A Kentucky law that aims to increase oversight in public schools by making it easier for parents to file complaints about – and, if desired, shield their children from – “harmful” materials has gone into effect after Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear declined to veto a Republican-pushed bill.
Senate Bill 5 makes Kentucky the latest state to join a push by Republicans nationwide to champion so-called parental rights in the classroom.
“Harmful” material, as defined in the bill, may “contain the exposure, in an obscene manner, of the unclothed or apparently unclothed human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks or the female breast, or visual depictions of sexual acts or simulations of sexual acts, or explicit written descriptions of sexual acts.”
The new law will establish a process for parents to lodge complaints. School principals will determine if the material in question is indeed inappropriate (the determinations can be appealed), and a parent may request that their child is blocked from seeing it.
By not vetoing the bill, Beshear is allowing the law to go into effect. Michael Adams, Kentucky’s secretary of state, confirmed Monday that his office had received the bill.
In a statement, Beshear’s office said the bill “is about creating a process that most school districts already have” and did not elaborate.
The Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, however, had called for Beshear to veto the bill.
“Senate Bill 5 is part of a long history of attempted government censorship, and overrides systems already in place to review and analyze materials to determine if they are appropriate for students,” Kate Miller, the advocacy director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said. “This bill is blatant government overreach and adds additional layers of bureaucracy on already overburdened school employees, and during a massive teacher shortage.”
Parental rights in education emerged as a significant political issue for the GOP during the Covid-19 pandemic, when school closures, along with mask and vaccine mandates, upended family routines and renewed scrutiny over school leadership. Republicans across the country, arguing that certain discussions around race, gender identity and sexuality are inappropriate for young children, have used the banner of “parental rights” to push for a curtailment of such conversations in schools, even though opinions on the matter vary widely among parents.
Critics have broadly argued Republicans have used the issue to turn the classroom into a battleground and advance a political agenda. LGBTQ rights advocates, in particular, have argued it is a conscious effort to stigmatize a vulnerable slice of American society and could have a chilling effect on what they believe to be urgently needed discussions.
In some states, such as Texas, Florida and Iowa, parental permission is now needed to discuss certain topics with students. Other states, such as Georgia, have put parents and school communities in charge of vetting books their children could encounter at school for signs of race-related or sexual themes, appealing to conservatives who have voiced concerns about “radical” literature.
Last week, the GOP-led House of Representatives passed a bill requiring schools to provide parents with a list of books and reading materials available in the school library and post curriculum publicly, though the legislation is likely to fail in the Democratic-led Senate.
Rarely have the tectonic plates of American politics collided as visibly and explosively as they did earlier this month in Tennessee.
The procession of predominantly middle-aged or older White Republicans who rose almost two weeks ago in the Tennessee House of Representatives to castigate, and then expel, two young Black Democrats crystallized the overlapping generational and racial confrontation that underpins the competition between the political parties.
The Republican vote to expel those Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, encapsulated in a single moment the struggle for control over America’s direction between the nation’s increasingly diverse younger generations and its mostly White older cohorts. While kids of color now comprise just over half of all Americans younger than 18, Whites still constitute about three-fourths of the nation’s seniors, according to Census data analyzed by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.
That stark division – what Frey terms “the cultural generation gap” and I’ve called the competition between “the brown and the gray” – has become a central fault line in the nation’s politics. Particularly in the Donald Trump era, the Republican coalition has grown increasingly reliant on older Whites, while younger people of color are evolving into a critical component of the Democratic voting base.
The priorities and values of these two giant cohorts often clash most explosively in red states across the South and Southwest, like Tennessee, where Republicans now control state government. In those states, Republicans are moving aggressively to lock into law the policy preferences of their older, predominantly White and largely non-urban and Christian electoral coalition. That agenda often collides directly with the views of younger generations on issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, limits on classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, book bans, and gun control.
Across the red states, the conditions are coalescing for years of escalating conflict between these divergent generations. From one direction, the Republicans controlling these states are applying increasingly hardball tactics to advance their policy agenda and entrench their electoral advantage. That strategy includes severe gerrymanders that dilute the influence of urban areas where younger voters often congregate, laws that create obstacles to registering and voting, and extreme legislative maneuvers such as the vote to expel Pearson and Jones. What Republicans in Tennessee and other red states “are trying to do is minimize the voices – minimize the sound, minimize the protest, and continue to oppress folks who do not agree,” says Antonio Arellano, vice president for communications at NextGen America, a group that organizes young people for liberal causes.
From the other direction, the youngest Millennials and first representatives of Generation Z moving into elected office are throwing themselves more forcefully against these GOP fortifications – just as Jones and Pearson have done. These young, elected officials have been shaped by the past decade of heightened public protests, many of them led by young people, particularly around gun safety, climate change, and racial equity. And more of them are bringing that ethos of direct action into the political arena – as Jones and Pearson did by leading a gun control protest on the floor of the Tennessee legislature. “This generation of politicians have been socialized through the crucible of Black Lives Matter and the [Donald] Trump era and political polarization,” says Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta who studies race and politics. “So it’s not surprising that they are usually going to be confrontational.”
In the red states, this rising wave of urgency and militancy among younger progressives is crashing headlong into the fortifications Republicans are erecting to solidify their control. Even with the ardor evident from Jones, Pearson and their supporters in Tennessee, most observers agree it will be very difficult any time soon for “the brown” to loosen the grip of “the gray” over political power in almost any of the red states. “In the short term there isn’t a risk” to the GOP’s hold on the red states, said Gillespie, “which is why you see these legislators flexing their power in the way they are.” And that could be a recipe for more tension in those places as the diverse younger generations constitute a growing share of the workforce and tax base, yet find their preferences systematically denied in the decisions of their state governments.
Like many analysts, Melissa Deckman, chief executive officer of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, predicts that “what we saw in Tennessee was the first salvo” of escalating conflict as older white conservatives, especially in the red states, resist the demands for greater influence from the emerging younger generations. “An overwhelmingly White conservative legislature taking this remarkable and drastic step of expelling the two young African-Americans,” she says, “is a taste of what we are going to see in the future driven by those demographic changes.”
Those demographic changes are rooted in the generational transition rumbling through American life. Though the tipping point has drawn little attention, Frey has calculated that a majority of the nation’s population has now been born after 1980. And those younger generations are kaleidoscopically more diverse than their older counterparts.
The change is most visible on race. Because the US essentially shut off immigration between 1924 and 1965, nearly three-fourths of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) are White, as are more than three-fourths of the remaining seniors from the older generations before them, according to Frey’s figures. By contrast, Frey has calculated, people of color comprise well over two-fifths of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), just under half of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) and slightly more than half the youngest generation born since 2012. That youngest generation (sometimes called Generation Alpha) will be the first in American history in which racial “minorities” constitute the majority.
The transition extends to other dimensions of personal identity. The Public Religion Research Institute has calculated that while just 17% of Americans aged 65 or older and 20% of those aged 50-64 do not identify with any organized religion, the share of those “seculars” rises to 32% among those aged 30-49 and 38% among adults 18-29. In turn, while White Christians constitute about half of all adults aged 50-64 and three-fifths of seniors, they comprise only about one-third of those aged 30-49 and only one-fourth of the youngest adults.
Gender identity and sexual orientation follow the same tracks. Gallup has found that while less than 3% of baby boomers and only 4% of Generation X (born 1965-1980) identify as LGBTQ, that figure jumps to nearly 11% among Millennials and fully 21% among Generation Z. In all these ways, says Deckman, who is writing a book on Gen Z, “you have a younger group of Americans who are more diverse, less religious, care passionately about the rights of marginalized groups, and are watching rights taken away that they thought would always be there.”
Though the pace and intensity varies, these changes are affecting all corners of the country. Even in states where the GOP has consistently controlled most state offices such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, the share of adults younger than 45 who are unaffiliated with any religion now equals or exceeds the share who are White Christians, according to detailed results PRRI provided to CNN. By contrast, in those states’ over-45 population, White Christians are at least twice, and often three times, as large a share of the population as seculars.
