least since 2020, when federal prosecutors revealed that Akron-based FirstEnergy had paid $61 million in bribes to get a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout. Far from stopping the scheme, Gov. Mike DeWine’s top regulator played a prominent role in drafting the corrupt bailout legislation.

Now grocery prices remain stubbornly high, gasoline prices are approaching $5, Ohioans are losing their healthcare, and the average cost to cool a home is projected to be $778 between June and September. 

Part of the increase in electricity prices can be attributed to spiking demand from data centers powering the mushrooming artificial intelligence industry.

Utilities are allowed to extract a profit from ratepayers on building projects intended to meet the spiking demand. That’s been good for stockholders — and highly profitable for the executives who run the companies.

For example, Bill Fehrman, CEO of Columbus-based AEP, was paid $37 million — or nearly $12,000 an hour — last year.

At the same time, the people who control the companies building many of the data centers — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — are among the richest in the world and are said to be in a race to control the AI market.

It might seem odd, but Ohioans are being forced to subsidize the centers even as the projects cause their electric bills to spike and the centers’ biggest product — artificial intelligence — is projected to put thousands of Ohioans out of work over the coming decades.

In January, Policy Matters Ohio estimated that some tax breaks for Google and Meta are so big they amount to taxpayers giving up $1 million for each job created. That money is being gifted to companies the top executives of which have a net worth of $1.8 billion and $215 billion, respectively.

Ohio economists are skeptical of the wisdom of those subsidies.

Fourteen were asked whether they agreed that “tax incentives for data centers are an efficient use of public funds to stimulate job growth in Ohio.” Ten disagreed, three were uncertain and just one agreed. 

In the comment section of the survey, Albert Sumell of Youngstown State University made the same point as several other economists — that after construction is complete, data centers create few jobs but lots of environmental impacts.

“I can’t think of a worse use of public funds than to incentivize data centers. They are associated with very few permanent jobs and high external costs,” he wrote.

Ejindu Ume of Miami University was the only economist who agreed that subsidies for data centers were a good idea. He did not explain his reasoning in the comment section of the survey.

As more than 200 data centers have exploded onto the landscape, some Ohioans are calling for a halt. A group is trying to gather 413,000 signatures to put a constitutional ban of large new centers on the November ballot.

Most of the economists surveyed by Scioto Analysis said the economic costs of such a ban would outweigh the benefits. Seven said they would, two said they would not, and five were uncertain.

Michael Jones of the University of Cincinnati said that from an economic standpoint, a ban is too heavy-handed. But he added that the companies should pay for their own “externalities” — the environmental and other costs they create.

“It should be up to the market to pick winners and losers; and Ohio should not be targeting a particular industry,” he wrote. “If there are concerns about energy use or land use, then data centers should internalize and pay the real costs of their deployment.”

David Brasington, also of the University of Cincinnati, said it comes down to the nation’s safety.

“AI is a national security issue,” he wrote. “We need to out-compete rival nations in AI, and allowing data centers is critical for that goal. How would it be to wake up one day and find a foreign nation had broken through our cybersecurity firewalls?”

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The organizers leading an effort to abolish Ohio property taxes are coming to a crossroads. By July 1, the campaign needs to decide if it wants to roll the dice and attempt to get on this year’s ballot or keep its powder dry and wait for another election down the road.

Last month, Ax Ohio Tax President Brian Massie announced they’ve collected 305,000 signatures so far. That puts them on track to clear the statutory minimum for the ballot, but doesn’t account for rejections. To feel confident, the campaign really wants at least 620,000 signatures for their submission.

They’re not on track for that.

Organizers can keep gathering signatures for as long as they want. Once they submit them, though, that’s pretty much it. If the campaign falls short there’s a brief, 10-day window to make up the difference. If they can’t, any subsequent effort to make the ballot would have to start over from square one.

“I want the citizens of Ohio to hear this,” Massie said. “They can rest assured that we will not stop until we get this amendment on the ballot.”

He said the campaign will announce its plans sometime in the middle of June.

Good news, bad news

Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer sees citizen-initiated ballot measures as a central part of our democracy, and she’s been personally involved in several initiative campaigns. While Turcer acknowledged it can be “challenging” to wish the anti-tax campaign well, she said the point of direct democracy is that’s it’s open to everybody.

And there are some factors working in the campaign’s favor.

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“We are going into really good signature gathering weather,” Turcer said.

“We’re going into farmers markets and parades, Memorial Day weekend,” she rattled off. “I mean, you can start to think about the different festivals and different ways that people are out and about outside, which makes signature collection easier than, say, January.”

Their signature total puts them in “decent shape,” Turcer said. It also doesn’t hurt that the pitch is straightforward: do you want to keep your property taxes or get rid of them?

But the campaign faces significant challenges, too.

Every ballot measure sees a vast number of signatures rejected over clerical errors, Turcer said. Information could be illegible or incorrect. Petition circulators could mix up signatures from multiple counties, potentially spoiling otherwise valid signatures. And the process of physically scanning all those documents for submission takes a really long time.

“In many ways, this is about, can I submit the appropriate paperwork in a really specific way, in a way I have never done before?” she said. “And it’s easy to get caught up in the hurdles.”

What’s more, the petitions themselves have a kind of shelf life. When elections officials go to validate signatures they’re comparing the petition to current information — not whatever was current at the moment the signature was made.

Ohio’s governor, lawmakers, and grassroots organizers are all wrestling over property tax reform

“It’s a good kind of rule of thumb,” Turcer said, “(to) say 20%, 25% of the signatures that we collected a year ago could no longer reflect where the voter now lives, and so they will not count in the total.”

And that means there are risks in submitting this year, and risks in waiting until next year, too. Turcer said only the campaign knows the quality of the signatures they’ve collected so far, and she’d be shooting for a similar threshold to the one the Ax Ohio Tax campaign has in mind.

Turcer could imagine going forward with less of a cushion — but not much less.

“At least over 600 (thousand),” Turcer said, as the absolute minimum she’d be willing to submit.

Campaign check-in

About a week after Massie’s announcement, Les Carrier joined a handful of other organizers to gather signatures at a community event in Hilliard. The former city councilman called out passersby by name and had a minute to chat with every one of them.

Carrier seemed energized by Massie’s update. Three hundred thousand signatures isn’t halfway from their goal, it’s halfway there. He used terms like “skyrocketing” or “snowballing” to describe interest in the campaign.

To him, the math is pretty simple.

“A $160,000 home in Old Hilliard now is worth $300 (thousand),” Carrier said. “Their taxes have doubled. Their income hasn’t. So, I mean, something’s got to give.”

Counterintuitively, he said enthusiasm began growing after Gov. DeWine’s administration warned eliminating the roughly $24 billion property taxes generates each year would lead to dramatic increases in sales or income taxes.

Carrier downplayed the loss in revenue — “Chicken Little is what I called it” — and said making up the difference would be simpler and fairer with consumption taxes.

“Everybody consumes at a certain level, everybody pays, and it broadens the tax base from which everything’s drawn,” Carrier said. In contrast, with property taxes, “what you’ve done is you’ve narrowed it down to those that have worked to build up equity and build up home valuation, and now they’re being punished for it.”

Consumption taxes, like sales or value-added taxes, are regressive, meaning they fall more heavily on those with lower incomes because those households spend a greater share of their income to get by.

And although Carrier thinks the solution is simple, that doesn’t mean everyone is on board. Massie, for instance, was blunt about his plans for replacing revenue. “We’re not going to,” he said, insisting instead that lawmakers need to cut spending, and “start a DOGE” in Ohio, referring to Elon Musk’s failed federal cost-cutting effort.

Carrier remains optimistic about the campaign’s chances of making the ballot this year, but he has no problem with waiting.

“I think we could make it for this year,” Carrier said. “But my personal opinion, I haven’t talked to Brian (Massie) about it yet, is if we don’t make 600 (thousand), we just keep on charging into next year.”

Andrea Beeson and Suzi Remick signed the petition after speaking to Carrier, and both expressed concerns about property taxes pushing people out of their homes.

“I feel bad for the aging people,” Remick said. “If they have to lose their homes, that would be horrible.”

Ohio farms get a significant property tax break because their valuation is based on agricultural use, but Beeson still worries about farmers near her home in Madison County getting priced out.

“Who do they sell to? Developers that can pay more than another farmer,” she said. “And now we’re getting houses and houses and houses and our schools can’t hold them all.”

Beeson and Remick said they’re still weighing whether it’s a good idea to abolish property taxes. They signed the petition because they want to give the campaign a chance to convince them and then have the chance to decide if and when the measure appears on the ballot.

“Right now, they don’t know how it would work, where the money would come from for schools and everything else,” Beeson said. “I want that option, and I want to see how they would do it.”

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky.

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Franklin County’s annual Point-in-Time Count identified 2,587 people experiencing homelessness — a 1.2% increase from 2025. 

Sheltered homelessness decreased by 8% with 165 fewer people in emergency shelters and transitional housing, but unsheltered homelessness increased 43% — from 455 in 2025 to 651 in 2026, according to the point-in-time count. 

“We’re seeing more people forced to live outside in encampments and cars and places that are never meant for human habitation,” said Columbus City Councilmember Tiara Ross. 

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Point-in-Time counts are one-night estimates of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness that are conducted nationwide in partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Franklin County’s count took place in January. 

“If people are outside on our cold days, then what we suspect is that that is an under count,” said Community Shelter Board President and CEO Shannon TL Isom. 

“There’s even more people that are outside on our cold days.” 

Last year’s point-in-time count took place during a storm, which Isom said is part of the reason why there was an increase in unsheltered homelessness this year. 

“When we were counting, it was during a winter storm last year … and we were able, because of hotels and motels, to have people gathered, so we ended up counting them as sheltered when, otherwise, like this year, they would have been outside,” Isom said.

Franklin County is projected to see a 68% increase in unsheltered homelessness by 2028. 

“We know from both local data and predictive modeling that without additional investment, you will see this trend continue … and that’s a hard truth that we have to sit and grapple with,” Ross said. 

Chronic homelessness increased 16.4% and people with severe mental illness experiencing homelessness increased 42%, according to the report. 

People experiencing homelessness with  HIV/AIDS increased 75%, people with chronic substance use experiencing homelessness increased 53%, and survivors of domestic violence  experiencing homelessness increased 32%, according to the report. 

Family homelessness went down 3.8%, parenting youth homelessness decreased by 40% and no parenting youth were identified as unsheltered, according to the report. 

“You will not see children in Franklin County ever unsheltered, we immediately have flex space for that,” Isom said. 

There were 96 veterans experiencing homelessness, one less than last year, according to the report. 

A little more than half of people experiencing homelessness were men (58%), 41% were women, and 1% is non-binary. 54% of people experiencing homelessness were Black, 33% were white, 9% were multi-racial, and 1% were Hispanic, according to the report.  

Franklin County is Ohio’s most populous county with 1,356,303 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

“There is no debate that our city is on an upward trajectory, but that does not mean that everybody is able to participate in that upward trajectory,” said Michael Wilkos, chair of the Columbus and Franklin County Continuum of Care. 

People living in Franklin County need to be making at least $27.79 an hour working a full-time job to be able to afford a “modest” two-bedroom apartment — more than $5 higher than the state average, according to a report last year by Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The Community Shelter Board and the Columbus and Franklin County Continuum of Care recommend expanding housing-focused system-funded street outreach. Franklin County currently has four outreach workers. 

They want to scale up hotel options as a bridge toward permanent housing. 44 people living outside moved into permanent housing from Dec. 1, 2025 to March 31 with Winter Warming Center funding. 

Hotel use year-round would permanently house 200-300 unsheltered people experiencing homelessness. 

“It is imperative that we have housing as the solution, not just sheltering,” Isom said. “People in this community should be able to skip over a shelter bed to get into housing.”

The Community Shelter Board and the Continuum of Care wants to get three hotel-based non-congregate shelter sites, which could reduce family homelessness by 48% by 2028. 

“We know that diversion programs that prevent people from entering shelter in the first place works,” Ross said. “We know that rapid re-housing moves individuals and families quickly back into stable housing works. We know that permanent, supportive housing that pairs housing with services for those with highest needs work.” 

There were 11,759 people experiencing homelessness in Ohio in 2024, according to the latest U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Homelessness Assessment Report.

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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I suppose you’ve got to love The Kentucky Derby, the chance for human peacocks and princesses of all ages and hues to don their finest 19th century finery, sip mint juleps and watch a horse race that’s called “the greatest two minutes in sports.”  

On Derby Day Saturday I stopped by The Royale Food and Spirits, my favorite St. Louis public house, because saloonkeeper Steve Smith is a friend and he hosts a Derby party which draws an interesting collection of devotees. I failed to don the Derby attire because my attendance was spur-of-the-moment, but in the spirit of The Royale, nobody cared. 

Earlier that day, an otherwise pleasant legal discussion brought into focus, with a tip of my imaginary Derby hat, the continuing restoration of the Confederacy occurring these days courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. That was the week that the Court’s backward-facing majority took the Voting Right Act, the legal horse whose leg the Court broke in 2013 and shot it. “Voting Rights Act” is an apt name for a racehorse whose winning days are behind him. 

Well, some “knowledgeable” observer said, the Voting Rights Act’s not completely dead because intentional racial discrimination remains illegal. But the overwhelming odds are the racing days for Voting Rights Act surely are over. He could be put out to stud, but who would bid?

If your state does redistricting – which apparently can be done most anytime, at least here in Missouri — and split up the Black population sufficiently, you can create all or nearly all districts that are inclined to elect Republicans. Just don’t mention race, even though states with large Black populations can end up with all-white Congressional delegations.  

When challenged about this, a state’s legislature can say it did it for partisan advantage –nothing wrong with that, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned – and not as an act of intentional racial discrimination. No longer can a challenger look at the racial effects of gerrymandering;  he or she must show intent. The Supreme Court majority thus may have set in motion the abolition of a goodly portion of the Congressional Black Caucus.  Rest in peace, Voting Rights Act, you’ve had a helluva run.  

So, back to The Royale and the Kentucky Derby. The Royale that day had an exhibit of Derby history from 1875 to 1902.  During slavery prior to the Civil War (also called the War of Northern Aggression), the enslaved had been various trainers, attendants and groomers for racing horses owned by the wealthy who also owned many of the trainers, attendants and groomers.

With the freeing of the enslaved by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery (1865), some of the formerly enslaved became jockeys.  

Did they ever. The Royale’s Exhibit listed the Black jockeys who won the Kentucky Derby between 1875 and 1902 – Black jockeys won half of the first 16 Derbys.  In the first Derby in 1875, 13 of the 15 riders were Black. 

This period was also the end of Reconstruction, where Union soldiers who had protected Blacks in the South in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant were removed after the election of 1876. There followed the continued rise of the Ku Klux Klan and measures that were designed to keep Blacks from voting, like poll taxes and literacy tests that were mostly administered to Blacks who tried to register to vote.  

This restoration of Confederate values, known as the Jim Crow era, continued well into the 20th century when statues of Confederate heroes were erected throughout states that participated in the rebellion, and Blacks were mostly eliminated from federal service during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. 

The Jim Crow era did not bypass horse racing. “By the early 20th century,” the Royale’s exhibit explained, “prejudice and jealousy of Black jockeys’ success resulted in African American riders disappearing from horse racing. The Jockey Club was formed in the early 1890s to regulate and license all jockeys. Blacks were denied their license renewals and by 1911 they had all but disappeared. James (“Jimmy”) Winkfield was the last Black jockey to win the Derby (he won in 1901 and 1902). Not one Black jockey raced between 1921 and 2000.”

The current Supreme Court majority professes to believe that the Constitution is color blind. Perhaps the same could be said for the Jockey Club’s licensing of jockeys, with about the same measure of truth. 

The current version of the nation’s highest court continues to have echoes of the Court’s most infamous decision, the Dred Scott case, where the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney recited as historical fact that Blacks “ had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and could not – whether or not born in the United States  —  be considered citizens. 

It was the adoption of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution following the Civil War that explicitly established that Blacks were citizens and provided the protection that enslavement denied them. (Well, at least the Black men. Women would have to wait another 50+ years to gain the most important right of citizenship, the right to vote, which had been granted to Blacks – men only — by the 15th Amendment in 1870. American Indians would be fully recognized as citizens a few years after women got the vote.)

The 14th Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens.  Today’s national administration disputes the plain wording of this “birthright” citizenship, and the current Supreme Court is thinking about it. The most surprising thing about the case is not what the decision may be – it’s the fact that the Court would even consider the question in the first place. 

When Chief Justice John Roberts was undergoing confirmation to be on the Court, he famously told the Senate and the public that as a judge he would merely be an umpire calling balls and strikes. Baseball fans should have known better. A strike is not a strike and a ball is not a ball until the umpire says it is. In Supreme Court cases, it takes at least five of those nine umpires in black robes.

I’m glad I stopped at The Royale. I did not know the racial history of the Kentucky Derby. There’s now a lot of whitewashing of American history taking place at the behest of our current leadership. If we do not remember our past, we may be condemned to repeat it, as the philosopher George Santayana and many other wise spirits have reminded us. If we forget and thus repeat our past sins, does that make us great again?

A longer version of this essay is posted online on Substack – WolffTracks: michaelwolff.substack.com.

This story was originally produced by Missouri Independent, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The U.S. Housing and Urban Development’s annual one-night count of those experiencing sheltered and unsheltered homelessness is projected to show a decline after a record-high surge in 2024, according to a new report.

Conducted during January, the Point-in-Time count is HUD’s annual one-night census of people staying in shelters and unsheltered locations; the latest official national Point-in-Time report found 771,480 people experiencing homelessness in January 2024, an 18% surge from 2023. 

Preliminary 2025 estimates, though, indicate homelessness has stabilized. A review by the nonprofit advocacy group Community Solutions, based on local counts available from 170 communities, projects that the total may fall to about 755,300 — a roughly 2% decline — though HUD has not yet released the official 2025 count.

“The shift from sustained increases to a small net decline suggests that the rapid expansion of homelessness seen in recent years has slowed,” the report said. “At a national level, this pattern is consistent with a period of stabilization, in which the number of people entering homelessness is more closely balanced with the number exiting.” 