Frey has found that in every state the youth population 18 and younger is now more racially diverse than the senior population 65 and older. From 2010 to 2020, in fact, every state except Utah and North Dakota (as well as Washington, DC) saw a decline in their total population of White kids younger than 18. Kids of color now comprise a majority of the youth population in 14 states and at least 40% in another dozen, Frey has found.
States on that list include many of the places where Republicans have been most forcefully imposing a staunchly conservative social agenda. Kids of color already represent about half or more of the youth population in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and Arizona and about two-fifths or more in several others, including Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. In many of those states the share of seniors who are White is at least 20 percentage points higher than the share of young people.
A similarly large “cultural generation gap” is also evident in many blue states, including Nevada, California, Colorado, Washington and Minnesota. The difference is that in states where Democrats are in control, the diverse younger generations are, however imperfectly, included in the political coalition setting state policy. Political analysts in both parties – from Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson to Democratic strategist Terrance Woodbury – point out that Democrats have their own problems with younger voters, who have never been enthusiastic about President Joe Biden, and are expressing disappointment that the party hasn’t made more progress on issues they care about. But in blue states the direction of policy on most key social issues, such as abortion, gun control and LGBTQ rights, aligns with the dominant views among younger generations. And in most blue states, Democrats have prioritized increasing youth turnout and, in many cases, reformed state election laws to ease registration and voting.
But in the red states, younger voters, especially younger voters of color, are largely excluded from the ruling Republican coalitions, which revolve preponderantly around Whites, especially those who are older, Christian, non-college and non-urban. In 2022, for instance, 80% of younger non-white voters (aged 45 or less) voted against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, 65% voted against GOP Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, and 55% opposed Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, according to exit poll results provided by Edison Research. Yet all three men won decisive reelections, in large part because each carried about seven-in-ten or more of Whites older than 45.
In some ways, the generational tug of war between the brown and the gray symbolized by the Tennessee expulsions represents the classic collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object. In this case, the irresistible force is the growth in the electorate of the diverse younger generations. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Generation Z constituted as large a share of eligible voters nationwide as did the Baby Boom and its elders – though those older generations, because they turned out at much higher rates, still represented a larger percentage of actual voters. In 2024, Frey has projected, Millennials and Gen Z will comprise a significantly larger share of eligible voters than the boomers and their elders – enough that they will likely equal them as a share of actual voters. Already in several states, kids of color comprise a majority of those who turn 18 each year and become eligible to vote; Frey projects that will be true for the nation overall by 2024.
The immovable object is the GOP control over the red states. That’s partly because of the changes in electoral rules Republicans have imposed that create obstacles to registration or voting, but also because of their dominance among older Whites and their inroads into culturally conservative Latino voters in some of these states, particularly Texas and Florida.
Another challenge for Democrats is that youth turnout is often lowest in red states. Though youth turnout also lagged in some blue states including New York and Rhode Island, in an analysis released earlier this month the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University found that red states comprised all nine states where the smallest share of eligible adults aged 18-29 cast a ballot; Tennessee ranked the lowest of the states for which CIRCLE has data. Red states also have erected many of the most overt obstacles to youth participation. Eight Republican-controlled states, including Tennessee, Texas and recently Idaho, have sent a clearly discouraging signal to young voters by declaring that student IDs cannot be used as identification under state voter ID laws. A Texas Republican state legislator this year has proposed banning polling places on college campuses.
Abby Kiesa, CIRCLE’s deputy director, says that in both blue and red states, laws and social customs act in reinforcing ways to either promote or discourage youth voting. “The infrastructure and the state laws” in states that encourage youth voting like Michigan, Oregon and Colorado “create a stronger culture of engagement,” she said. “Because more people are voting, it is more of a norm, people are talking about it more, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” In states with pronounced barriers to voting, she notes, an opposite cycle of disengagement can take hold.
The unlikelihood of overcoming the GOP’s red state electoral defenses in the near term will probably encourage more younger progressives to emphasize public protests, like the raucous rally for gun control that began the Tennessee confrontation, predicts Nse Ufot, who formerly led the New Georgia Project launched by Stacey Abrams.
“The young people in Tennessee … went to their legislators and said enough, and they had accountable, accessible leaders who heard what their demands were and took it to their colleagues and their colleagues didn’t like it,” says Ufot, who has now founded the New South Super PAC, designed to elect progressive candidates in the 11 states of the old confederacy.
Ufot uses a striking analogy to express her expectation of how this struggle will unfold in the coming years across the red states. Her mother, she explained, ran a shelter for battered women, and even as a young girl, she came to recognize “that the most dangerous time for victims of abuse is when they are preparing to leave, when they have made up their minds that they are done and they are making their exits. That when we see their abusers escalate to crazy tactics.”
Ufot sees the Tennessee expulsions, like the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s broader effort to overturn the 2020 result, as evidence that those “who are afraid of what a diverse, reflective, democracy looks like” will likewise turn to more extreme responses as the challenge to their position grows more acute. But she also sees the movement that erupted around Pearson and Jones as a preview of how younger generations may resist that offensive. “Instead of responding with resignation like people who have come before them, [the two expelled representatives] have chosen to do something about it,” she said. “And that’s what happens when you are forged in the fire of protest and are accountable to the people [you represent].”
As the Republicans now running the red states race to the right, and younger generations lean harder on direct protest, more forging fires across this contested terrain appear inevitable.
President Joe Biden and House Republicans may have as little as a month to prevent the US from defaulting on its debt, which would impact millions of Americans and unleash economic and fiscal chaos here and around the world.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Monday that the government may not be able to pay all of its bills in full and on time as soon as June 1. However, the forecast was uncertain, and the default date might come several weeks later, she said. The US hit its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in January, and Treasury has been using cash and “extraordinary measures” to satisfy obligations since then.
Just what would happen if the nation defaults on its debt is unknown since it’s never actually happened before. A close call in 2011 roiled the financial markets and prompted Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US’ credit rating to AA+ from AAA.
Yellen gave a sense of the turmoil it would cause in her letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday.
“If Congress fails to increase the debt limit, it would cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position, and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests,” she wrote.
To be clear, a debt default doesn’t mean all payments would stop and people would permanently lose out on money they are owed. Treasury would have the funds to satisfy some obligations, but it’s not certain how the agency would handle the disbursements. Much would also depend on how long it takes Congress to address the borrowing cap.
“Tens of millions of people across the country who expect payments from the federal government may not get them on time,” said Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Here are five ways that Americans could be affected bydebt default:
About 66 million retirees, disabled workers and others receive monthly Social Security benefits. The average payment for retired workers is $1,827 a month in 2023.
Almost two-thirds of beneficiaries rely on Social Security for half of their income, and for 40% of recipients, the payments constitute at least 90% of their income, according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
These payments could be delayed in a debt default scenario, though it’s possible Treasury could continue making on-time payments because of the entitlement program’s trust fund, Akabas said.
The benefits are disbursed four times a month, on the third day of the month and on three Wednesdays. Roughly $25 billion a week is sent out, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“Even a short delay in the payment of Social Security benefits would be a burden for the millions of Americans who rely on their earned benefits to pay for out-of-pocket health care expenses, food, rent and utilities,” Max Richtman, the committee’s CEO, said in a statement.
Many other government payments could also be affected, including funding for food stamps; federal grants to states and municipalities for Medicaid, highways, education and other programs; and Medicare payments to hospitals, doctors and health insurance plans.
More than 2 million federal civilian workers and around 1.4 million active-duty military members could see their paychecks delayed. Federal government contractors could also see a lag in payments, which could affect their ability to compensate their workers.
Also, certain veterans benefits, including disability payments and pensions for some low-income veterans and their surviving families, could be affected.
“Such calamity would place further stress on our servicemembers, retirees, and veterans, as well as their families, caregivers, and survivors,” Rene Campos, senior director of government relations for the Military Officers Association of America, said in a blog post. “Though life in uniform is not always predictable, those who serve or have served their country expect their country to honor their commitment to service.”
About $25 billion in pay or benefits for active-duty members of the military, civil service and military retirees, veterans and recipients of SupplementalSecurity Income is sent out on the first day of the month, according to the CBO.
Americans’ investments would take a direct hit. Case in point: Markets had what was then their worst week since the financial crisis during the 2011 debt ceiling standoff after the Standard & Poor’s downgrade.
Even if the debt ceilingimpasseis resolved soon after a default, stocks could shed as much as a third of their value. That would wipe out around $12 trillion in household wealth, according to Moody’s Analytics.
If a default occurs, yields on US Treasuries will inevitably rise to compensate for the increased risk that bondholders won’t receive the money they’re owed from the government.
Since interest rates on loans, credit cards and mortgages are often based on Treasury yields, the cost of borrowing money and paying off debt would rise. That’s on top of the increased costs Americans are already facing from the Federal Reserve rate hikes.
Families and businesses would also have a tougher time getting approved for lines of credit since banks would have to be more selective about towhom they loan money. That’s because their costs of borrowing money will also rise, which limits the amount of money they can lend out.
A debt default could trigger an economic downturn, which would prompt a spike in unemployment. It would come at a particularly fragile time – when the nation is already dealing with rising interest rates and stubbornly high inflation.
How much damage would be done would depend on how long the crisis continues. If the default lasts for about a week, then close to 1 million jobs would be lost, including in the financial sector, which would be hard hit by the stock market declines. Also, the unemployment rate would jump to about 5% and the economy would contract by nearly half a percent, according to Moody’s.
But if the impasse dragged on for six weeks, then more than 7 million jobs would be lost, the unemployment rate would soar above 8% and the economy would decline by more than 4%,according to Moody’s. The effects would still be felt a decade from now.
“It would be a body blow to the economy, and it would be a manufactured crisis,” said Bernard Yaros, aneconomist at Moody’s.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Monday that bans most abortions after 12 weeks with exceptions for sexual assault, incest and medical emergencies.
The bill does not define “medical emergency” and the legislation includes a clause that will put the rules into immediate effect the day after it is signed.
LB 574, which passed the state’s Republican-controlled unicameral legislature in a 33-15 vote last week, also bans gender-affirming care for people under 19 years old. The abortion amendment was tacked onto the legislation after previous efforts to restrict abortions failed to overcome a filibuster.
The bill only allows medical procedures for transitioning after a “waiting period” and “therapeutic hours” to determine if a person’s gender dysphoria is “long-lasting and intense.” The details of those provisions will be determined by the chief medical officer of Nebraska’s Division of Public Health.
In a statement released after the bill’s passage, Pillen said, “All children deserve a chance to grow and live happy, fruitful lives. This includes pre-born boys and girls, and it includes children struggling with their gender identity. These kids deserve the opportunity to grow and explore who they are and want to be, and they can do so without making irreversible decisions that should be made when they are fully grown.”
The new law reflects ongoing legislative efforts around the US to restrict access to abortion and gender-affirming care. More than a dozen states have moved to restrict gender-affirming care in 2023 and more than 130 bills that target LGBTQ rights, especially health care for transgender patients, have been introduced nationwide this legislative session, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“From North Carolina to Nebraska, extremists so-called leaders continue to restrict access to abortion across the nation,” Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted Monday. “Enough is enough. We need a federal law to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade for women in all 50 states.”
Major medical associations say that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria, the psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth do not align, according to the American Psychiatric Association. But some Republicans have expressed concern over long-term outcomes of the treatments.
Some Nebraskans have expressed displeasure with the bill and many protested and filled the halls of the state Capitol last week as lawmakers spoke, resulting in the arrest of several people on Friday on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to obstructing a government operation.
ACLU of Nebraska executive director Mindy Rush Chipman said in a statement last week that the consequences of the law will be “devastating.”
“To be clear, we refuse to accept this as our new normal. This vote will not be the final word. We are actively exploring our options to address the harm of this extreme legislation, and that work will have our team’s full focus. This is not over, not by a long shot,” Chipman said.
This story has been updated with additional information Monday.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a sweeping bill into law Friday that will restrict education about gender identity and sexual orientation and ban books with certain sexual content from school libraries, as well as require schools to notify parents if their child asks to use a new name or pronoun.
Iowa is just one of several Republican-led states to pass laws strengthening what advocates often describe as “parental rights” over the past few years.
The controversial movement, which critics argue is aimed at limiting the rights of LGBTQ and other marginalized students, emerged as a top issue for the national Republican Party during the Covid-19 pandemic and is expected to play a key role during the 2024 election cycle.
The Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization, likened Iowa’s parental rights law to legislation enacted in Florida last year that opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.” The Florida law banned certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom and set off a social and political firestorm.
Iowa state Sen. Ken Rozenboom, chair of the education committee, has said that the parental rights bill “matches up with what most schools are doing now.”
“But we need to rein in those schools that believe that ‘the purpose of public education is to teach [students] what society needs them to know.’ We must put parents back in charge of their children’s education,” he wrote in his newsletter in March.
The new Iowa law, also known as SF 496, touches on a range of education-related issues.
It prohibits instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation to students in kindergarten through sixth grade.
The law also requires school administrators to notify parents if their child “requests an accommodation” related to their gender identity, including using a name or pronoun that is different than the one “assigned to the student in the school district’s registration forms or records.”
When it comes to books, the law puts restrictions on school libraries for students in kindergarten through 12thgrade. The libraries can only have books deemed “age-appropriate,” which, according to the law, excludes any materials with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”
School employees found to be in repeated violation of some of these provisions could face disciplinary action, according to the law.
Similar laws restricting what books are allowed in libraries have recently gone into effect in other states, including Florida, Missouri and Utah.
“Vague language in the laws regarding how they should be implemented, as well as the inclusion of potential punishments for educators who violate them, have combined to yield a chilling effect,” according to a report published in April by PENAmerica, a nonprofit that works to defend free expression and tracks book bans.
Laws like the one in Florida give incentives to teachers, media specialists and school administrators to proactively remove books from shelves, the report said.
There were more book bans across the country during the fall 2022 semester than in each of the prior two semesters, according to PENAmerica. The bans were most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina.
About one-third of the titles banned are books about race or racism or feature characters of color. About 26% of the titles have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
“Those children tell us all the time that finding books that reflect their experiences and answer questions they would never ask adults is lifesaving for them,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation.
The past year has brought an escalation to the book ban movement, with many state lawmakers introducing legislation that could have an impact on what’s available at public and school libraries.
“We’re looking at over 31 bills that oppose some kind of restriction on the ability of librarians to create collections that serve the needs of every student or attempt to censor books based on one group’s opinion,” Caldwell-Stone added.
There are at least 62 “parental rights” bills that have been introduced in 24 states this year, according to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Most have yet to become law. But last year, six bills were signed by governors – two in Florida, two in Arizona and one eachin Georgia and Louisiana.
Many of the bills focus on parents’ right to know what their children are learning in classrooms, particularly around issues of race and gender.
The Republican-controlled US House passed its own “Parents Bill of Rights” bill in March, though the Senate is not expected to take up the legislation.
Overall, a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced this year. Some focus on education, but others concern health care, bathroom access and drag performances.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has toured the country calling Florida the place “where woke goes to die.” But it’s still alive at the company Sara Margulis runs.
At Honeyfund, a website for engaged couples to create gift registries that can pay for their honeymoons, Margulis’ Florida employees learn about privilege and institutional racism. Margulis, the CEO and co-founder, said the training makes her staff better suited to serve couples of any background. Planning for this fall’s employee retreat is underway, with a session scheduled on DEI – or diversity, equity and inclusion, a term DeSantis often rails against.
DeSantis tried to ban such employee training in 2022, when the Florida Republican championed what he called the Stop WOKE Act. But Honeyfund and others sued on the grounds that the law violated their free speech. A federal judge agreed and blocked it from going into effect. The DeSantis administration then appealed – one of many of the governor’s ongoing legal battles as he pursues the presidency.