HUD’s 2020-2024 national summary shows 912,807 people experienced homelessness for the first time in 2024, which was a slight decline from 967,134 in 2023 but still far above the 2020 and 2021 levels. 

The Point-in-Time numbers from this past January aren’t expected to be released until late this year or early next year. 

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

From the Rockies to the Cascades to the Sierra Nevada, mountainsides across the West are sparsely covered by the snow that usually blankets the high country well into the summer.

That snowpack is like a savings account that the West draws on when the hot, dry months arrive. It moistens the landscape as it melts, lessening the risk of severe wildfire. The runoff feeds into river basins, and the swelling waterways provide power to hydroelectric dams, irrigation to farmers and drinking water to cities.

This year, Western states are heading into the summer with a desperately low balance — threatening wildfires, drinking water, crops, electricity and more.

“This has been an extremely poor year,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center, a research unit at the University of Arizona. “This has gotten a lot of people concerned and alarmed.”

While a late-season storm brought heavy snow to parts of the Rockies this month, the region remains in a deep snowpack deficit.

As warmer weather arrives, states are preparing for a dangerous wildfire season across the drought-stricken West. Farmers and cities are bracing for potential cutbacks in their water allocations from rivers that have less to give. Fisheries managers are watching for low river flows that could threaten vital salmon runs. And worsening conditions could threaten the supply of hydropower that provides cheap, clean electricity to many Western states.

A hot, dry winter

Across nearly the entire West, states spent the winter waiting for snow that rarely arrived. Ski resorts lost millions of visitors as they struggled to stay open. Then in March, a record-breaking heat wave settled across the region, shrinking the already paltry snowpack.

“It’s unheard of,” Megdal said. “Things were already looking bad in January, but if you follow the projections, they had to keep revising the numbers downward because the snow just never came and we had this hugely hot period in March.”

Snow_Water_Equivalent_Percent_NRCS_1991-2020_Median_May_6_2026

 

The federal National Water and Climate Center produces a real-time map showing the snow water equivalent in river basins across the country — a measurement of how much moisture is being held in those mountaintop savings accounts.

The majority of the West is bright red, indicating that snowpack is at less than 50% of the median level for this time of year. Yellow and orange cover most of the remaining areas, showing regions that are still well below the median.

The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor map shows most of the country in abnormally dry or drought conditions, aside from the Great Lakes region and some other parts of the Midwest.

Wildfire

For many Western states, the most imminent threat from the dry winter is the prospect of a dangerous wildfire season.

Already, wildfires in Nebraska have burned hundreds of thousands of acres, shattering records and setting the stage for a record wildfire year.

The wildland fire outlook maps produced by the National Interagency Fire Center show above-normal fire risk spreading across much of the West by June and July.

“There’s a lot of red on the map,” said Matthew Dehr, wildland fire meteorologist with the Washington state Department of Natural Resources.

What we’re likely to see are wildfires moving more quickly through forests. When we do have a large fire event, it’s likely to move faster, be more significant.

– Washington public lands commissioner Dave Upthegrove

Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s public lands commissioner, said his agency is preparing for fire season as normal but with a heightened awareness that this summer could be demanding. He’s focused on educating residents about the risks, noting that 90% of wildfires in Washington are caused by humans.

“What we’re likely to see are wildfires moving more quickly through forests,” he said. “When we do have a large fire event, it’s likely to move faster, be more significant.”

He also noted that this year is Washington’s fourth consecutive year of drought conditions, making trees more susceptible to diseases and pests and compounding wildfire risk.

Dehr said spring rains could provide a bit of a buffer before the heat of July and August, but a recent stretch of sunny weeks has yet to provide relief.

Upthegrove noted that the challenging conditions across much of the West could make it more difficult for states to send wildfire crews to each other’s aid, if many states are battling big blazes simultaneously.

“As the climate crisis pushes a forest health crisis pushes a wildfire crisis, it’s going to stress the whole system, not just in our state,” he said.

Low water supplies

Many Western states also rely on snowpack to feed rivers that provide irrigation for farming and the water supply for cities. In particular, the Colorado River provides water for tens of millions of people across seven states, a region that has grown even as the river’s supply has dwindled in recent decades. Reservoirs that were full at the turn of the century are now nearing critically low levels.

“There hasn’t been enough flow in the river to meet all these expected demands, even in the good years,” said Megdal, the water researcher. “We’ve used up our savings and storage, so now what do we do?”

Water allocations for states, tribes and farmers in the region are governed by a complicated and fiercely contested system known as the Colorado River Compact. In recent years, cutbacks due to the low supply reduced the water allocation for central Arizona, including all of the water for agricultural users.

Now, states are fighting over even less water and struggling to negotiate who should bear the cost. Last week, Arizona, California and Nevada submitted a proposal to federal officials that would impose further cutbacks over the next two years in order to buy time for a longer-term deal.

“It’s turning out to be very hard to get the states to agree on how to slice up a much smaller pie,” Megdal said. “There are scenarios that are not zero probability that are catastrophic to the region.”

If the states are unable to reach an agreement, allocation for the river’s diminished water will be determined by federal regulators under the “law of the river.” Cutbacks imposed by the feds could fall heavily on central Arizona, Megdal said, cutting the supply for Phoenix, Tucson and some tribal nations.

Such uncertainty in the Colorado River basin and elsewhere “leaves farmers making planting decisions now without knowing whether sufficient water will be available to carry crops through harvest,” the American Farm Bureau Federation wrote in an April report.

The lack of water could force farmers to remove trees or vineyards, the Farm Bureau noted, or reduce cattle herds if the parched landscape does not supply enough forage.

Meanwhile, rivers running at a slow trickle could reduce the hydroelectric power produced by dams across the West. Across 13 Western states, hydropower accounts for nearly a quarter of electrical generation.

The Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, which forms Lake Powell, produces about 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to power nearly half a million homes. But the lake level may soon fall below a threshold from which the dam can no longer generate power.

“Hydropower is so incredibly important because it has been the lowest-cost power for many in the West,” Megdal said. “There are big implications for the energy grid and the cost of electricity.”

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Stories From The States is a weekly podcast from States Newsroom that explores, through personal stories, how people and communities across America are being affected by government decisions. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais altered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

The decision could upend American politics and hold sweeping consequences for how states and local governments draw district lines at all levels of government, from Congress to school boards.

What does that mean for this year’s midterms, as well as future elections?

In Episode 27, you’ll hear from Jonathan Shorman, democracy reporter for States Newsroom’s D.C. Bureau. From lawmakers scrambling now to redraw congressional maps to the pause of Louisiana’s U.S. House primaries, Shorman has been watching how the states are reacting to the decision. 

Then, Professor Rick Hasen unpacks how this could re-shape future elections, and what would need to happen to prevent even more drastic changes. Hasen is an expert on election law and teaches at UCLA School of Law.

Finally, Evening Wrap newsletter author Danielle Gaines shares the top stories she’s watching.

Episode produced and edited by Mallory Cheng. Music for Stories From The States composed by David Singer.

Click here for the full transcript: 

Relevant reading from States Newsroom outlets and partners: 

• Tennessee Republicans pass US House map carving up Memphis days after SCOTUS guts Voting Rights Act (Tennessee Lookout)
• Supreme Court voting rights ruling set to reshape local power from statehouses to school boards (Stateline)
• Alabama lawmakers advance primary bills as protests erupt in committees (Alabama Reflector)
• ‘Killing our vote’: GOP states rush to break up Black districts after US Supreme Court case (States Newsroom D.C. Bureau)
• Redistricting return, leadership questions loom after Indiana Senate primary shakeup (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Got questions? An episode idea? Email us at podcast@statesnewsroom.com

This podcast is produced by States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

WASHINGTON — The federal student loan system is set to see a dramatic overhaul beginning this summer, and critics warn it likely will make loans more expensive and difficult to obtain for borrowers — driving them to private lenders or altering their plans for higher education.

Among the major changes are new loan limits for graduate and professional students, a restructured repayment system where new borrowers will have only two plans to choose from and the elimination of a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing.

The provisions — most of which will take effect July 1 — stem from congressional Republicans’ mega tax and spending cut bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last year. 

The U.S. Department of Education finalized regulations, published May 1, that implement sweeping changes outlined in the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law. The department received more than 80,000 public comments before the rule was finalized. 

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said that “at a high level,” the reforms center on “lowering the cost of college, simplifying student loan repayment and restoring accountability to the federal student lending system,” during an April 30 call with reporters regarding the new regulations. 

The average federal student loan debt balance stands at $39,547, according to the Education Data Initiative.

As July 1 approaches, here’s a closer look at some of the biggest changes coming to the federal student loan system: 

Elimination of Grad PLUS 

The Grad PLUS program, which allowed for graduate and professional students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, will soon be eliminated under the package and unavailable for new borrowers.

“If you are currently borrowing Grad PLUS loans, so you borrowed Grad PLUS loans before July 1, you will be allowed to continue using Grad PLUS until you finish your program, or until three years have expired, basically whichever is sooner,” said Preston Cooper, senior fellow in higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

“Current students are grandfathered in — it will only be new graduate students, as of this fall, after July 1, who will be subject to the new loan limits,” Cooper said. 

New borrowing caps 

The package also sets forth new annual and aggregate loan limits for graduate and professional students, along with parents who take out federal student loans for dependent undergraduate students. 

Graduate student loans will be capped at $20,500 annually, with a $100,000 aggregate limit. 

Parent PLUS borrowers will have an annual cap of $20,000 and an aggregate cap of $65,000 per dependent. 

Professional student loans will have a $50,000 annual limit and an aggregate cap of $200,000. 

The programs that fall within the department’s “professional” category and are subject to that larger loan cap include: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology and clinical psychology. 

The department clarified in a fact sheet on the finalized regulations that the “professional” student classifications “do not express a value judgment about the importance of any occupation or field” but instead serve a “loan-administration function.” 

The agency has received immense pushback from groups representing people in fields that do not fall under the department’s definition and will thus be subject to lower annual and lifetime borrowing caps. 

Incoming repayment options 

In another major shift, the regulations replace prior repayment options with two new plans — the Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, and the Tiered Standard plan — both of which will launch July 1.

RAP is an income-based repayment plan that “waives unpaid interest for borrowers who make on-time payments that do not fully cover accruing interest,” per the department’s fact sheet. 

Balances under the plan will also “decline with each on-time payment, as unpaid interest is fully waived and the Department then reduces principal by an amount equal to the borrower’s payment, up to $50,” per the agency. 

The Tiered Standard plan offers fixed monthly payments, ranging from a 10-year to 25-year period, depending on the outstanding principal balance of the borrower. 

‘A lot more expensive’

“The upshot is that loan repayment is going to get a lot more expensive for almost everyone, and for some people, it’s going to get significantly more expensive, and the transition is also going to be difficult for a lot of people to manage,” Michele Zampini, associate vice president for federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access & Success, told States Newsroom.

Zampini, whose organization aims to advance affordability, accountability and equity in higher education, said she thinks “there will be a lot of students who will have to turn to the private loan market, who otherwise would have been able to cover their costs through the (Grad PLUS) program.”

Victoria Jackson, assistant director of higher education policy at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said that with the new loan limits and “drastic cuts to aid availability” in the regulations, “you would really hope that it would come with other, more affordable and better forms of financial aid.” 

“And what they’ve done is just created this vacuum that right now can really only be filled with private loans, which are costlier and riskier for students, or students are just not going to go,” Jackson said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues its efforts to eliminate the Department of Education, including through a series of interagency agreements that transfer several of its responsibilities to other departments. 

Under the most recent agreement, the Treasury Department will take over Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt — the first step in a multiphase process toward Treasury taking on Education’s entire, roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

Transition to new system

Zampini noted that, when it comes to the incoming student loan regulations, she does not have confidence in the Education Department’s “ability at this moment to successfully manage the transition without a lot of issues, as far as servicing and as far as account tracking and plan enrollment and things like that.” 

Jackson, of EdTrust, said that “by weakening the federal financial aid system, I think there’s a weakening of our higher education system and making it more difficult for low-income students, students of color and other marginalized students to access graduate education.”

She added that “people who complete those degrees tend to have more financial security in the future — they earn more over their lifetimes and, on markers of financial success and opportunity, do better.” 

“I think this is one prong of a plan of undermining our overall higher education system.” 

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s trade agenda faced another major setback Thursday when the U.S. Court of International Trade handed a win to two small businesses and the state of Washington after they challenged the president’s 10% global tariffs, imposed after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his previous emergency tariff regime.

In a 2-1 decision, the court granted a permanent injunction to a Florida-based toy manufacturer and a New York-based spice importer that sued the Trump administration in March, alleging the new tariffs would harm their businesses.

The court also granted relief to Washington state, which was among nearly two dozen states that sued over the tariffs. 

Tariff ‘bazooka’

Jay Foreman, CEO of toy company Basic Fun!, said he was “extremely excited” upon learning the decision.

“It takes a lot of guts and chutzpah for small companies like us and Burlap and Barrel to put ourselves out on the line to fight what we feel is injustice and unfair,” he said during a virtual press conference, referring to the other company named in the lawsuit, an online spice retailer.

“Certainly, there’s a place for tariffs on strategic products that make sense to protect in this country …  but in cases across the board, to approach this situation with a bazooka instead of a fine-tooth comb makes no sense, and it hurts companies like ours, hurts companies like Burlap and Barrel, hurts the consumer,” Foreman said Thursday evening. 

Basic Fun! is behind popular toys, including Tonka Trucks and Care Bears.

Foreman said he expects imports that were subject to the tariffs to arrive as soon as tomorrow.

“I’m already emailing my customs broker to make sure they’re on it,” he said.

The ruling only applies to the plaintiffs Basic Fun! and the online spice retailer Burlap and Barrel, and does not give universal relief to all businesses that must pay the blanket 10% tax on imports. 

Jeffrey Schwab, who argued the case on behalf of the clients for the Liberty Justice Center, said the nonprofit advocacy law firm has been “wrestling” with what the decision means for other businesses that are paying the import tax.

“It’s not entirely clear, and probably will depend on what happens now if the government appeals. If the government seeks a stay that could have an effect. Certainly, I think companies will probably want to file (legal challenges), being concerned about making sure that the tariffs stop for them, and possibly ensuring that they get a refund too,” Schwab said.

Win for Washington state

The ruling also applies to Washington state as an importer subject to the tariffs, according to the ruling. 

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown called the ruling “a win for both affordability and the rule of law.”

“It’s American consumers and businesses that have ultimately paid for the president’s illegal tariff campaign,” he said in a statement. “The court’s order will encourage more parties to challenge this illegal executive overreach.”

The judges ruled other states that sued did not have standing because they were “non-importers.” Among them were Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Trump ordered the fresh round of tariffs on Feb. 20, the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 6-3 opinion, that his initial global tariffs under the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, exceeded his presidential authority.

Following the Supreme Court loss, Trump’s alternative tariffs, imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, went into effect on Feb. 24.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now in the legally mandated process of refunding businesses and importers who paid a collective $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs. 

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

WASHINGTON — State governments should shoulder more of the cost and responsibility for natural disaster recovery, according to a report released Thursday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency review council.

The board, created by President Donald Trump last year, called on Congress and the administration to make several major changes, including offloading the National Flood Insurance Program to the private insurance market. 

Robert Fenton, regional administrator for FEMA Region 9 and a member of the review council, said the flood insurance program is “financially unstable” and in considerable debt. 

“We came away with a number of recommendations that we want to put forward — primarily that focuses on a shift from a federally managed flood insurance program back to the private sector and allowing the private sector to take on a bigger role within the market,” he said. “And I think that’s going to help because it puts the states, who are statutorily responsible for regulating insurance, back into a critical role.”

Fenton said the review council recommended lawmakers create a program to transfer NFIP policies, which he noted are a requirement for many homeowners, to the private sector.

But there will be some extra work to do on the 5% of NFIP policies he said are categorized as “repetitive loss” and are “responsible for 30% to 40% of the payouts that we do through our flood insurance program.” 

“So leveraging our other programs, like our mitigation program,” Fenton said. “How do we buy out those homes and move them out of those risk areas? Or how do we build the infrastructure around them to better protect them and have those not be areas that have repetitive damage?”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote in a statement that Trump “looks forward to reviewing the recommendations put forth by the FEMA Review Council.”

“The President remains committed to getting resources to communities in need while also working with states to ensure they invest in their own resilience before disaster strikes, making response less urgent and recovery less prolonged,” Jackson added. 

Trump has said throughout his second term that he wants to change how the federal government approaches natural disaster management and recovery.

“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June. “We’re moving it back to the states so the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”

Feds should be in ‘supporting role’

Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said one of the review council’s main recommendations is “to equip state, local, tribal, territories to lead disaster response with the federal government in a supporting role, not a supplanting role.”

“We want FEMA to set the standard and then encourage creation of standards and then adoption of standards at the state, local, tribal, territorial level,” he said. 

Guthrie said during the public meeting where review council members outlined the recommendations in their 75-page report that “federal assistance should only be reserved for truly significant events that exceed state, local, tribal, territorial capacity and capability.”

The federal government, he said, needs to update the methodology it uses to determine when a natural disaster or other major event has overwhelmed a community’s ability to recover. 

“Many, many states are going to say, ‘I hit a million dollars, I can request the threshold,’ regardless if it’s actually broken the back of that local or state government,” Guthrie said. “They’re going to do it because they can. And again, that’s what we’re talking about. We need to realign that.”

‘Empowering the states’

Former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said “nothing can be more important than empowering the states to take on this responsibility,” though he added that individuals need to prepare for natural disasters as well. 

“I remember as a child when people had their own fallout shelters in their backyards,” he said. “If they didn’t, they knew where the closest fallout shelter was. We took responsibility for food and water and to be able to respond to those disasters.”

Fenton said the review council believes FEMA’s post-disaster mitigation program should be turned over to state governments. 

“Let the state manage this program by providing them the resources and an architecture that will ensure that priorities are naturally aligned and that some of the complexities of environmental review and some of the other reviews are done locally,” he said.  

Guthrie said FEMA should also look for ways to speed up federal assistance by making it less complex for people whose homes are deemed uninhabitable following a disaster. The federal government should also allow state, local, territorial, or tribal governments to have more of a say on emergency housing. 

“Let’s get back to some common-sense, state-managed solutions,” he said. 

Another suggestion from the board calls on the administration and lawmakers to better integrate private sector, faith-based and nonprofit organizations that regularly play a role in natural disaster response and recovery. 

“(The) private sector is responsible for so much in disasters, and they own so much of the infrastructure or key capabilities that we depend on,” Fenton said. “And so we need to be able to leverage those retailers, those small businesses and we need to give them a way to integrate with these events.” 

Congressional action 

Many of the recommendations from the review council will need to run through Congress, where work overhauling FEMA began last year. 

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted 57-3 in September to approve a bill that would make several changes to the FEMA, including removing it from the Department of Homeland Security and making the agency its own Cabinet-level department. 

The legislation would create one application for federal natural disaster assistance from FEMA, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Small Business Administration. 

It would also give local and state governments more flexibility in deciding which types of emergency housing best meet the needs of their residents following different natural disasters.

House Republican leaders have yet to bring the bipartisan bill to the floor for a vote. 

Disaster survivors

On a call organized by disaster relief advocacy group Organizing Resilience, disaster survivors said the council did well at identifying problems with the current infrastructure, but that the recommendations appeared to come up short.

“Our concern for disaster survivors is that some of the recommended changes may not reflect what the council heard from survivors about what they need,” Maddie Sloan, the director of disaster recovery at the social justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said on the call shortly after the report was published.

FEMA would be unable to act on many of the recommendations on its own without congressional approval, Sloan said, while many of the “transformative actions” the agency has taken over the past 18 months have significantly weakened disaster response.

The changes shifted responsibility from the federal agency to states, tribes, local government and individuals, she said. Thursday’s recommendations would only worsen that problem.

“Survivors absolutely want a more streamlined system, and they need help to get to them faster,” Sloan said. “But these recommendations, particularly around individual assistance, in fact slash the help that’s available to individual survivors.”

One such change, allowing only relief for survivors whose homes are uninhabitable, means that costs related to auto repair or replacement, medical care or funerals cannot be covered, Sloan said.

Shifting responsibility to state and local governments, without any federal guarantee of repayment, would leave more survivors without access to critical funds, Sloan and other panelists said.

Michael McLemore, an organizer in St. Louis and a survivor of the tornado there last year, said the federal response was marked by “abdicating responsibility, playing political games and shifting the burdens of states and … cities.”

It took the agency nearly eight months to even start obligating funds, leaving the city to shoulder the cost in the meantime, McLemore said.

The panel called for passage of the bipartisan FEMA bill, sponsored by Missouri Republican Sam Graves and Washington Democrat Rick Larsen, along with 68 other cosponsors, that would take FEMA out of DHS management and reestablish it as an independent agency.

WASHINGTON — Attorneys for the Trump administration argued before a federal appeals court Thursday the Pentagon should be able to reprimand Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly for reminding members of the military they can refuse illegal orders, and for criticizing the Defense Department. 

Lawyers from the Justice Department told the three-judge panel that even though Kelly, a retired Navy captain, is no longer on active duty and has no commanding officer, they believe he is still subject to disciplinary action and limited First Amendment rights. 

John Bailey, an attorney in the DOJ’s civil rights division, said a “pattern of statements and conduct” showed Kelly intended to “counsel disobedience” within the armed forces. That led to a censure letter and attempts by the Defense Department to downgrade his retirement rank and pay. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempts to punish Kelly, he said, weren’t solely based on the senator’s appearance alongside other Democrats in the “Don’t Give up the Ship” video.

Bailey said comments Kelly made during a press conference and in television news interviews about the deployment of National Guard troops to various cities and strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean also played a role. 

Bailey told the judges that if Kelly or another of the roughly 2 million retired service members wanted to make similar statements, they were “free” to separate from the military and resign their commissions. He said the Trump administration was not seeking to apply the same restrictions on free speech to the 17 million veterans who have been discharged and no longer have any connection to the military. 

But, Bailey also told the judges that “context matters” and an instructor at the Naval Academy or West Point wouldn’t be in the wrong to tell service members they aren’t required to follow illegal orders.  

The question before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which will rule in the coming weeks, is on whether a preliminary injunction granted to Kelly can stay in place while the case proceeds, or whether it should be overturned.

Separation of powers

The attorney representing Kelly said during oral arguments a district court judge ruled correctly earlier this year when he granted the preliminary injunction that allows Kelly to keep his retirement rank and pay while the case moves through the court system. 

Benjamin C. Mizer, a partner at the Arnold & Palmer law firm, said that Kelly “did not counsel disobedience to lawful orders.” 

He also said subjecting a retired service member who is also a lawmaker to the jurisdiction of the president as commander-in-chief would create an issue with the separation of powers. 

Kelly said outside the courthouse after 90 minutes of oral arguments the Trump administration’s attempts to limit the free speech rights of retired service members was “absurd” and “an outrageous violation of our constitutional rights.”

“One of our most fundamental rights is the right to speak out about the government,” Kelly said. “It’s the right that guarantees all others and it’s how we hold our government accountable.”

Kelly said the voices and experiences of retired service members are especially important after President Donald Trump started a war with Iran. 

“Who better to speak out and share their perspective than the people who served — retired military members who understand the risks and sacrifice of sending brave Americans into combat, who understand how to use combat power, but also understand its limitations,” he said. “And also who have seen the mistakes of past administrations that thought wars could be fast and simple, only to get bogged down for years or for decades.”

Karen LeCraft Henderson, nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1990; Cornelia T.L. Pillard, nominated by President Barack Obama in 2013; and Florence Y. Pan, nominated by President Joe Biden in 2022, make up the three-judge panel that will rule on the appeal.  

Downgrade in Kelly retirement rank, pay

The case began earlier this year after Hegseth started the process to downgrade Kelly’s retirement rank and pay for appearing in a 90-second video alongside other Democratic lawmakers. 

“No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant,” they said in the video published in November. “But whether you’re serving in the CIA, in the Army, or Navy, or the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”

The video also featured Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, Pennsylvania Reps. Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan and New Hampshire Rep. Maggie Goodlander. 

A censure letter from Hegseth released in January alleged Kelly’s comments in the video undermined the military chain of command, counseled disobedience, created confusion about duty, brought discredit upon the Armed Forces and included conduct unbecoming of an officer. 

Senior Judge Richard J. Leon of the District of Columbia District Court heard arguments in early February over whether to grant Kelly a preliminary injunction, which he did later that month. 

“Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”

The Trump administration then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Ohio voters say no to public school levies. Signal Ohio’s Jake Zuckerman reports, “Ohio voters reject school levies, tax hikes around the state.”

Ohio voters around the state overwhelmingly rejected property and income tax hikes requested by local districts to fund K-12 public schools.

Only 24 of 66 local school district property and income tax levies passed, according to a count from the Ohio School Boards Association based on preliminary election results.

• Restricting healthcare for transgender adults. WCMH’s David Rees reports, “Ohio bill would restrict public insurance coverage for transgender surgeries.”

A newly introduced bill in the Ohio House would restrict certain healthcare coverage tied to gender-affirming procedures, adding to an ongoing legislative focus on transgender-related policies.

• Doesn’t believe Jim Jordan. NBC News reports, “Former Ohio State official testified he doesn’t believe Rep. Jim Jordan’s denials about Strauss abuse.”

A former Ohio State University athletic director said in a deposition that, in his opinion, Rep. Jim Jordan “probably knew” that campus doctor Richard Strauss was abusing the wrestlers Jordan coached more than two decades ago.

“I believe that the conversation about Dr. Strauss was active — with the wrestlers,” Andy Geiger testified in a sworn deposition unsealed Monday by the Southern District of Ohio. “Particularly loud and clear, I heard all about the unhappiness with the showering situation.”

“For somebody who was part of the program, it doesn’t seem credible to me” that Jordan was unaware that Strauss allegedly preyed on male athletes, Geiger said in the deposition.

“I don’t know for sure,” Geiger added. “But my opinion is that he probably knew.”

• Financial ruin. In a Columbus Dispatch guest column, Bill Shkurti, Greg Browning, Tom Johnson, and Pari Sabety write, “Banning property taxes would blow a $21 billion hole in Ohio.”

As former Ohio budget directors for Republicans and Democrats alike, we don’t always agree on everything. But on one thing we are united: a proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate property taxes in Ohio is one of the most reckless proposals we have ever seen.

Ohioans are fed up with rising property taxes, and more must be done to help homeowners. But eliminating the largest local revenue source for local governments and schools would set Ohio on a collision course toward financial ruin.

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Democratic judges have an uphill battle to change the 6-1 Ohio Supreme Court, where Justice Jennifer Brunner is an island unto herself in a sea of Republican justices. But she and another judge making a run for a seat in November sense a change in the winds when it comes to Democratic support, both in the judicial system and elsewhere.

“As I travel the state, I am taken by the movement, the energy, the sort of undertow that I’m sensing from the counties around the state,” Brunner said at the Ohio Democratic Party’s primary night event on Tuesday.

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Brunner has been on the court since 2021, but until last year, she shared the bench with two other Democratic justices.

Races for the state’s top judicial positions were made explicitly partisan when Republican state lawmakers added party labels to the races starting in 2022. Since that change, the court has gone from 4-3 to 6-1 Republican.

“I don’t mind it,” Brunner said. “But I sure would like a little more company.”

The most recent general election in 2024 saw the defeat of Justice Melody Stewart and Justice Michael P. Donnelly, in favor of Republican justices Joe Deters and Megan Shanahan.

Brunner will now face off against Republican challenger and former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O’Donnell, who edged out a crowded primary field of appellate judges on Tuesday, garnering 32% of the vote in unofficial results from the Ohio Secretary of State.

She succeeded in the election with a margin of less than 18,000 votes between her and her closest opponent, Fifth District Court of Appeals Judge Andrew King.

“This is not just a victory for my campaign team, but for all Ohioans who support law and order, public safety, and fair, consistent court decisions,” O’Donnell said in a statement late Tuesday night.

Brunner told the crowd of Democratic supporters that she wants to be “part of the foundation and the strong shoulders that people like (governor candidate Dr.) Amy Acton can stand on.”

She said the energy she’s seen from voters shows a dissatisfaction with the way government is working, particularly the Republican leadership at the federal level.

“We know we all have problems in our lives … and every time we look up thinking we might get a little hope, what we get out of Washington is this din, and this craziness, and this sense that this is not our country,” she said.

If Brunner loses the Nov. 3 election, and Justice Dan Hawkins defends his seat against a Democratic challenger, First District Court of Appeals Judge Marilyn Zayas, the Ohio Supreme Court will be a full 7-0 Republican panel.

In her campaign to join Brunner on the court, Zayas also feels a different energy in the 2026 election.

“I’m seeing how we are losing faith in our court because of politics, and politics has no place in our Ohio Supreme Court,” said Zayas, who was unopposed in her primary race.

Zayas said the state is at a crossroads, one in which wins for the two Democrats in 2026 could provide opportunities for more judges in 2028.

“We have to do this, because the alternative is way too dire,” Zayas said.

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With the primary out of the way, the race is officially on to become Ohio’s next governor. Republican candidate Vivek Ramasawmy will take on Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton in an already record-breaking expensive general election.

Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati businessman and billionaire, celebrated his win in Columbus with a crowd of supporters.

“I believe we’re on the cusp of a new dawn for Ohio,” Ramaswamy said.

He thanked his family, the voters, and his running mate, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, a legislative leader and attorney from Northwest Ohio.

The pair won with more than 82% of the GOP vote, according to unofficial election results from the secretary of state website. They beat out YouTuber and car designer Casey Putsch.

“I’m proudly the most pro-free enterprise, pro-liberty, conservative, and pro-capitalist governor this state will have,” Ramaswamy said.

Ramaswamy is running on the platform of cutting taxes, reducing government waste, and advocating for more energy independence. So far, he has raised $50 million in this race, half of it coming from himself.

“We are in this because we believe that together with the complementary skills that we bring to the table, we are the two people in this state who can work together as a team to lead Ohio back to our true potential, to our greatest heights, to put more money in your pocket, to bring down those costs, and to give our kids the world class education,” Ramaswamy said, referencing McColley.

The Democratic nominee is former state health director Amy Acton from Youngstown, who is running with David Pepper, a former party leader and attorney from Cincinnati.

“I am running for governor because people in this state are struggling. They are doing everything right. They’re working harder than they ever have, but there is no more breathing room. They’re struggling with the cost of everyday life,” Acton said. “And I refuse to look the other way. We are refusing to look the other way.”

Also at a crowded event for supporters, Acton thanked her voters and talked about the importance of the election. She was unopposed in the primary.

“It is time to put working families, Ohio’s families, first,” she said.

Her platform is affordability in housing and healthcare, as well as improving public education and supporting small businesses.

“Together we’re gonna make Ohio affordable so that we can pursue our dreams again, so that we can live a good life, so that we can age in place with dignity,” Acton said.

She has raised more than $10 million for the race.

“Ohioans need somebody fighting for them, not the self-funding billionaires and special interests,” Acton said.

While Acton and Ramaswamy both bring up affordability, they have different ways to accomplish it.

Acton wants to fully fund education so that schools don’t rely on increasing property taxes, as well as put forward a working families tax cut. She also proposed a new system to reduce prescription costs.

“I will fight to protect Medicaid and ensure that everyone in Ohio has access to quality healthcare, affordable healthcare,” she said.

Ramaswamy would limit automatic property tax increases and has suggested shutting down universities he calls “subpar,” like Akron, Kent State, or CSU, in order to pay for an income tax cut.

Expanding natural gas development will also make life more affordable, he added.

“We’re bringing down your electric bills because we’re producing more energy in Ohio,” he said.

And for each of them, they say the race is really just beginning.

“Now the real destination is in November,” Ramaswamy said.

While Ramaswamy and Acton are the frontrunners, Libertarian Don Kissich, a veteran from Northwest Ohio, will also be on the ballot.

He is running with brokerage director James Mills. They are focused on rooting out corruption, which Acton is as well.

“This campaign has never been about insiders, political machines, or corporate influence. It has been about everyday Ohioans- workers, parents, small business owners, young people struggling to afford a future, and citizens who feel unheard by a broken system,” Mills said in a statement over text.

He congratulated both Ramaswamy and Acton’s teams, then said that his campaign is about giving a voice back to the people.

“We are going to continue building a coalition of people who believe in individual liberty, government accountability, economic opportunity, and restoring trust between citizens and their institutions. We will fight for affordable living, transparent government, civil liberties, and a future where Ohio families can thrive without being crushed by corruption, bureaucracy, and division,” he added.

What other races stood out?

Ohio’s 9th Congressional District

Ohio’s 9th Congressional District had a very competitive five-way Republican primary to choose a candidate to run against longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur.

The November election will be a rematch between her and former lawmaker Derek Merrin.

Merrin won with 44% of the vote, according to unofficial results. Notably, He beat out Ohio House Majority Whip Josh Williams and former ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan.

The 2024 race was incredibly close, just about a 2,000-vote difference. Thanks to redistricting, the area is more red than it was before. However, President Donald Trump won’t be at the top of the ticket.

Ohio’s 7th Congressional District

Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker from Cleveland, won a crowded seven-person Democratic primary for Ohio’s 7th Congressional District. He won with 37% of the vote, according to unofficial results, beating out former Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald.

He will take on incumbent and Trump ally U.S. Rep. Max Miller.

Ohio Supreme Court

Former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O’Donnell won a four-way Republican primary to take on Justice Jennifer Brunner this fall. She won with 32% of the vote, according to unofficial results.

If she beats Brunner, the Supreme Court will be made up of all Republicans, as right now it is 6-1.

State Treasurer

Although the race looked tight at first, former lawmaker Jay Edwards won the Republican nomination over state Sen. Kristina Roegner, R-Hudson. He won with 53% of the vote, according to unofficial results.

He will face off against Cincinnati Councilman Seth Walsh, who ran unopposed in the primary.

Secretary of State

Both parties had two candidates running. Treasurer Robert Sprague beat veteran Marcell Strbich with 70% of the Republican vote, according to unofficial results. Former House Minority Leader Allison Russo beat doctor Bryan Hambley with 67%.

Tom Pruss, a libertarian, will also be on the ballot. He ran unopposed in that primary.

This race will be one to watch in November.

Incumbent lawmakers

Two incumbent Republican state lawmakers held onto their seats, at least for the primary, despite heavy campaigning against them.

Former Speaker Jason Stephens, Kitts Hill, defeated primary challenger Larry Kidd, while Rep. Ron Ferguson, R-Wintersville, beat former state Sen. Frank Hoagland. Both won by 62%, according to unofficial results.

State Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, when trying to move over to the Ohio House, lost to former lawmaker Shawn Stevens.

State Rep. Beth Lear, R-Galena, tried to switch to the Ohio Senate, but was beaten by businessman Ryan Rivers.

State Rep. Jim Hoops, R-Napoleon, also tried to move to the other chamber, but narrowly lost to former lawmaker Craig Riedel.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Residents in Richland County, Ohio, voted narrowly Tuesday to keep a ban on utility-scale solar and wind across much of the community — a setback for those who hoped the referendum could serve as a blueprint for overcoming local restrictions on renewables nationwide.

The vote was 53% to 47% in favor of keeping the prohibitions adopted last July for 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Turnout was 30%, according to the election results.

The rural county’s referendum drew widespread attention because it was a rare example of community members trying to use a ballot measure to counter state and local limits on siting wind and solar energy, which have mushroomed in the U.S. in recent years. In Ohio, more than three dozen counties restrict one or both types of energy, an authority granted by a 2021 law. Fossil fuel and nuclear projects are exempt from such bans and from other hurdles the statute erected for renewable energy. If Richland County had voted to overturn its ban, it would have been a first for Ohio.

This election result was a loss for the local group Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development, which first got the issue on the ballot and then reached out to voters. The group argued that reversing the ban would attract jobs and businesses to the area while protecting property owners’ rights to lease land for the energy development of their choice.

“As a group of your Richland County neighbors, we made a commitment to stand up to our elected officials and forced a countywide conversation about property rights and government overreach,” said Morgan Carroll, a leader in the campaign against the ban. ​“We did it with integrity, with passion, and with a deep love for our community. That’s not nothing. That is everything.”