“Companies aren’t ‘going woke’ out of allegiance to Democrats. Time after time, diversity has proven to be good for the bottom line,” Margulis said. “Valuing diversity means understanding it, understanding means training and training means having to deal with this law. We were really handed a chance to make a difference for other business owners by challenging it, and we took it.”
In his early outreach to Republican voters as a presidential candidate, DeSantis has portrayed himself as a fighter and, crucially, a winner in the cultural battles increasingly important to conservatives. If elected to the White House, he’ll take those fights to Washington, he has said.
“I will go on offense,” DeSantis said in Iowa last month. “I will lean into all the issues that matter.”
But back in Florida, the agenda at the centerpiece of his pitch remains unsettled. Still ongoing are more than a dozen legal battles testing the constitutionality of many of the victories DeSantis has touted on the campaign trail. Critics say DeSantis has built his governorship around enacting laws that appeal to his conservative base but that, as a Harvard-trained lawyer, he knows are unconstitutional and not likely to take effect.
In addition to halting parts of the Stop WOKE Act, judges have also intervened to freeze implementation of other DeSantis-led laws cracking down on protesters and Big Tech. The six-week abortion ban he signed this year – which he has called the “heartbeat bill” when speaking to conservative, and especially evangelical, audiences – won’t take effect unless the state Supreme Court determines that a privacy clause in Florida’s constitution doesn’t protect access to the procedure. Disney – the most famous of DeSantis’ political adversaries – has argued in court that the governor overstepped his power when he orchestrated a takeover of the entertainment giant’s special taxing district to punish the company for speaking out against his agenda. So did Andrew Warren, the twice-elected Tampa prosecutor whom DeSantis suspended last year in another act of political retaliation.
DeSantis has repeatedly predicted he will ultimately prevail in these challenges. Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for his campaign, called the lawsuits “the tactics of activists who seek to impose their will on people by judicial fiat.”
“These attempts to circumvent the will of the legislature are not indicative of anything beyond the failure of the left’s ideas at the ballot box,” Griffin said in a statement. “Governor DeSantis is a proven fighter who will bring the same temerity to the presidency.”
Recent weeks, though, have seen a handful of reminders that several pillars of his record remain fragile even as they figure prominently in his stump speeches.
On Friday, a federal judge blocked a new Florida law that gave the DeSantis administration the power to shut down bars or restaurants that admit children to certain “adult live performances,” widely seen as a crackdown on drag shows.
Another federal judge said Wednesday that Florida could not restrict transgender adults on Medicaid from receiving gender-affirming care. The same judge earlier this month had stepped in to allow three transgender children to receive puberty blockers while a lawsuit seeking to overturn a state ban on the treatment proceeds. In both rulings, the judge said there was “no rational basis” to prevent the care and declared “gender identity is real,” casting doubts on the future of the state’s prohibition.
DeSantis, as a presidential candidate, has seized on conservative concerns over such treatment, particularly for minors. His efforts to halt it – including signing a law that prohibits transgender children from receiving gender-affirming treatments and punish doctors who run afoul of it – are prominently featured in his stump speeches. Speaking to North Carolina Republicans after the ruling, the governor acknowledged the legal fight, but he assured the audience: “We are going to win.”
“It is mutilation, and it is wrong, and it has no place in our state,” he said.
DeSantis of late has also taken credit for the GOP’s narrow US House majority, noting the highly partisan map he pushed through his state legislature, which ultimately helped Republicans net four critical seats. But those suing Florida to invalidate the state’s congressional boundaries have new reason for optimism after the US Supreme Court ordered Alabama officials to redraw its map to allow an additional Black-majority district. The DeSantis map was similarly criticized as diminishing the power of minority voters in Florida.
“Many of the things coming from the governor are form over function,” said Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, one of plaintiffs in the redistricting lawsuit. “They want to get to a certain result, so they find a means to do it, whether it makes logic or legal sense or not.”
The US District Court for the Northern District of Florida has in particular stymied DeSantis’ agenda. Two judges on the bench, Mark Walker and Robert Hinkle, have repeatedly ruled against the governor, often punctuating their opinions with harsh and colorful repudiations.
Walker, in one ruling blocking parts of the Stop WOKE Act, compared Florida’s treatment of the First Amendment under DeSantis to the “Upside Down,” the nightmare alternativedimension from the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” In another lawsuit over the law, this one filed by college professors, Walker called the law “dystopian” and wrote that DeSantis and Florida Republicans had “declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”
Hinkle, in January, chided DeSantis’ suspension of Warren as political, unconstitutional and executed with “not a hint of misconduct,” though he ultimately ruled he was powerless to intervene. Warren is appealing, though he suffered another defeat when the state Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a separate request to reinstate him.
Ruling this month against the state in the two cases dealing with transgender care prohibition, Hinkle called the law “an exercise in politics, not good medicine.”
“Nothing could have motivated this remarkable intrusion into parental prerogatives other than opposition to transgender status itself,” he wrote.
DeSantis has shrugged off these defeats as the work of left-leaning judges. President Barack Obama nominated Walker to his district court judgeship in 2012, and Hinkle was selected by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Neither nomination drew objection from Senate Republicans at the time.
When Walker ruled to block Florida’s anti-riot law – comparing it to past attempts to squash dissent from Civil Rights activists in the 1950s and 60s – DeSantis dismissed it as “a foreordained conclusion in front of that court.”
“We will win that on appeal,” DeSantis said. “I guarantee we’ll win that on appeal.”
That assurance came 21 months ago. In the meantime, the law has yet to take effect.
Dana Thompson Dorsey, a professor of education law, was among seven Florida college professors who sued to block the Stop WOKE Act over provisions that limited how she and her colleagues could talk about race and sex with students. She called Walker’s decision halting the law a “work of art.”
Since then, she has continued to teach critical race studies to her doctoral students at the University of South Florida, while DeSantis has taken his fight against the concept national. But despite winning injunctive relief, she remains troubled by the new environment for higher education under DeSantis.
“There is a lot at stake and it’s not just for those of us brave enough to be plaintiffs,” she said. “The idea of telling adults what they can and cannot learn is unfathomable. The students who become our future leaders will repeat our mistakes if they don’t understand the past.”
While legal challenges have prevented DeSantis from fully realizing his vision for Florida, the uncertainty has not always benefited opponents and the plaintiffs suing to block his agenda.
Abortions after 15 weeks have paused in most cases in Florida while providers await a ruling on the state’s ban. Andrew Warren remains out of office. Transgender care providers are in uncertain territory – Hinkle’s limited rulings provided relief but only for those who sued the state.
The League of Women Voters of Florida is taking the state to court over new restrictions on third-party voter registration. Fines for violating the law could cost as much as $250,000 a year and the organization has asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent its enforcement. In the meantime, the league decided it would no longer collect and turn in voter registration forms, pausing for now a practice that has been central to its civic outreach for more than 75 years.
“That’s a very sad and horrible result, but we cannot figure out a way to protect ourselves without that major change,” Scoon said.
After several individuals arrested last year for voter fraud by DeSantis’ new election security force had their cases dismissed, lawmakers again tweaked the law to try to make it easier for the state to secure convictions.
DeSantis and Florida Republicans have signaled they intend to keep fighting in court, too. The budget DeSantis signed earlier this month included $16 million for legal battles underway and the ones to come.
“We will never surrender to the woke mob,” the governor recently told an audience in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs.”
Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law Friday that bans most abortions in the state as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
“This week, in a rare and historic special session, the Iowa legislature voted for a second time to reject the inhumanity of abortion and pass the fetal heartbeat law,” she said in remarks ahead of signing the bill at the Family Leadership Summit.
The law, which is effective immediately, comes after Reynolds ordered a special legislative session last week with the sole purpose of restricting the procedure in the state. But it is already facing a legal challenge after a group of abortion providers in the state filed a suit to try and stop the law.
The bill, which passed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this week, prohibits physicians from providing most abortions after early cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus or embryo, commonly as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.
It includes exceptions for miscarriages, when the life of the pregnant woman is threatened and fetal abnormalities that would result in the infant’s death. It also includes exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rapes reported within 45 days and incest reported within 140 days.
While the bill language makes clear it is “not to be construed to impose civil or criminal liability on a woman upon whom an abortion is performed in violation of the division,” guidelines on how physicians would be punished for violating the law are left up to Iowa’s board of medicine to decide – leaving the potential for some vagueness in how the law ought to be enforced in the interim.
Iowa joins a growing list of Republican-led states that have championed sweeping abortion restrictions in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
Reynolds’ push for abortion restrictions in the state comes weeks after Iowa’s Supreme Court declined to lift a block on the state’s 2018 six-week abortion ban, deadlocking in a 3-3 vote whether to overturn a lower court decision that deemed the law unconstitutional.
“The Iowa Supreme Court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said Tuesday in a statement following the bill’s passage. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”
Abortion rights supporters have been speaking out against the abortion ban in the state. National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called the ban the “latest show of abortion extremism from MAGA Republicans.”
“Governor Kim Reynolds just signed a cruel abortion ban into law among a crowd of extremists who cheered as Iowan women’s abortion rights were stripped away,” Harrison said in a statement Friday.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups, including National Right to Life and Iowa Right to Life, praised Reynolds and the law’s supporters in the state legislature for the abortion ban.
“We will continue to advocate for life and will not stop fighting until abortion becomes unthinkable,” Kristi Judkins, executive director of Iowa Right to Life said in a statement. “We want to see lives saved and women no longer placed in harm’s way because of abortion.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
Temu has sued Shein in the United States, accusing its rival of violating antitrust laws by trying to monopolize suppliers and engaging in other allegedly illegal behavior.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in Massachusetts federal court, is a dramatic escalation of a contentious legal battle the twofast fashion upstarts have been embroiled in for months.
It follows another complaint from Shein, which sued Temu in December for allegedlymobilizingsocial media influencers to disparage Shein online.
In the new suit, Temu claims that Shein has “engaged in a campaign of threats, intimidation, false assertions of infringement, and attempts to impose baseless punitive fines” on apparel makers thought to be working with Temu.
Shein has also “forced” exclusivity deals on clothing manufacturers to prevent them from working with Temu, the complaint states.
Both companies originated in China and made their names as online retailers specializing in a supersonic version of fast fashion, defined as the rapid design and production of cheap goods that respond to fleeting trends.
In some ways, they’re beating industry stalwarts like Zara and H&M
(HNNMY) at their own game, by making items more quickly and being more digitally savvy with customers.
Shein overtook the two giants in US market share during the pandemic, while Temu has clinched a strong position since its launch last year, according to analytics firm Bloomberg Second Measure.
However, the new litigation illustrates how the race is heating up on an emerging industry battlefield.
“This shows how competitive the environment is getting,” said Michael Felice, a partner in Kearney’s communications, media and technology practice.
In its lawsuit filed last week, Temu claimed its recent entry into the United States had rattled Shein.
Temu, which is owned by PDD along with hugely popular Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, launched in September. It operates as an online general store for everything from home goods to apparel to electronics at strikingly low prices.
The company’s platform quickly became the most downloaded app in the United States, where it currently remains in the top two on iOS and Android app stores, according to Sensor Tower.
As a result of its fast growth, “Shein now views itself as being ‘at war’ with Temu and has engaged in an elaborate and anticompetitive scheme aimed at stymieing Temu’s business,” Temu said in a court filing.
“The US market is the primary theater of this war.”
To force the hand of manufacturers, Shein tried to “lock up the supply chain” by forcing them to sign loyalty agreements, vowing not to do business with Temu, the latter alleged.
It also claimed that Shein issued fines and penalty notices to suppliers that did work Temu, in an effort to send a stern warning to businesses that it would “not tolerate any manufacturer’s doing business with Temu.”
Like Shein, most of Temu’s suppliers are based in China and “are not familiar with the US legal system and lack the funds to pursue independent advice,” Temu said.
“The intent and effect of Shein’s anticompetitive conduct is to exclude Temu so that Shein can charge higher prices to consumers while offering a smaller selection and lower quality than Shein would if it faced competition,” Temu argued.
In response, a Shein spokesperson told CNN that “we believe this lawsuit is without merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves.”
Shein took off in the United States two years ago, luring young customers to its platform through an addictive mobile shopping experience and wide selection of trendy apparel.
The firm is now “by far” the market leader in ultra-fast fashion, commanding more than 75% of US market share last year, according to Temu.
But there are signs its smaller rival is catching up or even racing ahead: In May, total US spending on Temu eclipsed that of Shein by 20%, according to Second Measure.
In recent months, the two have increasingly turned on one another, with battle lines being drawn on social media.
Shein sued Temu in Illinois federal court in December, alleging that the latter had enlisted online influencers “to make false and deceptive statements” about Shein to promote its own goods.
It claimed that Temu had required them to make statements such as: “Shein is not the only cheap option for clothing! Check Temu.com out, cheaper and way better quality.”
The newcomer provided influencers with guidelines to make those statements, creating false advertising, Shein alleged.
Temu has filed to dismiss the suit, but the case is still pending.
The company has said it “strongly and categorically rejects all allegations, and is vigorously defending its rights.”
“For a long time, we have exercised significant restraint and refrained from pursuing legal actions,” Temu told CNN in a statement Tuesday about the new lawsuit.
“However, Shein’s escalating attacks leave us no choice but to take legal measures to defend our rights and the rights of those merchants doing business on Temu, as well as the consumers’ rights to a wide variety of affordable products.”
Temu also claims that Shein “unilaterally changed its contract” with manufacturers, forcing them to effectively give up their intellectual property rights to Shein, which it then used to go after “the very same merchants” on Temu.
Shein’s onslaught has already hurt Temu’s business, the latter claims.
The company has falsely accused its smaller competitor numerous times of copyright infringement “to disrupt sales of products that are offered for sale on Temu,” the latter said in its complaint.
As a result, more than 10,000 product listings have been pulled from Temu since last October, it added.
The ongoing spats demonstrate how “obviously each [company] is a threat to the other,” said Felice.
“Given this dynamic, the lawsuits are not a surprise, and each seems to be trying to establish legitimacy in the courts by delegitimizing the other.”
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California announced Sunday that he won’t enter the competitive Democratic primary to fill retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s senate seat in the Golden State, electing to endorse Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee instead.
“I have concluded that despite a lot of enthusiasm from Bernie [Sanders’] folks, the best place, the most exciting place, action place, fit place, for me to serve as a progressive is in the House of Representatives,” Khanna told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“And I’m honored to be co-chairing Barbara Lee’s campaign for the Senate and endorsing her today. We need a strong anti-war senator and she will play that role.”
The Democratic field to fill Feinstein’s seat also includes Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter, who announced their bids earlier this year. Khanna had previously expressed interest in running for the vacant seat.
Lee, who announced her bid last month, is a member of the House Democratic leadership, serving as co-chair of the Democratic Steering Committee, and she was the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Throughout her time in Congress, Lee has served as the co-chair and whip of the Progressive Caucus. And before coming to Washington, she spent several years serving in the California state legislature.
If elected, Lee would be the sole Black female senator serving in the Congress and only the third in US history.
Lee, Khanna said Sunday, is a “unique voice. She was the lone vote against the endless war in Afghanistan. She stood up so strongly against the war in Iraq. She worked with me in trying to stop the war in Yemen, the War Powers Resolution. And frankly, Jake, representation matters. We don’t have a single African American woman in the United States Senate.”
Currently, Lee is at a disadvantage compared to her well-funded rivals. She had just $52,000 in cash on hand entering 2023, according to FEC filings, while Schiff had more than $20 million stockpiled at the end of the year and Porter had more than $7.4 million.
Under California’s primary system, all candidates run on the same ballot, with the top two candidates, regardless of party, advancing to the general election.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Semiautomatic gunfire echoed in the hallways of The Covenant School, making a distinct noise teachers there would not soon forget.
That was more than 14 months ago –before three children and three adults were gunned down on Monday in the stately stone school connected to Covenant Presbyterian Church, atop a tree-shrouded hill just south of downtown Nashville.