Campaigning in favor of the ban was Richland Farmland Preservation, a group that claimed the amount of land required for solar and was incompatible with preserving the area’s agricultural character. Darrell Banks, a committee member for that effort who is also a Richland County Commissioner, said of Tuesday’s results, ​“I think this is an affirmation by the voters that their township trustees and county commissioners are aligned with the best interests of their communities, and we appreciate the support of Richland County very much.”

Richland Farmland Preservation’s funders included organizations with ties to people and groups who have promoted the natural gas industry. Emails released last Friday show communications between Banks and a strategist for a political consulting firm that has done substantial work for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money group that promotes natural gas. Banks said that the strategist, Tom Whatman, is a ​“family friend.”

The links ​“should trouble every Richland County resident, regardless of how they voted,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, a statewide advocacy organization whose volunteers assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development on the referendum. ​“This community deserved a fair process, and the fight to bring that back to the county is not over.”

Despite the loss, Brian McPeek, another leader of the campaign to end the renewables ban, stressed that the margin by which it lost in the very Republican county was quite narrow. ​“The big thing that we showed yesterday is that this was not a partisan issue.”

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Ohio citizens living in rural areas are dying earlier and more often than people in other parts of the state.

A report from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio found that rural residents are 15% more likely to die before the age of 75 compared to the rest of Ohio. 

Many factors make this worse: 17% are living in poverty, 18% lack internet access, 8% do not have a vehicle, and 9% are uninsured — all higher than state averages. 

In addition, Ohio rural counties also have far fewer primary care, dental, and mental health providers.

Living in a rural area impacts access to healthcare because of geographic, economic and social barriers, that directly impacts a person’s health and well-being.  

As a resident of a rural community for most of my life, I understand the impact that driving hours for healthcare, can have on a family. 

I have memories of driving with my mother to take my 85-year-old grandfather for medical care, hours away. 

The drive was difficult for him and there were many times he missed appointments because of this. 

Although he was covered by Medicare insurance, his healthcare was also impacted by the lack of access to technology for appointment scheduling and management and the inability to drive. 

What we really needed, was a medical provider more accessible, to provide care closer to his home.

The Ohio Senate Bill 258, the Better Access to Health Care Act, offers a way to help. 

The bill would allow Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) to practice more independently. 

An APRN is certified to diagnose and treat illness, and prescribe medicine. Right now, APRNs must have a collaboration agreement with a physician. That means APRNs can only work where doctors are available. 

Additionally, individual states determine how APRNs may practice. Currently, 27 allow independence, and 23 have limitations placed on their practice. 

In the states where APRNs can practice to the highest level of education and training, the overall health ranks much higher, according to the Commonwealth Health ranking national survey. 

And in states where APRNs are able to practice independently, people living in rural areas have better access to preventative care. 

This is the result of increased use of high-quality health services.

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, many states temporarily lifted restrictions to the APRN practice. The result almost doubled the number of APRNs available to serve rural and underserved communities.  

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The new bill would allow APRNs to practice without the physician collaboration requirement. It also updates nursing standards, prescriptive rules, and how APRNs can provide various health services.

The goal of the bill is to remove administrative barriers while keeping patient safety and education standards strong.

For the rural community, if the bill passes, it could mean more primary care, urgent care, and maternal care. 

Hospitals, clinics, community health centers, and private practices could also staff more easily, both in person and virtual visits. 

Independently practicing APRNs help organizations overcome staffing barriers and can save money.

For Medicare insurance, primary care from APRNs costs less than care from physicians. Communities also benefit when geographic barriers are reduced, and more providers are available.

Key stakeholders, or entities with a trusted interest, include APRNs, the organizations that employ them, collaborating physicians, and insurers — especially Medicare and Medicaid, since reimbursement can differ for physicians and APRNs. 

Some professionals are concerned about clinical experience and training for independent APRNs. 

The bill requires 5,000 hours of clinical practice with physician oversight and a 6-month transition-to-practice period with a physician before independent practice. 

This step ensures APRN readiness.  

Health care is becoming more complex, and APRNs can help shape policy at both the individual and system levels. The Make America Healthy Again initiative aims to lower the burden of chronic disease that affects many Americans. 

Improving rural access to care and changing how services are delivered can reduce negative health outcomes. 

Rural Ohio needs better access to healthcare services. 

If the problem is not addressed, I predict that the death rate will continue to surpass the state average. 

Allowing qualified nurse practitioners to practice more easily is a practical step toward improving access to care and healthier underserved communities. 

Having been an emergency department nurse for nearly 10 years, I have seen first-hand the impact of rural living on access to healthcare services, as well as the positive impact nurse practitioners are making to the healthcare industry as a whole.

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Advocates and opponents of abortion access say they’re wondering what happens next in a critical telehealth medication case that created chaos and confusion over the past week after an appeals court blocked nationwide access to the drug and, days later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary stay.

Alito’s stay preserves telehealth access until May 11. But it’s unclear what happens next for patients and providers.

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ Friday ruling to suspend a federal rule allowing telehealth prescriptions of the drug mifepristone while the lawsuit Louisiana v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration unfolds. Abortion providers are determined to continue providing the service, though potentially without mifepristone, the drug at the center for the case, which has had a high record of safety and efficacy since 2000.

Anti-abortion advocates have pushed to reverse the 2023 policy, enacted under former Democratic President Joe Biden, that allowed the FDA to drop its requirement that a patient see a provider in person before the medication can be prescribed. One similar national case already failed unanimously before the Supreme Court, but anti-abortion advocates are hoping this time around, with a more tailored approach, they will be successful.

Abortion-rights advocates say they’re prepared for whatever might happen in the courts, with contingency plans and a message that abortion will still be available even if the particular medication — mifepristone — is not.

Has the abortion pill been banned?

No. Mifepristone is still a legally approved FDA drug commonly used to terminate a pregnancy before 10 weeks’ gestation and is used off-label to treat miscarriages.

Is telehealth abortion still legal?

Yes, for now. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s administrative stay that expires on May 11, it is still legal to obtain abortion medication through telemedicine under the FDA’s regulations. Mifepristone is commonly used with a second drug, misoprostol, in medication abortions. The case doesn’t include misoprostol.

Who would be affected if telehealth access is struck down?

According to the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount report, 27% of all abortions in the first six months of 2025 were obtained through telehealth, adding up to more than 162,000 cases.

Mifepristone is also used for patients experiencing a miscarriage; those patients also would have to visit a provider in person.

The ruling would apply nationwide, meaning that health providers couldn’t prescribe mifepristone without an in-person visit with the patient, even in states with abortion access.

What are the arguments on each side in Louisiana v. FDA?

Louisiana says the Biden-era policy undermines a state law banning abortion, and that the federal rulemaking process allowing telehealth prescriptions was flawed.

The Food and Drug Administration says the state doesn’t have standing to sue, but also notes that it’s taking more time to review the drug’s safety.

Two mifepristone drugmakers, meanwhile, have intervened on the FDA’s side.

What could happen next?

The Supreme Court has many options available moving forward, but a few options are most likely, said Katie Keith, founding director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. The justices could extend the stay when it expires May 11, or the court could make a longer-term ruling.

That could mean sending it back to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with or without upholding the initial ruling blocking the 2023 provision while the appeals case proceeds. Or justices could decide to take up the case and bypass the rest of the 5th Circuit appeal.

If it did that, the manufacturer defendants Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro have asked for an expedited process with a decision by June. That seems unlikely, Keith said, but the court has conducted expedited cases related to abortion before, such as the Moyle v. United States case in 2024 related to the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

What will providers do if they can’t use the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol?

Brittany Fonteno, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, said providers have been preparing since 2023 for the possibility of losing access to mifepristone. There have long been plans to switch to a misoprostol-only protocol, which is the main method of pregnancy termination across much of the world, she said.

“A lot of providers had created these policies and just needed to dust them off,” Fonteno said.

Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which provides telehealth abortions to patients in all 50 states, said she and her team spent the weekend scrambling to contact patients waiting on medication abortion pills they had ordered before the ruling, and implementing a contingency plan that many abortion providers have been planning for since the lawsuits against mifepristone began in 2023.

That contingency involves pivoting from the FDA-approved mifepristone-misoprostol regimen to a misoprostol-only regimen.

Early Monday, Foster said her team was getting ready to ship misoprostol-only packages to patients at 2 p.m., but after the Supreme Court stayed the appeals court’s ruling on Monday morning, she said they were able to switch back to the mifepristone-misoprostol regimen.

Foster also said her organization was inundated with requests for pills that people could stockpile — people who didn’t need an abortion but were worried about losing access to the pills. Normally that’s a small fraction of the requests they receive, she said, but on Tuesday, they sent out more than had been sent in the entire month of April.

“Over the last two days, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of people from Louisiana requesting pills, especially pills for future use,” Foster said.

What are the pros and cons of the misoprostol-only regimen?

Dr. Maya Bass, a family physician in New Jersey who also provides abortions in Delaware, said misoprostol-only regimens are still safe and highly effective, but that the regimen has a lower efficacy rate than the combination of the two drugs and comes with potentially more side effects and risks.

Misoprostol-only regimens vary between 85% and 90% effective, while the combination is between 93% and 99% effective. The effective rates are lower as the gestational age increases.

The combination works well, Bass said, because mifepristone stops the hormone that allows the pregnancy to continue and signals to the body that the pregnancy is over. The misoprostol then helps soften the cervix and prompts the uterus to contract and expel the pregnancy tissue.

Without that hormonal signal, Bass said, a higher dose of misoprostol is needed to empty the uterus. The usual side effects of nausea, diarrhea, chills and sometimes fevers can be more severe because of the higher dosage. And it may lead to more people needing to seek in-person follow-up care to fully remove all of the pregnancy tissue, which can cause infection if it stays in the uterus.

“A lot of the people who are using telehealth for their medication abortion are not necessarily in places where they can safely access that care,” Bass said. “So it is concerning that we might be relying more on a regimen that means that many more people needing to seek care.”

What are the details of the legal arguments?

Louisiana officials, including Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, argue that the state is harmed by the 2023 telehealth policy because it undermines a state law banning abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with few exceptions that don’t include rape or incest. The state also challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s process in deciding to eliminate the in-person dispensing requirement, saying it was based on flawed or nonexistent data.

The state also said the rule has resulted in $92,000 in Medicaid bills from two women who went to the emergency room because of complications related to mifepristone in 2025. And the state says the rule harmed the other plaintiff in the case, Louisiana resident Rosalie Markezich, who said her ex-boyfriend ordered the medication online and pressured her into taking it. That wouldn’t have been possible if the medication had to be dispensed through an in-person visit, the state argues.

“The priority of safety supersedes the priority of access, and that is what ultimately, I believe, needs to be looked at directly,” Sarah Zagorski, senior director of public relations at Americans United for Life, told Stateline on Wednesday. The anti-abortion organization submitted a brief supporting Louisiana’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

The FDA’s response has been to try to dismiss the claims in part on the grounds that Louisiana doesn’t have standing to sue, but agency officials have also said they are in the middle of conducting a safety review of mifepristone and need more time.

GenBioPro and Danco Laboratories, two of the manufacturers of mifepristone, intervened as defendants in the case, which can happen when the party that is sued may not be willing to fully defend the case for various reasons.

The two companies argue that Louisiana does not have proper standing to sue because the state does not prescribe or use mifepristone and is an “unregulated party” as it relates to the 2023 telehealth provision. They also noted that the FDA reviewed 15 studies evaluating medication abortion outcomes for more than 55,000 patients before approving the rule, “all of which supported the safety and effectiveness of dispensing mifepristone by mail, courier, or through pharmacies.”

How does this compare to the 2023 case Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA?

Both lawsuits were designed to restrict access to mifepristone. The plaintiffs in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case included a group of anti-abortion doctors who said they would be harmed by having to care for people who took mifepristone. They also argued that the FDA’s approval of the drug was improper.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was involved in that case as well, and determined that the FDA should roll back its decision to ease restrictions on the drug, including the 2023 telehealth rule. But the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided in June 2024 that the Alliance plaintiffs didn’t have proper standing and sent it back to the lower court.

After that ruling, the attorneys general of Missouri, Idaho and Kansas stepped in as plaintiffs, and the case was transferred to Missouri’s U.S. district court, where it’s still pending.

The Louisiana case is more limited because it would strike down one provision of mifepristone regulation, noted Jenna Hudson, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. The Alliance plaintiffs sought to revoke the drug’s approval altogether.

Stateline reporters Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org and Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.  

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The nation’s largest electricity grid operator has called on power plant operators, investors, utilities and consumers to consider reforms to ensure the region’s wholesale electricity market can supply enough power as it faces unprecedented demand from data centers. 

PJM Interconnection, based in the Philadelphia suburbs near Valley Forge, has been under scrutiny as record electricity prices in its auctions contributed to skyrocketing bills for consumers and businesses in the last year. 

In a report issued Wednesday, PJM said the growing demand from data centers and broader electrification of the economy is exacerbated by tightening supply as older, dirtier power plants retire and supply chain and permitting issues make new plants harder to build fast enough.

“The PJM region is now navigating a convergence of three structural forces that have pushed the system into disequilibrium,” the report says. “The result is a transition from an era of managing surplus to an era of managing scarcity — one that is anticipated to persist for some time based on current projections.”

PJM’s electricity pricing model depends on a concept it calls the “shared reliability compact” in which all customers, large and small, share the same standard of reliability and agree to pay to ensure it.

The organization’s board recognized price volatility — while economically rational — is creating unsustainable stress on the compact and called on PJM’s staff to reexamine its foundational assumptions in a resource-constrained world.

It also suggested that government intervention in the market has kept investors on the sidelines by undermining the credibility of economic signals that would normally spur the construction of new generation plants. 

In 2024, Gov. Josh Shapiro sued PJM demanding a limit on prices after an auction in July of that year resulted in a record price. Federal regulators agreed last week to extend the price control for a second time through 2030.

Shapiro pushed back on the notion that his administration’s intervention has dissuaded new investment.

“A core reason why the reforms described in this report are needed is that PJM hasn’t been moving fast enough to connect new resources for many years and continues to deny states a full seat at the table,” spokeswoman Rosie Lapowsky said in a statement. 

“The Shapiro administration looks forward to working constructively with fellow states and with PJM on next steps, but Gov. Shapiro is never going to let Pennsylvanians get stuck with a bill they don’t deserve,” the statement said. “That’s why any changes must prioritize reliability, protect consumers and increase transparency.”

Jon Gordon, director of the renewable energy industry group Advanced Energy United, said PJM finds itself in a tough spot and is taking fire from many elected leaders. He said the report is a self-reflective document.

“They’re trying to lay out the facts of the world. They want everyone involved in the solution.

These are really big, profound decisions,” Gordon said. “Time is short and we need to solve these problems yesterday, and that’s where the challenge will be.”

PJM, which manages the grid for 13 states, including Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., stopped short of offering a solution, but invited stakeholders to join in discussion to restore confidence in the system.

“Wholesale electricity markets are extraordinary institutions, and their most essential infrastructure is not a price curve or a performance obligation — it is legitimacy,” PJM President and CEO David Mills said in a letter accompanying the report.

“Generators, utilities, investors and consumers must all believe, at a basic level, that the rules are fair, stable and the product of a process they recognize as credible.” Mills continued. “It is built through the kind of deliberation this paper is intended to initiate — and it is the only foundation on which a durable market design can rest.”

The paper identifies three possible pathways for reform:

The first would stabilize the market by ensuring that the vast majority of power needed is obtained through longer-term agreements to insulate ratepayers from volatility. Any additional power needed would be secured through spot auctions to allow higher prices to ensure capacity is available for peaks in demand on the hottest and coldest days of the year. 

Another would do away with the shared reliability contract when supplies are scarce and develop a framework that differentiates between customers that can and cannot be cut off. Policymakers, including the PJM governors and the Trump administration, have backed a requirement for large loads such as data centers to build their own power plants.

“Path B focuses on physical accountability – those who do not bring or fund supply cannot lean indefinitely on the shared pool – but it requires a fundamental reorientation of how the PJM system allocates reliability as a scarce good,” the report says.

The third would pair long-term contracts that reduce volatility with a shift in how power generation owners recover revenue to cover the cost of producing electricity, placing an emphasis on payments for the underlying electricity commodity rather than the availability of power plants to handle peaks in demand.

This story was originally produced by Pennsylvania Capital-Star, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced Thursday he will resign and take a private-sector job with nonproft law firm Alliance Defending Freedom.

The “surprise move” was first reported by the Columbus Dispatch.

Earlier Thursday, Yost’s spokesperson did not confirm or deny the report when contacted, but half a dozen statehouse sources who wished to remain anonymous said Yost is expected to leave his job ahead of the November election.

WEWS attended an event today in hopes of speaking with Yost, but his spokesman, Steve Irwin, physically blocked reporter Morgan Trau several times when she attempted to speak with the attorney general in a public area.

Department of Public Safety Director Andy Wilson thanked Yost for his public service.

“Attorney General Yost has dedicated his entire professional career to keeping people safe … wish him the best in everything that he’s going to do,” Wilson said.

On Thursday afternoon, Yost tweeted that he is taking a job with Alliance Defending Freedom. He will be the firm’s new vice president of Strategic Research and Innovation.

Yost has served as attorney general since 2019.

Prior to that, he was the state auditor.

Yost’s political dreams of being governor were dealt a blow in 2025 when the Ohio Republican Party endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy. Yost suspended his governor campaign soon after, and has since kept a low profile. He is the only statewide Republican besides Gov. Mike DeWine who is not currently running for office.

DeWine has the authority to appoint a new attorney general, with just six months until the general election.

Republican nominee for attorney general Keith Faber told WEWS that he looks forward to talking to the governor about the “best path forward.”

DeWine said he isn’t making an appointment today and issued the following statement:

“I am grateful for Attorney General Yost’s long career in public service, from serving as Delaware County Auditor, Delaware County Prosecutor, Auditor of State, to Attorney General of Ohio. I wish him the best in his next endeavor.