The active shooter training session ended with live gunfire intended to familiarize school staff with real gunshots if they ever heard them.
“Blanks don’t sound the same. They just don’t,” said security consultant Brink Fidler, whose firm conducted the exercise.
A bullet trap the trainers wheeled around captured the rounds of a semiautomatic pistol and an AR-15-style rifle loaded with real ammunition.
When a handful of teachers heard the very first shot of Monday’s rampage they initially mistook it for the din of ongoing construction at the building.
“But then they said, ‘When we heard a few more after that we all knew because we had heard it before,” said Fidler, a former police officer who did a walk-through of the elementary school with Nashville officials on Wednesday – two days after another massacre in America renewed questions about what schools are doing to protect children and staff against mass murder.
As investigators work to determine the motive for the carnage, students, parents and school leaders across the country are again asking what more can be done to secure schools in the era of active shooter drills, lockdowns and widespread anxiety amid recurring mass shootings.
Fortified school buildings and entrance doors, glass panes coated in bullet-resistant laminate, locked classrooms and heavy surveillance have became a part of life in places where children are supposed to feel inspired to learn.
A funeral service for Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, the first victim to be laid to rest, was held Friday, which would have been the final school day before Easter break for the 200 or so private school students.
The shooter was a former Covenant School student, who also killed William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, both 9; Katherine Koonce, the 60-year-old head of the school; Cynthia Peak, a 61-year-old substitute teacher; and Mike Hill, a 61-year-old custodian.
Police fatally shot the 28-year-old attacker – who was armed with an AR-15 military-style rifle, a 9 mm Kel-Tec SUB2000 pistol caliber carbine, and a 9 mm Smith and Wesson M&P Shield EZ 2.0 handgun – inside the school about 14 minutes after the shooter fired through locked glass doors to enter the building.
The AR-15 and 9 mm pistol caliber carbine appeared to have 30-round magazines, according to experts who reviewed photos and video released by police.
Officers were on scene at 10:24 a.m. and fatally shot the attacker three minutes later, police said.
“The shooter, confronted in the second floor lobby, didn’t even have a chance to get to the classrooms,” said CNN analyst Jennifer Mascia, a writer and founding staffer of The Trace, a non-profit focused on gun violence. “That is something that is very reassuring to parents across the country. However, as we see, even a robust police response is not enough.”
The attack was the 19th shooting at an American school or university in 2023 in which at least one person was wounded, according to a CNN count. It was the deadliest since the May attack in Uvalde, Texas, left 21 dead. There have been 42 K-12 school shootings since Uvalde, where the gunman fired 100 or so rounds before police breached a classroom more than an hour later and killed the attacker to end the siege.
Once again, children, their parents and school leaders are left struggling with how to stop and handle mass shootings even though such incidents are rare and schools are still quite safe.
“What a lot of school leaders have learned is don’t react quickly. You’ve got a lot of pressure to do something right away but it’s really better to be thoughtful,” said Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit school safety firm that has evaluated security at thousands of schools.
“You should assume that you don’t have a good picture of what really happened and what didn’t. Be very skeptical about claims that this saves lives or people died because of that. In Tennessee no one will have a really accurate picture of what happened there for months.”
Coping with the nightmare scenario of a school shooting is now part of the mission to educate and counsel children.
“We keep repeating the same mistakes because people don’t know what the same mistakes are,” Fidler said. “School resource officers are a great part of the solution. Security laminate – great part of the solution. Cameras – great part of the solution. But if the people in the building don’t know what to do, none of that other stuff means anything.”
Mass shootings have helped fuel a multibillion dollar school security industry in recent years – ranging from high-tech surveillance systems to weapon scanners and hand-held emergency panic devices to immediately alert law enforcement and lock down schools.
“The message is really simple and it has been since before Nashville,” said Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, who was scheduled to speak about school security this weekend at the annual conference of the National School Boards Association in Orlando, Florida. “One of the worst times to make knee jerk policy and administrative actions is after a high profile incident like this when you’re in a highly emotional state.”
Experts said school officials should not give in to political pressures to take steps that are likely to be ineffective and wasteful of limited resources.
“We’ve been in schools where, on the positive side, almost every staff member has a two-way walkie talkie, which is good,” Trump said. “And we’ve been in other schools, sometimes in the same district, where they’re sitting in a charger and the principal says, ‘Well, we have them but I prefer to not use them.’ “
He added, “When security works, it works because of people. When it fails, it fails because of people.”
Dorn said he has been inundated with emails since Monday from companies “I’ve never heard of,” with offers of technology they claim will heighten security in schools.
“The three things that every school leader better pay a lot of attention to is, we have limited time, energy and budget for safety,” Dorn said. “So we can’t afford to waste any of that. We can’t spend our budget or training time on something that we don’t have pretty good evidence actually bears fruit. With the caution that nothing’s going to be 100 percent. This idea that we’re gonna stop all school shootings; there’s just, no country has been able to do that.”
Dorn and others pointed to a 2016 school safety technology report from Johns Hopkins University that found there was insufficient evidence to show devices such as weapons detectors and high-tech alarms and sensors helped curb mass shootings.
“There is no universal school safety solution – no one technology will solve all school safety and security issues,” the researchers wrote. “The sheer number of schools and school districts across the country – with different geography, funding, building construction and layout, demographics, and priorities – make each one different.”
Fidler and others said more resources should be devoted to educating and training students and school staff on recognizing and responding to threats.
“I can’t tell you how many of our school clients still have classroom doors that are not lockable from inside the classroom,” he said.
Referring to training and preparation for catastrophic school events like a mass shooting, Fidler said: “As a society we suck at this – which is terrible, but we do.”
On Wednesday, two days after the massacre, Fidler did a walk-through of the blood-stained school corridors with investigators. “It was hard, man. I’m struggling,” the law enforcement veteran of nearly 20 years said Saturday. “Some of that blood belonged to people I know.”
Fidler found that upon recognizing they were under attack teachers and staff relied on their training.
The shooter fired multiple rounds into several classroom doors but didn’t hit any students inside “because the teachers knew exactly what to do, how to fortify their doors and where to place their children in those rooms,” Fidler said.
“Their ability to execute, literally flawlessly, under that amount of stress while somebody is trying to murder them and their children, that is what made the difference here,” he said.
“These teachers are the reason those kids went home to their families.”
Koonce, the head of the school, had been adamant about training school staff on how to respond during an active shooter situation, Fidler said.
“She understood the severity of the topic and the severity of the teachers needing to have the knowledge of what to do in that situation,” he said.
“Katherine went to find out what was happening” when she was shot, Fidler said. “You know, Katherine Koonce, I could have had a lasso around her waist and she would drag me down the hall. She was going to go find out what’s going on and try and figure out what’s best for her students… She went right to it.”
Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake could not confirm how Koonce died but said, “I do know she was in the hallway by herself. There was a confrontation, I’m sure. You can tell the way she is lying in the hallway.”
Fidler said teachers covered windows. They shut off lights. Unused medical kits sat on desks.
“Countless teachers had their bleeding control kits out, staged and ready to treat people in their classroom,” he recalled.
“The fact that they had the wherewithal to do that. ‘Ok, I’ve got my kids secure. I’ve got the door locked and barricaded.’ And now, as a teacher, to have the wherewithal to remember the last piece, the medical, because we can potentially save a lot of people. They crushed it. They were able to perform under that amount of stress… They were able to recall all this information and put it into practice.”
The six shooting victims were trapped in hallways and killed, Fidler said.
“How many teachers in America could walk into their classroom right now and throw a tourniquet on the table and put that on? How many of them could do it?”
His message for anxious parents: “Ask questions. Find out what your kids’ school is doing or not doing. And don’t stop asking until something’s done.”
Trump has long conjured political storms, alternative realities, legal imbroglios and media spectacles to blur the truth or discredit institutions that have constrained his rule-busting behavior. He’ll lose that ability when he steps before the court at his arraignment in a case related to a hush money payment to an adult film actress.