Having served as Ohio Attorney General, I know how important this office is and the great work done by its employees. I will give the appointment of someone to serve as Attorney General thoughtful and deliberate consideration.”

According to DeWine, Yost’s resignation is effective June 7.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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The day after the U.S. Supreme Court crippled the federal Voting Rights Act, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson addressed a virtual gathering for the group’s members and supporters where he ranked the landmark decision alongside the court’s most infamous cases.

Dred Scott excluded Black people from American citizenship ahead of the Civil War. Plessy blessed policies of racial segregation in 1896. And now there was Callais. 

The opinion will “probably go down in the history book as one of three of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of this nation,” Johnson said.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais on April 29 cleared states to split apart, for political gain, congressional districts where a majority of residents belong to minority groups. The court’s conservative majority said Louisiana lawmakers acted unconstitutionally when they intentionally created the state’s second majority-Black district, which the justices found unnecessary.

A week after its release, the decision is roiling politics across the South as states move at a rapid pace to recast the political landscape that has taken progressives by surprise. 

Republicans, triumphant over their victory at the court, are rushing fresh gerrymanders through Southern statehouses in time for the November midterm elections in an effort to strengthen their party’s control over the region’s U.S. House delegations. They’re acting at lightning speed, over loud protests, and have nullified votes by suspending ongoing elections.

Democrats, especially Black residents, are furious with both the court and GOP politicians, who they believe are poised to wipe away decades of Black political progress in the region. The new maps that seek to oust Black members of Congress and prevent the election of Democrats in the future recall a Jim Crow past of literacy tests and poll taxes, they say.

“We refuse to let you kill us by killing our vote,” Eliza Jane Franklin, a resident of rural Barbour County, Alabama, told a state House hearing Tuesday.

Decision kicked off legislative efforts

The Alabama Legislature is moving to authorize a special primary election using a congressional map currently blocked in federal court, if a district court or, ultimately, the Supreme Court allows the state to move forward. At least one of the state’s two Black members of the U.S. House would be vulnerable.

In Louisiana, the governor has suspended the state’s primary elections for the U.S. House, setting aside some 42,000 votes that were already cast. Republican lawmakers will begin advancing a new gerrymander in a matter of days, aiming to force out at least one of the state’s two Black House members.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new map into law Monday that aims to hand his party up to four additional U.S. House seats. State lawmakers approved the map hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. The map has already drawn multiple legal challenges.

The South Carolina Legislature is weighing whether to redraw maps. And Tennessee lawmakers want to gerrymander a Memphis district currently held by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents the state’s only majority-Black district. 

“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be color-blind,” Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday unveiling a plan to divide the Memphis area among three congressional seats.

More states, in the South and elsewhere, are expected to pursue new maps over the next two years. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp ruled out a special session this year, for example, but supports redistricting before the 2028 election. 

The current moment represents an extraordinary time in America, said Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group. But she also called it a reversion “back to America.”

Many thought the presence of Black, Hispanic and Asian American elected officials somehow meant racial discrimination no longer existed, she said.

“And unfortunately, that is a misread of American history,” Caruthers said. “And perhaps it is a retelling of American history for those who want to gloss over America’s very sordid past, especially when it comes to voting rights.”

Midterms impact

The scramble by a handful of Southern states to redraw districts comes as Republicans grasp for any scintilla of advantage ahead of the midterm elections in November. 

A U.S. House under Democratic control would spell the end of much of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, produce a wave of investigations into his administration and potentially lead to a vote to impeach him in the House, though the Senate would almost certainly acquit him.

“This is all about Donald Trump wanting to avoid hard questions and oversight hearings about his actions,” Cohen said at a news conference in Memphis.

Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied Southern politics, said Republicans are attempting to “staunch the bleeding” ahead of unfavorable midterm elections.

“The desperation of this Republican Party, it’s off the charts,” McKee said.

Redistricting push supercharged

Prior to Callais, Trump had already urged Republicans to redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage — a process that typically occurs once a decade after the census. 

Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas enacted more GOP-friendly maps, while Democrats struck back in California and Virginia. In Utah, Republicans want to block a court-ordered map that’s more favorable to Democrats.

Republican primary voters have given their approval to that approach. On Tuesday, five Trump-endorsed state legislative candidates in Indiana defeated GOP incumbents who had defied the president to block a gerrymander in the state last year.

But until now the Voting Rights Act limited how far that gerrymandering push could extend.

For decades, Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act helped protect majority-minority districts from gerrymandering and ensured voters could elect Black candidates to Congress in Southern states following the end of state laws that blocked Black citizens from voting. The Callais opinion guts Section 2 by curtailing the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps.

Republicans have praised the decision and many have been clear that they believe the opinion opens up a path to securing additional GOP seats. Trump has endorsed disregarding primary elections that have already been held so that states can pass new maps — which he predicts can net Republicans an additional 20 seats this fall.

“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”

Calls for GOP seats

Over the past week, some Republicans have cast majority-minority districts previously protected by the Voting Rights Act as racist because they were drawn with attention paid to the racial makeup of the map. U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, wrote on X that there are “no more excuses for keeping racist maps,” for example, and called for their immediate removal.

Other GOP leaders have centered their case for quick action on political power. Like Trump, they have explicitly invoked control of the U.S. House as a reason to gerrymander. While Republicans have the House, their margin of control is razor thin: 217 to 212, with one independent and five vacancies. Even a modest Democratic wave in November will likely sweep away GOP control.

Alabama Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger Jr. and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said in a joint statement that the state’s lawmakers have a responsibility to offer Alabama a “fighting chance” to elect seven Republican U.S. representatives. Two of the state’s seven districts are held by Democrats.

“Control of the U.S. House of Representatives could come down to just a handful of seats, and when the dust settles, the people of Alabama will know that their Legislature stood firm, acted decisively, and did everything within its power to fight for fair representation,” Gudger and Ledbetter said.

Alabama Republicans want to use a map passed by lawmakers in 2023 that federal courts blocked from taking effect. Alabama’s current map was drawn by a court-appointed special master.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, asked a federal district court Tuesday for an order that would let the state move forward with the gerrymander.

In Louisiana, Republicans obtained special permission from the Supreme Court to quickly move forward on a new gerrymander after the justices struck down its current map in the Callais decision.

Absentee voting was already underway in Louisiana before Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended congressional primary elections set for May 16. Votes already cast for U.S. House candidates won’t count, Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation, has said.

Louisiana state lawmakers are set to begin work on a new map this month that will likely break apart a New Orleans district held by U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat who has fought with the governor.

“The Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent of the decision to quickly finalize Callais.

Court challenges

Still, Democrats and other opponents of the gerrymandering effort across the South are turning to the courts. Lawsuits have also been filed challenging the suspension of Louisiana’s congressional primaries and Florida’s new map also faces court challenges.

A petition filed in Louisiana state court by Elias Law Group, a major Democrat-aligned voting rights litigation firm, alleges the governor’s decision to halt the congressional primary is unlawful and unprecedented. Only the state legislature has the power to set the state’s election schedule, the petition argues.

“Governors do not get to cancel elections by executive fiat, least of all elections that are already underway, with ballots in voters’ hands and votes already cast,” Lali Madduri, a partner at Elias Law Group, said in a statement.

Regardless of how the legal challenges play out, Democrats say the Callais decision and the ongoing fallout from the decision underscore the need for massive voter turnout in the November election. A large Democratic turnout that results in a significant Democratic majority in the U.S. House would serve as a rebuke to Trump’s gerrymandering campaign, they say.

Blue state gerrymanders

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s sole congressional Democrat, said during the NAACP virtual meeting that a Democratic House could pass voting rights legislation. 

“I would hope we could do that because I really think that’s our only hope legislatively,” Clyburn said.

Democrats have long called for the passage of a bill to restore preclearance, a major element of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court paused in 2013, which required states and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes. 

But the measure would face a certain filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Even if Democrats broke a filibuster, Trump would likely veto it. 

In effect, Democrats’ most realistic opportunity to enact major voting rights legislation relies on regaining control of the White House and Congress and ending the filibuster — a set of conditions that’s out of reach until at least 2029.

In the meantime, more Democrats are calling for aggressive gerrymandering of blue states as a way to punch back. U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Joseph Morelle, both New York Democrats, on Monday announced an initiative to encourage their state to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2028 election.

Gerrymandering New York would be an intensive effort, likely requiring voters to repeal or suspend anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state constitution. But voters in California and Virginia have previously endorsed Democratic gerrymanders.

“This is just the beginning,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Across the nation, we will sue, we will redraw and we will win.”

By Naisha Roy/Medill News Service

WASHINGTON — Dozens of people gathered on a sandy lot in front of the White House construction zone Tuesday evening, carrying posters peppered with monarch butterflies and unfurling massive banners reading “Set kids free.”

The butterflies symbolized immigrants without legal status, as the protesters called to abolish all detention facilities in the United States as part of a “Close the Camps” vigil and protest organized by the Coalition to End Family and Child Detention.

“Migration is beautiful,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a communications manager for advocacy groups that helped organize the event. “People move, and that should be celebrated.”

Many of the protesters were from Texas, rallying against the conditions in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Dilley Immigration Processing Center south of San Antonio. 

Over the last few months, several advocacy group reports and lawsuits have alleged the facility lacks potable drinking water, healthcare, adequate food and clean clothing for detainees, many of whom are children.

“Families are reporting worms and mold in the food that’s making children ill,” said Trudy Taylor Smith, a policy administrator for the Children’s Defense Fund in Texas who was at the protest. “They are reporting a lack of access to clean drinking water. The tap smells foul. It’s making children sick, and yet if people want to avoid the tap and access clean water, they have to pay their own money to buy bottled water from the commissary.”

Democrats demand release of families

Dilley is the larger of two facilities in the country that hold immigrant families with children. Both had been shuttered for nearly four years, until the Trump administration reopened them in early 2025. 

Since then, children at the Dilley detention center reported feeling “sadness and depression,” in handwritten letters to ProPublica news reporters. They also wrote about losing their appetites and missing home. 

On the same day as the protest, a delegation of congressional Democrats led by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, visited the Dilley facility and urged the Department of Homeland Security to release all families detained there. The delegation included Reps. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas; Christian Menefee, D-Texas; Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz.; Henry Cuellar, D-Texas; Mark Takano, D-Calif.; and Chellie Pingree, D-Maine.

“The kids, as you can imagine, were distraught. They were sobbing most of the time that we were with them,” Castro said after the inspection. “When it comes to the Dilley detention center, it’s one horror after another and one abuse after another.”

The Trump administration has denied the reports of mistreatment in Dilley, saying in a press release that all detainees have access to educational resources, infant care packages and regular medical screenings. “In most cases, this is the best healthcare illegal aliens have received in their entire lives,” the release reads.

Single mothers detained with children

Dianne Garcia, a pastor at San Antonio’s Roca de Refugio Church, led the protest with a moment of silence in honor of those detained and deported. so far. Garcia has seen 18 people in her community detained, including several single mothers sent to Dilley with their children.

“I knew a 3-year-old. He used to be the most gregarious kid,” she said. “Now he’s afraid all the time, always by his mother’s side.”

About 1 in 3 Texan children have an immigrant parent, per the Migration Policy Institute. 

The Austin school district lost over 3,000 students this year, partly because parents feared sending their kids to school amid immigration sweeps.  

“When children don’t feel safe to go to school, when enrollment drops, that means teachers are laid off, that means they lose funding,” Taylor Smith said.

Despite this, the Trump administration has announced plans to expand holding areas for children. 

Many demonstrators spoke out against a proposed detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, set to be a “short-term facility,” where migrant families and unaccompanied children would be held for three to five days. 

Trump administration officials have said the facility will only temporarily house people who have agreed to “self-deport,” or leave the country voluntarily.

The detention facility’s construction was sited inside the Alexandria International Airport complex, across from the tarmac. U.S. officials deport hundreds of immigrants without legal status every day on ICE-contracted planes from this airport. 

Already, an investigation by The Guardian found the former military facility to be heavily contaminated with PFAS, toxic “forever chemicals” directly linked to cancer and other diseases. 

‘The same thing as being in a cage’

The protest organizers hoped to prevent more detention centers, and abolish the ones that already exist. Some attendees were former detainees, like Sulma Franco, who came to the United States in 2009 from Guatemala and was immediately sent to a facility by the Border Patrol. She called the detention center where she was held a hielera, or icebox, referencing the frigid temperature. 

“Being in a detention center is the same thing as being in a cage or being in jail,” she said, in an interview conducted in Spanish. “I believe the solution isn’t improvement; the solution is to close them permanently.”

Shenker-Osorio, the communications manager, said part of the protest’s goal was to maintain pressure on the White House and shift the rhetoric around how detention is discussed. 

Instead of “facilities,” for example, some of those at the event specifically chose to use the word “camps,” referencing the similarity in conditions to Nazi concentration camps. 

The coalition has a policy working group that communicates with Congress, with the ultimate aim of passing legislation banning family detention.

“This isn’t a difficult moral question,” Taylor Smith said. “Children don’t belong in cages.”

Medill News Service articles are reported and written by graduate student journalists in the Washington program of the Medill School at Northwestern University.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Absentee ballots. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles reports, “Voting rights advocates report problems with new Ohio law on absentee ballots.”

This is the first Ohio election in which mail-in absentee ballots must be returned by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day. Voting rights advocates say they are hearing from voters who are concerned about their mail-in ballots arriving in time.

Cincinnati-area voter Terry Susskind said she requested a mail-in ballot and received it on April 14. She called the board of elections on April 29 to check on it.

“The ballot had not yet arrived. They were very helpful,” she said. “They said they would send me another ballot which did arrive within two days which we filled out and dropped off.”

• Sports betting on credit. Cleveland.com’s Jeremy Pelzer reports, “Ohio moves to ban use of credit cards for sports betting.”

Ohioans may soon no longer be able to use credit cards to place sports bets, under a draft rule change put forward by Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration this week.

The rule change, which could take effect in as little as a few months, is one of the reforms sought by sports-betting critics, who say using credit cards to place bets amplifies the risk of gambling addiction and financial ruin.

• Richland County voters ban solar and wind energy. Signal Ohio’s Jake Zuckerman reports, “MAGA-friendly Richland county voters preserve ban on wind and solar.”

In a Republican-dominated district, voters narrowly upheld a ban on utility scale renewables in most of the county in a 53% to 47% vote. A referendum backer called the result disappointing, yet ‘telling.’

• FBI going after journalists. MSNOW reports, “FBI investigating leaks to journalist who wrote explosive article on Kash Patel: Sources.”

The FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation focusing on an Atlantic magazine journalist who wrote a deeply unflattering account last month of Director Kash Patel’s work habits, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.

The sources said the so-called insider threat investigation is highly unusual because it did not stem from a disclosure of classified information and because it is focused on leaks to a reporter. The agents involved are part of an insider threats unit based in Huntsville, Alabama, the sources added.

Typically, leak investigations look into government officials who may have disclosed state secrets or classified documents. Journalists who receive and publish such information have typically only been involved as potential witnesses.

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A new law banning low-level THC hemp products and changing the state’s marijuana laws hurts Ohio businesses, plaintiffs argued during a preliminary injunction hearing Monday. 

Happy Harvest and Get Wright Lounge filed a lawsuit in Franklin County Court of Common Pleas after Ohio Senate Bill 56 took effect March 20 after Ohioans for Cannabis Choice failed to get enough signatures to get a referendum on the November ballot for voters to block the law.

Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Magistrate Jhay Spottswood-Harrison heard the preliminary injunction hearing. 

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“This bill completely put my clients out of business,” said Scott Pullins, the attorney for the plaintiffs. 

“There were no ways to get rid of the inventory except to destroy it, and the court attempted and succeeded in fashioning a fair and equity remedy to solve that problem. Now, would we like to see it extended statewide to any other retailers in a similar situation.” 

Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey M. Brown issued a 14-day TRO on April 22 allowing Happy Harvest locations and Get Wright Lounge to sell their existing products, but the 10th District Court of Appeals stayed the TRO last week. 

Happy Harvest has locations in Delaware, Marion, and Wood counties. Get Wright Lounge has one location in Columbus. 

“The TRO restores the status quo that existed for years before March 20, 2026, and in fact, the TRO strengthens what the law was back then by expressly putting in more stringent age restrictions, more restrictions against marketing children, more restrictions as to products that look like hemp,” Pullins said. 

The state argued Ohio’s law now aligns with new federal restrictions on hemp products that are set to take effect Nov. 12.  

Congress voted in November to ban products that contain 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container when they voted to reopen the government. 

The only way to sell marijuana in Ohio starting Nov. 12 is by getting a license from the Ohio Division of Cannabis Control, said Ann Yackshaw, assistant section chief in the Ohio Attorney General’s office. 

“The only way for plaintiffs or anyone else to get that license is to let Senate Bill 56 continue in effect so that the Division (of Cannabis Control) can continue to regulate and continue to build out the regulatory framework to bring these people into cannabis regulation in the state of Ohio,” Yackshaw said. 

“Putting Senate Bill 56 on hold would put that rule-making process on hold, and then no one would be able to get into the cannabis program in the state of Ohio.”

Previously, the 2018 Farm Bill said hemp can be grown legally if it contains less than 0.3% THC. 

But the 2018 Farm Bill created challenges from a definition standpoint and a series of loopholes, said Andrew Makoski, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Division of Cannabis Control. 

“Hemp products exploded, not just in Ohio, but all across the country, where people were using the hemp definition to sell these intoxicating products that had the technical definition of hemp,” he said. 

“With any kind of unregulated marketplace, you don’t know what you’re actually getting. What you found was a large spike in accidental ingestions.” 

Stopping S.B. 56 would take Ohio back to an unregulated market where “any child or anybody could walk into a store buy whatever they want,” Makoski said. 

Ohio Senate Bill 56 

The bill had to go to conference committee in the Ohio legislature after it passed the Ohio House, but the Ohio Senate voted not to concur with changes made to the bill at the end of October. 

“The General Assembly enacted a sweeping criminal statute through a midnight conference report that neither chamber ever read three times in its final form and that consolidated four separate bills … into a single omnibus vehicle,” Pullins said. 

Under the new law, THC levels in adult-use marijuana extracts will be reduced from a maximum of 90% down to a maximum of 70%, cap THC levels in adult-use flower to 35%, and prohibit smoking in most public places.

The new law prohibits possessing marijuana in anything outside of its original packaging, criminalizes bringing legal marijuana from another state back to Ohio, and requires drivers to store marijuana in the trunk of their car while driving.

“Customers who wish to get lower prices and go to Michigan and other states have now been declared to be felons if they buy the product and bring it back here,” Pullins said. 

The new law funnels unregulated THC through the Ohio Division Cannabis Control, Yackshaw said. 

“That is the regulation that plaintiffs say that they were looking for, but they don’t want it because they don’t want to have to go through the stringent procedures that the Division of Cannabis Control lays out,” she said. 

Mark Fashian was the president of hemp product wholesaler Midwest Analytical Solutions in Delaware, Ohio, but he is now out of business because of the new law. 

“After March 20, my sales have died,”  Fashian said. “(Senate Bill 56) basically made everything that I do illegal. … I have five employees, and right now they’re finding other jobs.”

Happy Harvest was one of his best customers and they have more than $200,000 of stranded inventory, Fashian said.

“Every day (Ohio Senate Bill 56) is enforced, it destroys lawful Ohio businesses, businesses operating a good faith reliance on the 2018 federal farm bill,” Pullins said. 

A Sandusky County judge last month issued TRO on the hemp portion of the new law which allows the sale of intoxicating hemp products to continue in Fremont. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

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As the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily holds off a ban on telehealth abortion pill care, Ohio reproductive rights advocates and clinics say the potential loss of that type of abortion access will cause uncertainty and direct impacts to public health and wellbeing.

The U.S. Supreme Court, specifically Justice Samuel Alito, ordered a one-week pause on a federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that stopped access to mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions, through the mail, or through any other means outside of in-person distribution.

The circuit court took up the case after a Louisiana-based challenge to the FDA’s “justifications for remotely dispensing mifepristone,” justifications Louisiana officials said were “based on flawed or nonexistent data.”

Following the court of appeals decision on May 1, drug companies that make mifepristone requested a pause.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mifepristone distribution would be allowed for one week as the court decides next steps in the appeals process.

Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio praised the pause, adding that restricting the drug “would have devastating consequences in Ohio and nationwide.”

“Decades of research and peer-reviewed studies demonstrate mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness,” Dr. Bhavik Kumar, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, said in a statement.

“It’s our sincere hope that the Supreme Court will make this restoration permanent so patients remain able to access this vital health care.”

Greater Ohio Planned Parenthoods plan to operate as usual until May 11, providing telehealth, mail and in-person medication abortion care.

Telehealth is a leading method of abortion care in Ohio, trending upward in the latest annual abortion report released by the Ohio Department of Health.

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Kumar called the appeals court decision “another politically-motivated attack on abortion.”

“This decision dictates how providers must practice medicine and eliminates patients’ personal choices about their health care,” Kumar said.

Mifepristone has been FDA-approved for decades, and decades of studies have promoted their safety, despite anti-abortion rights advocates claims that the drugs were overall a danger to pregnant people.

“Americans have safely and effectively used mifepristone to terminate pregnancies since it was approved a quarter-century ago,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of the abortion rights group Abortion Forward.

“The actions by one federal court in Louisiana are both a drastic overreach impacting patients far outside their jurisdiction, and an unacceptable blockade against people in need of options.”

While Ohio passed a constitutional amendment in 2023 to add abortion rights into the state constitution, Republican state legislators have been working to go around the amendment, attempting to not only further regulate abortion care, but disincentivize funding for clinics who provide abortion.

The legal activity also comes as Trumbull County Probate Judge David Engler attempts to get the state amendment thrown out, claiming the constitutional clause is keeping him from being able to rule on cases in which a minor requests court approval to conduct an abortion without parental consent, which involves a longtime legal method called judicial bypass.

The lawsuit is supported by anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life, which has worked to garner support for legislative measures to further regulate abortion as well.

“Parents, and when necessary, a probate judge in their stead, should maintain the ability to be involved with a decision of this magnitude when it involves their underage daughter,” said Carrie Snyder, executive director of Ohio Right to Life.

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After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down major provisions of the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional, some states are trying to draw new district lines ahead of the election. Ohio, which completed a bipartisan process in 2025, will likely not be joining the latest mapmaking effort.

Since the Voting Rights Act (VRA) went into effect decades ago, minority communities have had the assurance that there is recourse if they are discriminated against when trying to cast their ballot, but the Supreme Court’s latest 6-3 decision could take away representation.

Future elections could look different, at least that’s what voting rights advocate Jen Miller worries about.

“We could see large communities that are sliced and diced in ways that they really don’t have fair representation,” Jen Miller with the League of Women Voters of Ohio said.

The justices issued a decision in Louisiana v. Callais, overturning a Louisiana congressional map, saying its two majority-Black districts were unconstitutional.

“When large swaths of voters are not heard, our democracy will not be as effective,” Miller said.

This dramatically alters the interpretation of Section 2 of the VRA, which has allowed for some racial data to be used when drawing congressional and legislative district maps.

“The court has made it really, really hard for districts to be drawn in a way that gives black people or other minorities a realistic chance to elect candidates of their choice,” said Jonathan Entin, a Retired nonpartisan Case Western Reserve University constitutional law professor.

Entin explains that this could allow a legal challenge to a previously enacted map if racial data were used in creating the district.

“We’ll see some effort by Republicans to redraw at least some of the congressional districts in a way that makes it more likely that Republicans can control, can win those,” Entin added.

Ohio GOP leader Tony Schroeder cheered the ruling, saying it was a long time coming. Using race to draw districts is actually what is discriminatory to minority populations, he said.

“This actually harms black voters who may not have anything in common other than their race,” Tony Schroeder, Ohio Republican Party Secretary, said.

He approved of Ohio’s 2025 mapmaking process, when the state’s redistricting commission unanimously passed a 12-3 GOP-leaning map.

The new map is being called a “compromise” by both GOP and Democratic leaders on the commission, angering both progressives and far-right advocates we spoke to.

Republicans were worried about a referendum, and Democrats say that any other map would have been significantly worse for them.

“Will this ruling impact how the Ohio GOP redistricts moving forward?” I asked Schroeder.

“Well, I mean, I think there’s some possibility that there will be litigation associated with it,” he responded, adding that he doesn’t think anything will happen in the short term to change Ohio’s maps. “The larger impact we’re going to see as a result of this case is in 2030, when every state’s going to look at its redistricting in the light of that census.”

Ohio is supposed to have certain safeguards against gerrymandering, but some voters, like Bria Bennett, said that politicians have continued to break that law, which a bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court has previously agreed with.

“This partisan gerrymandered, 12 Republican, three Democratic, map explicitly targets black and brown communities,” Bennett said during the commission process.

Unlike other states, Ohio has a schedule of if and when it is allowed to redraw maps mid-decade. The congressional map decided in 2025 will be used for the next six years, according to the state constitution.

Legal experts say that it could now be up for interpretation.

Miller doesn’t trust any politician to do the right thing when it comes to redistricting, regardless of whether it’s in a blue or red state. She said politicians need to be out of the process as a whole, but that effort failed, in part due to what she calls deceptive ballot language, in 2024.

Still, both Schroeder and Miller think that 2030 is the target for more redistricting in the Buckeye State.

Due to the unanimous decision that came from the redistricting commission, plus House Speaker Matt Huffman’s dismissal of the Trump administration’s begs for more seats, points to Ohio staying out of the mapmaking spotlight — at least for the next few years.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on X and Facebook.

This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

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According to Newsweek, a record high percentage of Republicans from across the country now identify as part of President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, with about two thirds defining themselves this way.  

Recent polling suggests that things may be a little different among Ohio Republicans.  

The Democracy and Public Policy Network in the Department of Political Science at Bowling Green State University conducted its seventh web-based poll from April 7-14, 2026, with insight from 1,000 registered Ohio voters.

The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percentage points. The weighted sample reflects a +11 recalled vote margin for President Trump in the 2024 presidential race.

To measure the strength of the MAGA movement, we asked those who intended to vote in the state’s May 5 Republican primary if they consider themselves part of the MAGA movement.  

Overall, 55% of those who said they planned to vote in the Ohio Republican primary identified as part of the MAGA movement.

What could explain the difference between Ohio Republicans and the national figure? 

First, the question was asked a little differently in each survey, with the national survey asking, “Are you a MAGA supporter,” while ours asked, “Do you consider yourself to be part of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement?” 

The slight difference in the wording seems unlikely to account for the difference, however.  

Also, the difference is unlikely because of Democrats planning to vote in the Ohio Republican primary. Only two of the respondents who planned to vote in the Republican primary identified as Democrats.  

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The more likely culprit is that only just over half of those who said they planned to vote in the Republican primary have a very favorable opinion of Donald Trump, and nearly 20% believe the country is going in the wrong direction.

About half of Ohio Republican primary voters strongly approved of the Job Trump is doing as president.   

Which Ohio Republicans are more likely to identify as part of the MAGA movement?

Men (58%) were a little more likely than women (53%) to identify as part of the MAGA movement, as were those without a four-year degree (62%) compared to those with one (44%). 

Older voters were more likely than younger voters as well. 

Fully 65% of those aged 65 or older considered themselves part of the MAGA movement, whereas just under half of both 18-29 year olds and 30-49 year olds did.

More than 70% of those who consider themselves very conservative considered themselves part of the MAGA movement.    

Republican union members were only a little less likely (52%) than non-union members (56%) to identify as MAGA.  

Fully 62% of those who consider themselves Born Again identified as part of the MAGA movement, whereas only 50% of those who are not Born Again did, and 61% of those who say religion is very important in their lives considered themselves part of MAGA, while only 41% of those for whom it is not important at all did.  

Those who live in small towns or rural areas were substantially more likely than those who live in suburbs to consider themselves part of the MAGA movement.  

What does all this mean?

With only just over half of Ohio Republicans saying they identify as MAGA, that may reduce Donald Trump’s ability to influence the elections in November. 

Not only will Trump’s name not be on the ballot to provide coattails for Republicans, the shine of the MAGA brand may be coming off a little bit in the Buckeye State. 

Certainly the MAGA movement remains popular with those voters traditionally associated with it: older, rural, conservative men without four year degrees who consider themselves Born Again. But those voters are unlikely to be sufficient to carry the day in statewide elections in Ohio in 2026.  

On the other hand Democrats should certainly not be counting their chickens. 

The high percentage of Republican union members who consider themselves part of MAGA is a sign for Democrats that organized labor’s opposition to President Trump and his policies has not reached many of their Republican members. 

Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton are going to need those voters to prevail in November.   

Finally, all of this points to the possibility of Ohio once again becoming a battleground state, but for that to happen Democrats will need to prove it at the ballot box.

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Charlotte Cravins’ son Landry turned 2 in January. He’s a smiley little boy who loves singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and recently got his first pair of glasses.

Landry was born with Down syndrome and has impaired vision. He receives publicly funded therapies that have helped him learn to crawl, to pull himself up to stand, and to use American Sign Language.

Landry lives with his parents and sister in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of the eight states whose attorney general has chosen to remain in a lawsuit challenging a federal rule that protects accommodations for people with disabilities. States are asking a federal court in Texas to declare unconstitutional a part of federal law that requires states to provide services to disabled people in their communities, rather than in institutions, when appropriate.

Cravins, an attorney, has followed the case with increasing concern. If the states succeed, that could strip disabled people like her son of the right to publicly funded services that allow them to live in their own homes and neighborhoods, and instead push them into institutions such as state hospitals and nursing homes.

“Landry is a part of our family, a part of the community,” she said, “and to present his involvement in our family and in our community as a burden is unconscionable.”

The lawsuit is unusual. It began in 2024 with 17 Republican-led states suing the Biden administration over its inclusion of gender dysphoria as a protected disability under a portion of federal law known as Section 504. The states also challenged the constitutionality of Section 504 itself.

But the suit has since morphed into something different.

After President Donald Trump was reelected and his administration made clear it would not enforce the Biden rule protecting gender dysphoria, eight states pulled out of the lawsuit. Their attorneys general scrambled to distance themselves from it, amid a swift backlash from the disability community that warned the suit imperiled federal protections for all people with disabilities.

But in a surprising move, nine states chose to stick with the lawsuit anyway, and in January amended their complaint.

They’re now asking the court to strike down a part of Section 504 that requires states to provide disabled people with services in their communities whenever possible, rather than in institutions such as state hospitals and nursing homes.

It’s a maneuver that has shocked many in the disability rights community. Those who spoke with Stateline said they have not received answers from public officials about why the states are still pursuing the lawsuit after the Trump administration removed federal protections for gender dysphoria.

The Republican attorneys general from the states involved either did not respond to Stateline’s requests for comment or referred Stateline to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the lawsuit. Paxton did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

Last week, a few days after Stateline reached out, Indiana dropped out of the lawsuit, leaving eight states remaining.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, said he remains concerned about “federal overreach into traditional state matters” but felt that Trump’s move in December to officially exclude gender dysphoria from Section 504 protections meant the lawsuit’s core objective had been reached.

“Our goal in this lawsuit was to remove President Biden’s ridiculous addition of gender dysphoria as a disability, which risked jeopardizing services for those who truly need them most,” Rokita said in a statement. He noted he has a child with a disability; his son has Angelman syndrome, which causes developmental delays.

But eight other states are pushing forward with the lawsuit: Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota and Texas.

Cravins, Landry’s mom, said she feels misled by Louisiana Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, because Murrill initially framed the case as being about the inclusion of gender dysphoria and has not responded to questions about why her state remains involved after that’s no longer an issue.

“Other states left the lawsuit. Louisiana didn’t. Why?” Cravins asked. She said she’s written an open letter to Murrill about the case, with no response. “At this point, it seems that her issue is people with disabilities living in the community.”

States say in their revised complaint that updates to Section 504 unfairly restrict how they’re able to spend money and prevent them from deciding how best to care for their own residents. They say their budgets, strained by rising costs and workforce shortages, can’t always accommodate expensive service changes required by the law, and that with smaller Medicaid budgets they’re having to make hard choices. Removing the law’s “integration mandate” would give them more flexibility.

Disability rights advocates respond that if the court strikes down the integration rule, it will be harder for people with disabilities to get services in their communities. States won’t be required to provide those as a condition of receiving federal money.

And they worry the states’ efforts signal a return to darker times, when disabled people were hidden away, warehoused in institutions and far from family and friends.

“The reality is, the world was not built with us in mind, and there are people who would rather us not be here,” said Kaleigh Brendle, an advocate and college student who launched a nonprofit to push back against efforts to defang Section 504. “Us existing in the world makes people uncomfortable, with our braces, our canes, our wheelchairs, our differences.”

Nonpartisan, until recently

For decades, disability issues were largely nonpartisan. The two most consequential landmark federal disability rights laws were signed by Republican presidents: Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act — which includes Section 504 — in 1973; George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

The requirement that states provide services for disabled people in their communities comes from the landmark 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Advocates hailed that decision as a civil rights victory that has helped shift disability care from institutional “warehousing” to integrating disabled people into the fabric of their communities.

“Now the states’ lawsuit seeks to upend all of that,” said M. Geron Gadd, a senior attorney with the National Health Law Program who focuses on disability rights cases.

Gadd said that as a litigator, she’s seen states shift how they fight disability-related cases: Instead of disputing how laws apply in specific situations, states are increasingly challenging the thrust of the laws themselves.

“States seem to be much more offended by having to conform their programs and services to basic requirements of disability law,” said Gadd. And, she added, “it seems to have become politicized in ways that it had not been for decades.”

State efforts have echoed those at the federal level.

The Trump administration has been pushing a rule change that would penalize disabled adults who live with their families and deduct the value of their bedroom from the amount they receive in federal benefits. Last year, Trump administration officials abandoned a proposal to cut disability benefits for older workers after news reports and public outcry. The efforts have been made in the name of government efficiency and reducing red tape, particularly in safety-net programs.

And in April, the U.S. Department of Justice delayed a Biden-era deadline — based on the Americans with Disabilities Act — for state and local governments to update their web content to make it accessible for people with disabilities.

Disability rights advocates say the conservative-led states and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services they are suing feel like two sides of the same coin, with disabled people and their families caught in the middle of the case, without a champion.

‘Something to fight back’

When Kaleigh Brendle was 17, she joined four other vision-impaired high school students in challenging a decision by the College Board — which administers Advanced Placement tests — to replace hard-copy Braille exams with a digital format during the COVID-19 pandemic.

They were successful. Brendle’s experience then, as well as her experiences pushing to get the accommodations she needed in school, drove her to advocate for disability rights nationally.

She named her new advocacy nonprofit Judy’s League, for Judy Heumann, a legendary disability rights activist known as the “Mother of the Disability Rights Movement.” Brendle likes to quote Heumann, who often said that disability can happen to anyone at any time.

Families and students with disabilities also worry the Republican states’ lawsuit could erode Section 504 protections for students if states were no longer required to provide services in public schools and could instead direct students to institutions.

As a student, Brendle received services locally that helped her learn to use a cane, to read Braille and to use accessible technology needed to complete school coursework.

At times she had to push for the accommodations she needed.

“But at least 504 gives you a leg to stand on,” she said. “It gives you something to fight back with.”

Similarly, Cravins worries her son Landry could have a hard time receiving services at his local school when he’s old enough to attend, even though he would be able to go to school with his peers with the right supports.

National disability rights groups — including the National Federation of the Blind, the National Down Syndrome Society and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund — have continued urging the public to speak out about the possible loss of rights.

“It feels like it’s up to us as individuals to try and convince these people in these positions of power to stop attacking us,” Brendle said.

Cascading effects

On Monday, the states asked the judge to decide the lawsuit without a trial. Over the next few months, the states and feds will file briefs with the court. Disability community groups and allies will have the chance to file briefs as well.

If the states prevail, it’s hard to say what the cascading legal impacts could be. A win could trigger further litigation. Other courts might interpret the law differently.

A number of state laws, programs and other efforts have been built on the integration mandate and could be affected as well, said Mike Oxford, a retired director of an independent living center in Topeka, Kansas, who has been a longtime disability rights advocate.