Trump posts video from his motorcade while en route to New York for his arraignment
And there are increasing signs that this new reality – which will come with hefty financial commitments in legal fees and locks on Trump’s calendar – could be multiplied at a time when he’s already facing the intense demands of another White House bid.
That’s because the ex-president – the first to face criminal charges – also appears to face serious problems in a potentially more perilous case involving his alleged mishandling of secret documents being investigated by special counsel Jack Smith. Charges look like an increasing possibility as the Justice Department secures evidence about Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
Smith’s prosecutors have secured daily notes, texts, emails and photographs and are focused on cataloguing how Trump handled classified records around Mar-a-Lago and those who may have witnessed the former president with them, CNN’s Katelyn Polantz and Evan Perez reported Monday. The new details coincide with signs the Justice Department is taking steps consistent with the end of an investigation.
Trump’s former lawyer, Ty Cobb, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the developments represent a serious turn in the case for the ex-president. “We’ve known the investigatory steps were under way, we just haven’t known alleged results until today,” Cobb said. “I think these are highly consequential.”
The documents case may not be the end of it. Smith is also investigating Trump’s conduct in the run-up to the US Capitol insurrection. Then there’s also a possible prosecution in Georgia led by a district attorney probing the ex-president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election result in the swing state.
Trump denies any wrongdoing in all of these investigations. He has described his behavior in Georgia as “perfect.” And he has lambasted the sealed indictment in New York, where he faces more than 30 counts related to business fraud, as an example of politicized justice.
But at a grave moment for the country, given that an ex-president and current presidential candidate is about to appear in court, there’s also growing sense of inexorably building pressure on Trump that will compromise his capacity to evade accountability.
Trump made a big show on Monday of his return to New York ahead of his arraignment. The snaking motorcade of black Secret Service SUVs to and from his private Boeing 757 in its sparkling new livery carried overtones of a presidential movement in a power play meant to send a message of strength.
Watergate whistleblower says this Trump move would be a ‘terrible idea’
Trump is itching to speak publicly. After court Tuesday, he will return to his Mar-a-Lago resort and reclaim the media spotlight with a primetime speech he will likely use to proclaim his innocence, attack the New York case as political persecution and try to distract from the fact he will be a criminal defendant.
Multiple people familiar with Trump’s thinking tell CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Kristen Holmes, however, that he has weighed speaking even earlier, in Manhattan, even as advisers caution the former president that any unplanned remarks put him at high risk of hurting his case. His speech Tuesday night is expected to have legal eyes on it before he delivers it.
But despite his bravura and talk by pundits that he will alchemize his legal problems into political gold, Monday was a dark day for Trump. He was returning to his old stomping ground in Manhattan under duress, to turn himself in on Tuesday over the first-ever criminal charges ever laid against an ex-president. Trump has long been a force of nature who rebels against constraints and has always been impossible for his staff to control. But now he will be subject to the dictates of a judge and the rules and conventions of the legal system, which will be far harder for him to disrupt and divert than the institutions of political accountability he has subverted.
At times, he may be compelled to appear in court. The grueling pre-trial process, with its numerous legal argument deadlines and heaps of evidence the defense must sift through, will impose severe demands on a legal team that has often struggled to act coherently. Ahead of his appearance Tuesday, for instance, Trump made a late shuffle of his legal team, bringing in another attorney, Todd Blanche, to serve as his lead counsel – a move some saw as sidelining another attorney, Joe Tacopina. The ex-president’s camp pushed back on this interpretation, however.
‘You can’t make this up’: The dramatic history within Trump’s legal team
One criminal prosecution is onerous enough. Trump hasn’t been charged in any of the other cases, but a multi-front defense in multiple cases would represent an extraordinary storm. And it would further disrupt the ex-president’s capacity to dictate his political schedule and control his destiny. When he was under scrutiny in the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, or during his two impeachments, Trump exploited his huge popularity with Republican voters to discredit accusations against him. He pressured most GOP senators, who knew they would pay with their careers if they voted to convict him in an impeachment trial.
While public opinion will be critical in shaping the political impact of the New York case, the prosecution itself will be insulated. Acting New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who will preside over Trump’s arraignment, is immune to his political pressure. In fact, Trump’s attacks on prosecutors or the judge could backfire in a legal arena. And even a former president can’t disregard the choreography of a court case and rules of criminal procedure.
The situation is somewhat similar to the 2020 election, when the will of voters prevailed because Trump’s attempts to have votes thrown out and results changed foundered in multiple courts because of the fact-based standards of evidence and the law.
Trump’s lawyers attempted to wrest some control of the court proceedings on Monday, arguing against a request by news organizations, including CNN, to allow television cameras into Tuesday’s arraignment. The media outlets argued that the case was of such public interest that it should be broadcast. But Trump’s lawyers told the judge that “it will create a circus-like atmosphere at the arraignment, raise unique security concerns, and is inconsistent with President Trump’s presumption of innocence.”
In a late-night ruling, Merchan turned down the request for broadcast cameras. Five still photographers will be allowed to take pictures of Trump and the courtroom before the hearing begins, however.
But the irony of the ex-president complaining about being the subject of a media circus was rich indeed. Without his salesman’s talent for whipping up media circuses, he’d have never have been president. Trump built his “The Art of the Deal” mythology in New York by constantly providing fodder for the city’s ravenous tabloids with his famed celebrity feuds, colorful personal life and business hits and failures. His entire 2016 campaign and his single-term presidency were pageants of outrage, scandal and lawlessness stoked by his often unchained Twitter posts.
If anyone knows how to thrive in a media circus, it is Trump. The difference, perhaps, in this case is that he fears being part of a media circus that he can no longer control.
Jack Teixeira, wearing a green t-shirt and bright red gym shorts with his hands above his head, walked slowly backward toward the armed federal agents outside his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, who took him into custody on charges of leaking classified documents.
The carefully choreographed arrest of the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman stood in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s scramble one week earlier to deal with the fallout from the revelation that highly classified documents had been sitting publicly on the internet for weeks.
Those leaked documents, which appeared to catch the Biden administration flat-footed, disclosed a blunt US intelligence assessment of the war in Ukraine, as well as details revealing US intelligence collection on allies.
The Biden administration raced to determine the identity of the leaker who had posted pictures of folded-up documents online, to understand the full scope of what had been leaked and to soothe allies who were varying degrees of angry that their secrets had spilled out for the world to see.
While the suspected leaker has been arrested, the administration’s damage assessment is still ongoing. It remains unclear whether the full extent of the impact of the leaks is known, as details from additional classified documents continued to be published throughout the week – even on Friday morning, the day after his arrest.
Inside the Pentagon, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was “pissed” at the leak and “deeply concerned” about its national security implications, a US official told CNN. The Defense Department has been holding daily meetings on the leak since Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first briefed last Thursday.
The episode represents the most egregious disclosure of classified documents in years. The leaked documents have exposed what officials say are lingering vulnerabilities in the management of government secrets, even after agencies overhauled their computer systems following the 2013 Edward Snowden leak, which revealed the scope of the National Security Agency’s intelligence gathering apparatus.
It is unlikely, however, that those safeguards would have prevented the most recent leak, sources said. “All classified systems have multiple levels of risk controls, but a determined insider will find the weak points over time,” said a former US official.
The Pentagon has already taken steps to clamp down on who can access sensitive classified material, while Austin has ordered a review over access to classified documents. And Congress is vowing to investigate exactly what happened and why the US intelligence community failed to discover its secrets were sitting on a public internet forum for weeks.
In a statement acknowledging the extent of the problem that the leaks exposed, President Joe Biden said Friday that he had directed both the military and intelligence community to “take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information.”
“This is a breakdown,” Chris Krebs, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, told CNN. “There’s no question that there will be a lot of introspection inside the intelligence community and across the government of where were those breakdowns? How do we ensure that we tighten that system of military discipline that that was referred to earlier to ensure that these things do not happen?”
According to charging documents unsealed on Friday, Teixeira allegedly began posting classified information on the Discord server in December 2022.