“I’ve seen people with significant disabilities become great lawyers, academics, corporate leaders, on and on,” he said. “That would not have happened” without the integration mandate.

Oxford said he has not gotten a response from Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach when he asked about the case. He doesn’t think that the attorneys general remaining in the case believe it’s still about gender dysphoria.

“It’s just totally ridiculous,” he said. “They’re lawyers. They signed the new complaint. They know what it does and doesn’t say.”

If the court strikes down the integration mandate, that doesn’t mean the entire law is invalidated or in-community services automatically cease.

But it does mean that if a family were denied services outside of an institution, they’d likely have to pursue litigation each time to fight the decision, Cravins said.

“I think it’s important for the average citizen to realize that laws only work when there is enforcement behind them,” she said.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

The leader of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted that he had never even heard of some of the countries his agency has been deporting immigrants to.

“Now we are actually removing people to countries that I didn’t even know existed,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said during a panel discussion at the 2026 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, speaking of the third country deportation program in which the administration has sent immigrants to African nations they have no ties to. 

Lyons added that the third country deportation program has been “a huge game changer” in implementing President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

Lyons was one of a series of Trump administration speakers, including “border czar” Tom Homan, who spoke Tuesday, and interim U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who will be giving the event’s keynote speech on Wednesday. 

Lyons, who will be resigning at the end of this month, made the comment during a “State of the Border” panel discussion. Last year, Lyons used the session to declare that ICE’s goal was to deport millions of people with the efficiency that Amazon delivers packages. 

During last year’s event, Homan and other speakers told the military industrial complex representatives in the crowd that the Trump administration is depending on the private sector to implement its mass deportation agenda. 

That message remained largely unchanged this year, though Lyons and others also took aim at the public perception of the enforcement actions which have led to nearly two-thirds of Americans saying ICE has gone too far. 

Homan claimed that those who work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE and similar agencies have been “vilified by the media” and members of Congress, taking particular offense to comments made by elected officials comparing their actions to Nazi Germany. 

Homan said that ICE is just “enforcing the laws” written by members of Congress and called those remarks the “ultimate insult.” 

The rampant use of violence by immigration agents, including the shooting deaths of two American citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, has been well documented on social media and in the press.

Homan also went on to falsely claim that ICE has not arrested individuals in churches or at hospitals. There have been multiple reports of recent immigration enforcement activity at churches as well as at hospitals. The Trump administration in 2025 rolled back federal protections that designated hospitals as protected areas where ICE could not do enforcement actions. 

On those enforcement actions, Homan said that more are coming. He said he had been speaking with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who has agreed to hire more deportation officers. 

“You ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said to applause and cheers from the crowd. “This is going to be a good year.” 

Homan also claimed that New York will be seeing more ICE agents due to a proposed law that would ban police in the Empire State from entering into 287(g) agreements with ICE. Such agreements leverage local resources to do the investigative legwork for federal immigration agents and increase deportation rates. 

“We’re going to flood the zone. You’re going to see more ICE agents than you’ve seen before,” Homan said of New York if they pass such a law, claiming that it would make the state less safe and make it harder for ICE to do its job. “You forced us in this position.” 

During the “State of the Border” panel in which Lyons participated, officials lauded the Trump administration for letting them “do the work” and touted the low number of illegal border crossings that have occurred under the second Trump administration. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott also spoke directly to “any illegal aliens out there.” 

“We’re going to go find your entire family, your entire network. Anybody you spoke to on the phone. We’re going to take out that entire network,” Scott said, adding that one arrest at the border can lead to multiple arrests inside the United States of other individuals. 

Both Scott and Lyons also shot back at a question asked by a member of the audience who asked for them to respond to reporting by ProPublica that found more than 170 U.S. citizens have been arrested by immigration agents.

“We don’t arrest U.S. citizens, we arrest criminals. Period,” Scott said, adding that any U.S. citizen they do arrest is likely a criminal and that they are overseen by the Office of the Inspector General and FBI. Lyons made a similar statement. 

The Trump administration has gutted the OIG and DHS itself has reportedly been obstructing the work of the OIG in recent months. ICE has also arrested U.S. citizens during enforcement actions who were often later released without being charged with a crime. 

A small group of protesters showed up to the event Tuesday. Among them was Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari.

On the show floor, vendors hawked their wares to Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security Investigations agents and local law enforcement that were seen by the Arizona Mirror walking the floor. 

A large majority of this year’s vendors focused on camera platforms, some meant to provide persistent surveillance and others meant to be placed at ports of entry to scan faces in cars in real time. 

Also present were a number of vendors aiming to integrate artificial intelligence with workbook systems or camera platforms. 

Two of the most prevalent forms of tech at the expo this year were drones and technology to counter them. 

But it wasn’t just surveillance technology and military grade tech meant for the border at the expo. 

One piece of equipment shown to the Mirror was the “Upper Hand Glove” by On Point Solutions. It is a wearable metal detector in the form of a glove meant to streamline the metal detection process. 

Also present at the expo were companies looking to cash in on transporting detained immigrants as well as housing them. 

The Mirror examined the list of companies set to be in attendance to highlight some of the key trends as well as noteworthy companies seeking the attention of the government officials.  

Some have ties to Trump and his allies, such as Andruil Industries, which is tied to Trump ally Palantir.

This story was originally produced by Arizona Mirror, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

WASHINGTON — Voters, including those within the Make America Healthy Again movement, say the rising cost of healthcare is a significant concern that will have an impact on whom they support in November’s midterm elections, according to a poll released Wednesday by KFF. 

Sixty-one percent of respondents to the survey, which asked how important several health-related issues were, said the price of healthcare will have a major impact on which party they support as control of Congress hangs in the balance.

Among MAHA voters, who are predominantly Republicans but also include independents and some Democrats, 42% said cost is their top issue heading into the elections. 

“While the issue of health costs is more salient for Democratic voters than for Republicans, larger shares across partisans say health costs will have a major impact on their voting decisions than say the same about vaccine policy or food safety,” the survey said. 

Seventy-two percent of Democrats, 63% of independents and 47% of Republicans said the cost of healthcare will have a major impact on which party’s candidate they vote for. 

Vaccine policy came in next, with 57% of Democrats, 46% of independents and 32% of Republicans surveyed saying it will have a major impact on their choice. 

Issues related to food safety came in third after 43% of Democrats, 40% of independents and 38% of Republicans responded that it will have a major impact on their choice of candidate.  

MAHA issues 

For MAHA voters, twice as many listed health costs as their first priority than the next issue: restricting the use of certain chemical additives in food, which was a key concern for 21%.

Ten percent were interested in politicians who will reevaluate vaccine approvals, 8% want lawmakers to limit corporate interest in food and 8% want Congress to limit the use of pesticides in agriculture. Eleven percent said none of those or had no answer. 

The survey showed that a significant majority of Americans across the political spectrum believe the government hasn’t done enough to address chemical additives in food or pesticide use in agriculture, two core demands of MAHA supporters.  

“The public perception that there is not enough regulation may be rooted in broader skepticism toward the industries themselves,” the survey said. “Most U.S. adults do not trust pharmaceutical companies, food and beverage companies, or agricultural companies to act in the public’s best interest.”

Doctors and healthcare providers were the most trusted source of information at 70%, followed by agriculture companies at 40%, food and beverage companies at 25% and pharmaceutical companies at 21%. 

Seventy-five percent of those polled said the government hasn’t done enough to regulate chemicals in food, while 65% said it should do more to regulate pesticides in agriculture. 

The poll of 1,343 U.S. adults took place from April 14 to April 19. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points for the full sample and 6 percentage points for MAHA supporters.

WASHINGTON — Get off the train at Union Station, walk outside and gasp at that iconic view of the Capitol dome in front of you. 

Cross the street and the first thing you run into is a construction site surrounding walled-off Columbus Circle. On the wall is a huge poster of President Donald Trump wearing a hard hat (and a coat and tie).

“Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP,” the sign says.

That’s just the start of what a tourist will encounter as they sightsee in the heart of the nation’s capital. Or these days, the nation’s capital as brought to you by Donald Trump.

The Trump reminders are all over. Walk the tourist walk from the Capitol down and around Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House and on to the Lincoln Memorial and it’s clear who’s in charge.

Whether or not this is affecting tourism is unclear. Destination DC, a nonprofit organization that markets the area as a global tourist destination, doesn’t keep month-to-month data. It found in 2024, before the Trump boom, a record 27.2 million people visited the city.

“Tourists who are pro-Trump will be drawn to his eponymous sites. Those who oppose him will not. Most tourists will pay no attention to his projects but will enjoy all the historic and exciting venues and exhibits in Washington,” said Barbara Perry, professor in Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center 

She said Trump’s propensity to “destroy, rebuild, construct, and name numerous sites and institutions for himself is most unusual.”

Trump likenesses 

Trump detailed his plans in a March, 2025, executive order, “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful.”

“Its highways, boulevards, and parks should be clean, well-kept, and pleasant,” he said of the nation’s capital. “Its monuments, museums, and buildings should reflect and inspire awe and appreciation for our Nation’s strength, greatness, and heritage. Our citizens deserve nothing less.” 

Previous incumbent presidents’ pictures were usually confined to 8-by-10 portraits hanging in post offices or deep inside other federal buildings, as they were careful not to splatter their names and likenesses so publicly.

“Typical presidents want to avoid looking arrogant by honoring themselves while in office or even after—except for their presidential libraries, starting with FDR. They usually feel humbled if a Navy ship, for example, is named for them while they are extant: Bush I and Ford come to mind,” Perry said of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford.

Both served in the Navy and saw combat in the South Pacific.

Democrats are furious about the Trump makeover. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, calls Trump’s actions “narcissism” and is pushing the “Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego Act.”

“Donald Trump doesn’t get to slap his name on any public institution he chooses. We don’t have kings or dictators in America, and this legislation stops him or any future sitting president from creating monuments to glorify themselves,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

The bill is likely to go nowhere in the Republican-run Congress.

So for now, tourists can stroll around the Mall and see how Trump has tried to transform the nation’s capital.

Starting at the Capitol and heading south down Constitution Avenue until it splits off to Pennsylvania Avenue, here goes:

Albert Pike statue

Status: Installed at Judiciary Square, about four blocks from the Capitol.

Details: “The only public sculpture in DC to commemorate a Confederate general,” says the DC Historic Sites team website. Pike was a slave owner and a senior officer in the Confederate Army.

The memorial was “toppled and burned on Juneteenth of 2020, as protests continued across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd,” the website says. Floyd was a Black man killed by a white policeman in Minneapolis, sparking protests around the country.

Last year, the Trump administration had the Pike statue restored and placed at its present location. 

The action was part of an executive order Trump issued in March 2025. He ordered a review of memorials or statues that had been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” 

The order also affected the Smithsonian Institution, which Trump said “has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” 

Trump banners on federal buildings

Status: Huge banners with Trump’s face hang from the Judiciary and Labor Departments.

Details: “American Workers First” says the Labor banner, with Trump’s vastly enlarged face atop the saying. Another banner features President Theodore Roosevelt. 

The banners, which cover almost three stories of the building, are visible from both heavily-trafficked Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues.

About six blocks away, on Pennsylvania Avenue at the Justice Department — which a few years ago investigated Trump for possible crimes — there’s a new, three-story banner where he looks down at the street atop the saying “Make American Safe Again.”

When the Labor banner went up, then-Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told Trump about it at a Cabinet meeting, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

“Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker,” she told him.

Bonus sighting: As you walk along Pennsylvania Avenue, don’t miss another “Thank You, President Trump” banner hanging on a construction wall across from the National Gallery of Art near 4th Street.

White House ballroom

Status: Walk up Pennsylvania Avenue starting at the 1500 block and you’ll see the White House East Wing is gone. It’s a rubble-laden construction site now, where Trump is trying to build a 90,000 square foot ballroom with a military installation underneath. The project is to be privately funded, though Senate Republicans are seeking $1 billion for security in an immigration bill.

Details: The project is embroiled in a still-evolving legal battle. The April 25 assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where a gunman threatened the president and top officials, may be changing minds.

Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Montana,  last month introduced legislation to authorize the ballroom. “A President of any party should be able to host events in a secure area without attendees worrying about their safety. This is common sense. Let’s get it done,” he tweeted.

Last week, Justice sought to have the lawsuit dismissed. “This (ballroom) project will ensure that events like the horrific attack on Saturday night do not happen again,” it argued.

Reflecting Pool

Status: Keep walking toward Constitution Avenue. You’ll see the Reflecting Pool between the World War II Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. Renovations are underway and expected to be completed by July 4. The pool is being cleaned and painted blue.

Details: The pool has often been criticized for being dirty and leaking. 

Trump’s effort is going a step farther than others who have launched renovation and cleaning projects. He said the project will cost $2 million, far less than other recent refurbishing efforts, according to his TruthSocial website.

“It was filthy dirty and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” Trump said in a video posted to the site. 

He’s having it painted “swimming pool blue,” a color that appalls many preservationists.  

Kennedy Center

Details: The city’s premier cultural center is about a 20-minute walk away. Perhaps no Trump change has provoked more outrage among his Washington critics than his renaming of the capital’s cultural center.

He said during a visit to the center in March 2025 that “it needs a lot of work,” adding it should have better seats and more “Broadway hits.”

The president overhauled its governance, creating a board that named him the center’s chairman, changed programming to suit his tastes, and announced the center would close this summer for two years for renovations.

Status: While the center’s board renamed the site the Trump-Kennedy Center, Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, an ex officio member of the board, has taken legal action in federal court seeking to stop the name change, saying only Congress can do so. The case is pending.

Monumental Arch

Details: Trump wants to build a 250 foot arch — taller than the nearby Lincoln Memorial and the tallest in the world — at the traffic circle at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. The circle leads to the Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, connecting to the Lincoln Memorial.

Status: The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, packed with Trump appointees, approved the arch’s concept design in April. 

The arch, the commission said in its approval letter, “would contribute positively to the honorific landscape of Washington, D.C., for many generations.” It requested more information for the next phase, including plans for better pedestrian access and sculptures.

Court battles await, notably from a group of Vietnam veterans and others. 

They say the arch would distort the clear view from the cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial, as well as disrupt the symbolism of the bridge, designed to join the North and South.

Off the usual paths

Go away from the main tourist routes and there’s yet more evidence of the Trump rebranding. The United States National Institute of Peace is now the Donald J. Trump National Institute of Peace. The change is meant “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history,” said a State Department tweet.

Then there’s what tourists won’t see.

“Visitors who take the garden tour of the White House this spring will miss the beautiful Rose Garden outside the West Wing and the Jackie Kennedy Garden outside the East Wing, of blessed memory,” said Perry. “Both gardens, planned by the Kennedys, plus the East Wing itself have been obliterated by the incumbent.” 

The Rose Garden, the White House says, “was turned into a patio with roses lining the perimeter, developing a space dedicated to hospitality and entertaining. Today, the Rose Garden is used to host many guests of the president for events and dinners.” 

East Potomac Golf Course

While the East Potomac Golf Course isn’t right on the main tourist route, it’s just off to the side on an island not far from the Jefferson Memorial, with a view of the Washington Monument. The Trump administration has reportedly wanted to close and then revamp the historic site. Preservationists and local folks are furious.

Reports say he wants to convert it to a championship golf course — one that some think will make it an exclusive club, instead of the current affordable public setup that’s popular with locals. NOTUS wrote that the National Park Service is scheduled to start landscaping.

The links currently have two nine-hole courses, an 18-hole par 72 course, miniature golf, a driving range and a restaurant. 

The D.C. Preservation League and two local residents Sunday asked a District Court judge to halt any Trump project. 

“Trump is taking a public park away from the American people while spending their hard-earned taxpayer dollars to build a private, elite club from which he’d personally profit,” Democracy Defenders Fund Executive Chair Norm Eisen said in a statement.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes on Monday did not stop the project, saying reports about the course’s overhaul did not provide enough evidence for her to act, but she warned that if she sees that certain renovations are underway she could reconsider.

National Mall Superintendent Kevin Griess said Monday there were no plans to begin renovation work but a safety assessment was underway, The Associated Press reported.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans released a roughly $70 billion spending package Monday night that will keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operating for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term without any of the new constraints Democrats have demanded.

The legislation also includes $1 billion “to support enhancements by the United States Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.”

Trump, who had the East Wing of the White House bulldozed to make way for his $300 or $400 million ballroom project, had said it would be funded by private donors and not taxpayers. White House officials have said the ballroom is critical for national security when top officials are gathered, following an April 25 incident in which a gunman opened fire at a dinner at the Washington Hilton attended by Trump.

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement the panel “is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families.” 

“We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay,” he added. 

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement the package shows “Republicans are ignoring the needs of middle-class America and instead funneling money into Trump’s ballroom and throwing billions at two lawless agencies.”

He noted the Department of Homeland Security has more than $100 billion from Republicans’ signature tax and spending cuts package it hasn’t spent. 

“Throughout this process, Democrats will continue to show the American people that we are for bringing down costs, making it easier to get ahead, and building an economy where families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share,” Merkley said. “It is clear that the country has had enough of the Republican ‘families lose, billionaires win’ agenda.”

Billions for immigration enforcement

The package’s release follows a record-setting shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security that began after the two parties were unable to reach a compromise on new guardrails for immigration operations after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.  

The Judiciary Committee’s bill includes $30.725 billion for ICE, $3.47 billion for Customs and Border Protection and $1.457 billion for the Department of Justice.

The bill from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs allocates $19.1 billion for CBP to hire Border Patrol staff and $7.45 billion for ICE to hire Homeland Security Investigations agents.

CPB will receive an additional $3.45 billion to purchase new technology “to combat the entry or exit of illicit narcotics at ports of entry,” to upgrade border surveillance technology and to conduct initial screenings of unaccompanied children. 

Another $2.5 billion would go to the Homeland Security secretary for any additional border security needs. 

All of the funding would last through Sept. 30, 2029.

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a statement the panel plans to vote later this month to advance the bill. 

“Senate Democrats refuse to vote for a single dollar to secure our borders or enforce our immigration laws, even against the most violent illegal aliens,” Paul said. 

60 votes not needed in Senate

Republicans plan to pass the bill using the same complex budget reconciliation process they used last year to enact their “big, beautiful” law that provided DHS with $170 billion. 

GOP lawmakers voted last month to approve the budget resolution that unlocks the process that comes with many rules and restrictions but avoids the need to get 60 votes in the Senate to end debate. 

Senate Republican leaders chose to separate funding for ICE and Border Patrol from the annual Homeland Security appropriations bill after the two political parties made little progress toward restrictions on immigration agents. 

The stalemate led to a 76-day shutdown for the Department of Homeland Security, which ended in late April after the House sent Trump the annual funding bill the Senate had approved a month earlier.

WASHINGTON — The alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday on four federal charges, including attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump and assaulting an officer or employee of the United States with a deadly weapon.

The three-page indictment alleges 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, of California, “knowingly and by means and use of a deadly and dangerous weapon” forcibly assaulted, intimidated or interfered with an unidentified U.S. Secret Service agent who was hit with one bullet in his protective vest while working a security checkpoint outside the annual dinner. The agent was uninjured.

The indictment does not specify whether Allen fired the shot that hit the agent.

Allen was also indicted on transporting a firearm over state lines with intent to commit a felony, and using, brandishing or discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. 

Shotgun, pistol and wire cutters

The indictment specifies Allen transported a 12-gauge pump action shotgun with 45 rounds of ammunition, and a .38 caliber semi-automatic pistol with 55 rounds of ammunition.

Government prosecutors in a court filing prior to the indictment alleged Allen also had on him “two knives, four daggers, multiple sheaths, multiple holsters, needle nose pliers, (and) wire cutters.”

The Department of Justice initially charged Allen on three of the grand jury indictment counts, with the exception of assaulting a federal officer or employee.

Allen is scheduled to be arraigned in federal district court Monday in Washington, D.C.

He faces up to life in prison if convicted of attempting to kill the president.

Black-tie dinner

Allen allegedly rushed a security checkpoint one level above the Washington Hilton ballroom on April 25 where Trump, Vice President JD Vance and several Cabinet officials were among thousands of journalists, government officials and celebrities attending the black-tie event that dates back a century.

Shortly before he ran through a magnetometer, with a long gun in hand, at 8:40 p.m., Allen sent an email to friends and family explaining he intended to target “administration officials … prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”

Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Cabinet members all safely evacuated the ballroom. 

The Secret Service agent, whose vest protected him from gunfire, is referred to in court filings as V.G. 

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters April 27 that a ballistics investigation had not yet been completed, and would not answer whether Allen fired the bullet that hit the agent.

V.G. fired five rounds from his service weapon in Allen’s direction, but did not hit the suspect who fell to the ground and sustained minor injuries, according to a signed affidavit from law enforcement filed in court April 27.

Trump publicly shared photos on his social media platform Truth Social the day following the dinner of a shirtless and handcuffed Allen face down on the hotel carpet Saturday night.

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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• Hunting and fishing amendment? Cleveland.com’s Karan Singh reports, “Proposed constitutional amendment on hunting and fishing deemed ‘a solution in search of a problem’.”

A measure to enshrine hunting and fishing in the state’s constitution has revived a recurring question: Are politicians solving real problems or creating new ones?

Over three hearings, Senate Joint Resolution 8 revealed a sharp divide:

Supporters insist it is a proactive safeguard for tradition and economic stability, while opponents warn it may upend wildlife management systems, trigger legal challenges and complicate Ohio’s governing document.

• Dismissed. Athens County Independent’s Keri Johnson reports, “County commissioner’s intimidation charge dismissed.”

Athens County Commissioner Charlie Adkins’ third-degree felony intimidation charge was dismissed without prejudice Friday at his arraignment in the Athens County Courthouse.

The state asked that the charge be dismissed, pending further investigation. Visiting Judge John Wallace granted the special prosecutors’ motion to dismiss without prejudice.

• Seneca County. The Tiffin Advertiser-Tribune’s Kayla Trevino reports, “What Frankart said under oath.”

When the Seneca County Commissioners’ office described Bill Frankart’s May 2024 deposition as a battle he endured with “typical wisdom and strength,” it did not describe what he said under oath inside that conference room.

According to the deposition transcript, obtained by the Advertiser-Tribune through a records request to the Ottawa-Sandusky-Seneca Joint Solid Waste Management District, Frankart acknowledged over more than six hours of questioning by WIN Waste’s legal team that public statements he had made, including signed testimony submitted to the Ohio Senate, were false. He said he had taken no action to correct them.

• The U.S. government actively suppressing the safety of vaccines. The New York Times reports, “F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe.”

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

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When you fill up your tank with regular, unleaded gas pushing $5 bucks a gallon or pump diesel into your truck closing in on $6 per gallon, think ballrooms.

It’s all the president thinks about even as the war he started (for no good reason) takes a sharp bite out of your wallet every time you refuel.

Two months ago, the erratic felon in the Oval Office dragged the U.S. into a quagmire in the Middle East with no clearly defined objective or exit strategy.

Trump just bombed Iran, a nation that posed no imminent threat to America — if we take him at his word. Last summer, Trump repeatedly said Iran was decimated following U.S./Israeli airstrikes that “obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities. 

But he launched an epic attack on Iran anyway, amassing over 50,000 troops and multiple carrier strike groups in the region, rapidly depleting key munition stockpiles and running up a tab of at least $25 billion-and-counting.

Iran retaliated (predictably) by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global energy chokepoint.

Which gets us back to soaring gas prices and ballrooms.

Closure of that vital waterway in the Persian Gulf is directly related to what you’re paying for a full tank of gas today over what it cost in late February. 

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Why? Gasoline prices are primarily determined by supply and demand in a global market, not a domestic one.

When supply of crude oil, used to make gasoline, is disrupted — courtesy of Trump’s Iran war — and demand for gas stays the same, (because you still need to get to work) prices rise. Worldwide. Plus, higher transportation costs mean you also pay more for other products from groceries to clothes.

But as gas prices surge to record highs in Ohio, compounding cost-of-living spikes everywhere else, and the global economy is knocked sideways by Trump’s reckless “excursion” into Tehran, the president is laser focused — not on an urgent way out of the mess he created — but on a gold-plated legacy to dwarf the White House.

“We need a ballroom,” Trump said ludicrously as warning signs of recession flashed around the world. A petulant plutocrat obsessed with opulence not governing.

The serial liar, who promised no taxpayer money would be spent on his ballroom, sent a bill to Congress for $400 million to build it.

A Trumpian Palace of Versailles done on the public dime — while you can’t afford gas for your car.

But the Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” mentality King Donald and his billionaire cronies assume in their gilded bubble, isn’t constrained to only the Trump circle.

Last week, Ohio’s power brokers in state government gloried in the groundbreaking of the palatial pet project of a multi-billionaire NFL owner.

Jimmy Haslam had called in his GOP chits to get hundreds of millions in public funding for his private sports facility investment.

Jimmy and Dee Haslam, owners of the Cleveland Browns (who should henceforth be called Brook Park Browns) padded the campaign coffers of leading Ohio Republicans and dropped $100,000 on their efforts to defeat an anti-gerrymandering ballot issue two years ago to grease the skids for lavish government subsidies for a new domed stadium/entertainment complex in Brook Park.

Call it another billionaire bailout on the backs of Ohioans struggling to stay afloat with climbing electric bills, rent hikes, rising out-of-pocket medical costs, worsening food price inflation, and gas prices that recently spiked nearly 40 cents in a single day.

But Ohio “needed this” gushed Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine as he rubbed elbows with the Big Money gathered to break ground on the Haslam’s $2.6 billion suburban boondoggle.

He was there to chat about what the state’s role might be in lessening the financial burdens of a football team owner whose personal net worth is $10.3 billion and whose family’s overall worth is $14.4 billion.

The state has already agreed to kick in a whopping $600 million via unclaimed funds, (currently tied up in court) and Brook Park expects to throw in another $245 million, to be generated via tax revenues.

The Ohio Department of Transportation approved $35 million in state funding to help upgrade infrastructure near the new stadium site.

The Haslams are angling for a bump in the Cuyahoga County sin tax, maybe doubling or tripling the rate, to pull in more public money for maintenance.

DeWine lauded the largesse of the state plan to subsidize a privately owned, for-profit business owned by an enormously rich sports industry titan and suggested, with a straight face, that the massive handout in public funds to the Haslams “did not interfere with the money we need for education and all the other things we want.”

Yet before Republican lawmakers gifted their generous GOP donor with a generous state grant (to leave Cleveland in the dust) Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman — who pocketed $60,999 from Jimmy and Dee between Jan 1, 2024, and March 24, 2025 — maintained the state couldn’t afford to fully fund public education and passed a budget (the governor signed) that cut the Fair School Funding Plan by two-thirds.

That budget also slashed state aid to libraries and cut millions from Ohio food bank funding, childcare, clean water programs, etc.

If only the state had $600 million to spare for desperately needed quality of life initiatives.

If only the plutocrats drawn to domed playgrounds and gaudy ballrooms pumped their own gas. 

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Americans’ views on crime often don’t match reality — and a new report suggests those perceptions are shaped as much by personal experiences and economic conditions as by crime itself.

The analysis, released by the nonprofit think tank Council on Criminal Justice, draws on decades of Gallup survey data to examine how people perceive crime and what drives those beliefs. The report’s authors found that, since the 1960s, public perceptions of crime have frequently diverged from actual crime trends.

Even during periods when crime declined, most Americans continued to believe it was rising. From 2005 to 2024, about 69% of survey respondents on average said crime was higher than the year before, despite overall crime rates falling in most of those years, according to the report.

Fear of crime has remained relatively stable over time. In 2024, 35% of Americans said they were afraid to walk alone at night — the same share as in 1968.

The researchers found that public concern tends to track major shifts in homicide rates more closely than broader crime trends. But overall, people’s views about crime and their fear of it have not matched shifts in crime rates for most years, according to the report.

Instead, the analysis points to other factors that shape how Americans think about public safety.

Household victimization — whether someone in the home has been a victim of a crime — was one of the strongest predictors of both fear and the belief that crime is increasing. 

Property crimes, such as theft, and people’s own experiences with crime were more closely tied to concerns about the issue than actual violent crime rates.

Economic sentiment also played a role. People who said it was a good time to find a job or expected to spend the same or more on holiday shopping were less likely to say crime was rising and less likely to report fear of walking alone at night, according to the report.

Political views showed a more limited effect. While people with more conservative ideologies were somewhat more likely to perceive crime as increasing, political party affiliation itself was not a significant factor after accounting for economic conditions and other variables.

Higher presidential and congressional approval ratings were associated with a greater likelihood that respondents said crime was staying the same or declining, according to the report.

Local conditions, meanwhile, were more closely linked to personal fears than to perceptions of crime overall. The researchers found that neighborhood factors, such as poverty and youth population, were associated with whether people said they were afraid, but did not generally influence whether they believed crime was rising locally or nationally.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Ty Wooten didn’t realize the weight of answering his first 911 call — until more than a decade later.

A woman had dialed 911 to report that her husband had shot himself in front of her and their 7-year-old son, on the family’s living room couch. It was Wooten’s first call as a dispatcher.

“I wasn’t prepared for that, and I didn’t quite realize how difficult that call was for me for several years,” said Wooten, who has worked in the 911 industry for more than 30 years, both taking calls and managing dispatch centers.

He is now director of government affairs for the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch, an industry group that helps set standards for emergency dispatch centers.

Wooten pushed the experience aside. It wasn’t until about 15 years later, while swapping stories with colleagues, that the details came rushing back — triggering a spiral of anxiety, panic attacks and depression that would take time to fully confront.

“I had taken that experience and kind of put it in the corner of my mind, and built a wall around it so I wouldn’t think about it again,” Wooten said.

Wooten’s experience reflects a broader reality for first responders, who are routinely exposed to traumatic events but often lack the space — or support — to process them.

Across the country, state and local officials are increasingly looking for ways to change that, expanding mental health resources and testing new approaches aimed at reducing stigma and improving access to care for 911 dispatchers, police officers, firefighters, paramedics and emergency medical technicians.

Research suggests that first responders face higher rates of trauma-related mental health challenges than the general public, with repeated exposure increasing the risk of post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. That strain has also been linked to burnout, and to higher rates of substance use and suicidal ideation.

Some policing experts say untreated trauma and stigma around mental health don’t just harm police officers — they can also ripple outward, influencing split-second decisions on the street and the quality of encounters with the public.

“It’s not just a personal and individual tragedy. It’s also potentially going to have a direct consequence for how officers treat those they encounter on duty,” said Heidi Bonner, a criminal justice and criminology professor at East Carolina University.

At the same time, rising health care costs and concerns about affordability have made access to mental health services more difficult for many nationwide. Some communities are already experimenting with new approaches for first responders.

In Brevard County, Florida, some first responders now have access to therapy dogs, peer-to-peer counseling and confidential hotlines. Florida state officials last year also announced they were developing a more coordinated, statewide mental health program for first responders.

In Virginia, Henrico County firefighters gained access to a new app that allows them to seek mental health support anonymously. They are one of the first departments in the country to use the platform. Some experts say anonymity can help reduce barriers tied to stigma and fear of professional consequences.

Expanding options

Even as awareness grows, many first responders still don’t seek help — a gap that policymakers and local agencies are increasingly trying to address.

“You’re going to see something horrible, and the expectation is, ‘Yeah, that’s what we do — you just got to deal with it,’” said Alanna Badgley, a paramedic in New York. Badgley also is the EMS external affairs coordinator for the International Association of EMTs and Paramedics.

“Bringing up if you were feeling some kind of way might have been seen as a sign of weakness, or that you weren’t cut out for the job, so a lot of people would kind of hide it,” she said, describing what the culture was like when she started in emergency medicine in 2010.

She added that there’s now a growing recognition that first responders need to be honest about their mental health and seek support early and often.

You’re going to see something horrible, and the expectation is, ‘Yeah, that’s what we do — you just got to deal with it.’

– Alanna Badgley, paramedic in New York state

Many agencies or departments offer employee assistance programs, or EAPs, which provide confidential counseling and support services for employees dealing with personal or work-related stress, but some first responders may hesitate to use them.

“A lot of first responders worry about the potential for their employer to know what’s going on if they go through their EAP,” Badgley said.

A 2025 survey by the National Emergency Number Association found that nearly 70% of telecommunicators reported feeling stress before every shift, with fatigue and anxiety among the most common symptoms.

In recent years, states and municipalities say they’re focusing on reducing barriers to care, including affordability.

“We will pay whatever it takes for someone to get help,” said Tom Synan, the police chief of the Newtown Police Department in Ohio. Synan also is a speaker with the nonprofit Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

“I think that’s what’s going to help first responders have long careers, better home life and better service to the community,” he added.

State efforts

In New York, state officials launched an online training program in March to help mental health professionals better understand and support first responders, with a focus on responder culture and barriers to care.

New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in January signed into law a measure that provides employment protections for first responders diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, barring retaliation and guaranteeing they can return to their jobs once cleared. The law is already in effect.

In Nebraska, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen in April signed into law a bill that shields peer support conversations from being used in court or disciplinary proceedings.

Minnesota legislators are considering a proposal to allow first responders to access donated mental health services, including counseling and peer support, without violating state gift laws.

And in Missouri, lawmakers have advanced legislation to study alternative therapies, including the psychoactive compounds psilocybin and ibogaine, for treating conditions such as depression, substance use and post-traumatic stress, with first responders and military veterans eligible to participate in supervised studies.

Other states have taken similar steps in recent years. Last year, Ohio lawmakers approved $40 million for a PTSD treatment fund, while Texas is developing a statewide peer support network for firefighters and EMS personnel.

Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Utah and Washington have enacted laws to protect the confidentiality of peer support counseling. Lawmakers in Vermont are considering similar legislation this year that would ensure conversations in peer support groups remain confidential for first responders.

Still, advocates say access alone does not guarantee use — particularly when providers may not fully understand the realities of the job.

“The trauma is so unique,” Badgley said. “It’s hard to feel comfortable confiding in somebody who just really isn’t trauma informed, or doesn’t understand the first responder mentality.”

Some first responders say the mental health strain of the job goes beyond exposure to traumatic calls. It’s often shaped just as much by internal and external pressures, including workplace dynamics, public expectations, staffing shortages and required overtime, and stressors from life outside the job.

The combination can leave first responders struggling to process their stress.

“When you feel helpless — and you’re the person who helps — who do you go to?” said Synan, the Newtown police chief.

Synan said his department has worked to create space for those conversations, holding debriefs after difficult calls and encouraging officers to talk through what they experienced without pressure or judgment.

A culture slow to change

When now-retired firefighter Frank Leto joined the New York City Fire Department in 1983, mental health support barely existed.

“The mental health support at that point was probably drinks after work,” he said.

The expectation was to absorb whatever you saw and move on — until, as Leto put it, “You just stuffed it down until it started taking things from you: your family, your relationships, your health, eventually your job.”

That code of silence began to break after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

“There was really no option for the fire department to not address the mental health needs of our firefighters and their families,” Leto said.

He moved off the line to help expand the department’s counseling unit and its early peer support efforts, but their first major idea — embedding clinicians in the hardest-hit firehouses — “was an utter failure.” Firefighters rarely spoke to those experts, and the clinicians were overwhelmed by the scale and immediacy of the trauma.

The breakthrough came when the department stopped trying to import help from the outside and instead formalized what had long existed informally. Training firefighters to support one another created a trusted buffer between the rank-and-file and clinical care, and over time that model “became part of the fabric of the department,” he said.

The International Association of Fire Fighters, a labor union, recognized how powerful that shift was and helped fund the work in New York City.

Today, Leto, who is a member of the IAFF Disaster Response To-Go Team, estimated that roughly 15,000 IAFF members have been trained in peer support — a sign that, in a culture slow to change, attitudes around mental health are beginning to shift.

But that progress has been uneven, and many departments — across fire, law enforcement, emergency medical services and 911 dispatch — are still working to build systems in which seeking support is normalized and accessible.

“Looking at mental and physical and overall well-being is not one answer with one solution,” said Wooten, the former 911 dispatcher. “These are all things that have to be worked at collectively and multifaceted to make sure that we can hopefully create an opportunity to fix some of these larger systemic problems.”

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.