Teixeira is believed to be the head of obscure invite-only Discord chatroom called “Thug Shaker Central,” multiple US officials told CNN, where information from the classified documents was first posted.
One of the users on the Discord server told FBI investigators that Teixeira began posting photographs of documents that appeared to be classified in January 2023, according to the affidavit unsealed Friday after Teixeira was arraigned.
Investigators wrote in the affidavit that at least one of the documents that described the status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movements, was classified at the TS-SCI level, meaning it contains top-secret, sensitive compartmentalized information.
“The Government Document is based on sensitive U.S. intelligence, gathered through classified sources and methods, and contains national defense information,” the affidavit states.
Teixeira, an airman first class stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base, was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing, which is a “24/7 operational mission” that takes in intelligence from various sources and packages it into a product for some of the most senior military leaders around the globe, a defense official said.
His job was not to be the one packaging the intelligence for those senior commanders, but rather to work on the network on which that highly classified intelligence lived. For that purpose, the official said Teixeira would be required to have a TS/SCI clearance, in the instance that he was exposed to that level of intelligence.
“It’s not like your regular IT guy where you call a help desk and they come fix your computer,” the official said. “They’re working on a very highly classified system, so they require that clearance.”
CNN has reviewed 53 documents that were posted on social media sites, which include US intelligence assessments of Ukrainian and Russian forces, as well as details about other countries providing weapons to Ukraine and other intelligence matters. The Washington Post has reported on an additional tranche of documents from the server.
The photos showed crumpled documents laid on top of magazines and surrounded by other random objects, such as zip-close bags and Gorilla Glue, suggesting they had been hastily folded up and shoved into a pocket before being removed from a secure location.
A Discord user told investigators that Teixeira had become concerned “he may be discovered making the transcriptions of text in the workplace, so he began taking the documents to his residence and photographing them,” according to the affidavit.
Four Discord users active in a different Discord chatroom where the documents later appeared told CNN they began circulating on Thug Shaker. Another user who was in the Thug Shaker chatroom told CNN they saw the original posts of classified documents but declined to speak further about them.
While the documents were being shared on Discord, there’s no indication that the US intelligence community was aware they were on the internet. Discord servers are typically small, private online communities that require an invitation to join.
On April 6, The New York Times first reported on the leaked documents and the Pentagon having launched an investigation into who may have been behind the leak.
The investigation into finding the leaker quickly moved into the hands of the Justice Department, while the Pentagon investigation focused on a damage assessment of the leaks themselves.
But the number of leaked documents continued to grow in the hours and days that followed the initial disclosure, revealing new intelligence assessments on everything from South Korea’s hesitance to provide the US weapons that might be sent to Ukraine to intelligence suggesting Egypt planned to supply rockets to Russia.
US diplomats were forced to deal with the fallout. Seoul said it would hold “necessary discussions with the US” following the leak.
The documents that were leaked appear to be part of a daily intelligence briefing deck prepared for the Pentagon’s senior leaders, including Milley, the top US military general. On any given day, the slides in that deck can be properly accessed by hundreds, if not thousands, of people across the government, officials said.
Last Friday’s announcement of a Justice Department investigation underscored just how high a priority the leak was considered.
By Monday, FBI agents from Washington to California to Boston were combing through evidence, conducting interviews and tracking volumes of computer data that within days pointed to Teixeira. They worked with Army CID investigators experienced in classified document probes.
Anthony Ferrante, a former FBI agent, said that the “first few hours are critical” in a case like the Discord leaks as investigators rush to preserve digital evidence before it becomes harder to find online or vanishes altogether.
FBI agents likely worked backward from the initial Discord posts to build a profile of the leaker, combing through his other online accounts to “put a human behind a keyboard,” Ferrante, who is now global head of cybersecurity at FTI Consulting, told CNN.
Even though Teixeira emerged quickly as the most obvious suspect, counterintelligence agents trained in uncovering foreign spies looked through Teixeira’s background to try to find any sign that he could be working with a foreign intelligence service.
The FBI agents’ work was made more urgent because the trove of documents had set off a media frenzy and reporters found ready interviews among members of Teixeira’s Internet social circle.
On Monday, the FBI interviewed a user of the Discord chatroom where the classified information had been posted, according to the affidavit. That person told investigators that a user who went by “Jack” and said he was in the Air National Guard was the server’s administrator.
A day earlier, the investigative news outlet Bellingcat posted an interview with a member of that same chatroom.
On Wednesday, a day before Teixeira’s arrest, the FBI obtained records from Discord that included the subscriber information of the server’s administrator, which had Teixeira’s name and address, according to the affidavit.
By day 5 of the FBI’s search, agents believed they had enough to charge Teixeira, and they began surveilling him.
In a different scenario, without the intense public attention, agents might have watched him for weeks to see if he was meeting anyone suspicious or if he had accomplices.
Instead, they moved to make an arrest Thursday, as news helicopters flew above.
Teixeira was charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal of classified information and defense materials. He will next appear on Wednesday in federal court in Massachusetts.
For the Biden administration, the episode has already prompted the Pentagon to begin to limit who across the government receives its highly classified daily intelligence briefs, amid lingering questions over why a 21-year-old junior Air National Guardsman had access to such classified information – and why it wasn’t discovered more quickly.
Austin and Milley spent time on the phone speaking with US allies and partners around the world regarding the sensitive intelligence and top-secret documents suddenly thrust into the public sphere. Those conversations were expected to continue through the end of the week, another US official said.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was tapped to lead the diplomatic response to the leaked US intelligence documents, according to a US official familiar with the matter.
Biden was continually briefed on the state of the investigation while abroad, as well as the efforts of his top officials to engage with allies over the leaked information, officials said. Behind the scenes, that effort was a reality that loomed over a deeply personal and important foreign trip for Biden, one official acknowledged.
Still, the leaks didn’t arise when Biden met Wednesday with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Five Eyes intelligence sharing ally.
Biden publicly downplayed the significance of the leak when he made his first comments on the matter. “I’m concerned that it happened, but there is nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence,” Biden told reporters Thursday.
Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, once again refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election and repeated false claims about it being stolen at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
Taking questions from GOP primary voters at the town hall moderated by “CNN This Morning” anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump remained defiant about the 2020 election as well as the myriad investigations into him – making clear that he’s sticking to the script he’s delivered over the past two years on conservative media.
The town hall at Saint Anselm College – his first appearance on CNN since 2016 – came as unprecedented legal clouds hang over him as he seeks to become only the second commander in chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms. New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation GOP primary, is also home to many swing voters and is a state he lost in both 2016 and 2020 after winning the primaries.
The audience of Republicans and undeclared voters who plan to vote in the GOP primary cheered Trump throughout the evening, including when he attacked Tuesday’s jury verdict that found he sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump mocked Carroll on Wednesday while downplaying the significance of the $5 million the jury awarded her for battery and defamation.
The former president said he would pardon “a large portion” of the rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and even pulled out a printout of his own tweets from that day in an attempt to deflect blame as Collins pressed him on why he waited three hours before telling the rioters to leave the Capitol.
“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said Wednesday night.
When Collins pressed Trump on the Manhattan federal jury finding Trump sexually abused Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996, Trump suggested it was helping his poll numbers.
When asked if the jury’s decision would deter women from voting for him, the former president said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Trump insulted Carroll, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even Collins when she pressed him on a question about why he hadn’t returned classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s very simple – you’re a nasty person, I’ll tell you,” Trump said on stage.
Trump also took questions from New Hampshire voters on the economy and policy issues, such as abortion. The former president, who solidified the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that struck down Roe v. Wade, repeatedly declined to say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if he won a second term.
Trump suggested Republicans should refuse to raise the debt limit if the White House does not agree to spending cuts.
“I say to the Republicans out there – congressmen, senators – if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default, and I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave, will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen, but it’s better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors,” Trump said.
When Collins asked him to clarify whether the US should default if the White House doesn’t agree to cuts, Trump said, “We might as well do it now than do it later.”
Trump pleaded not guilty last month to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump also faces potential legal peril in both Washington, DC – where a special counsel is leading a pair of investigations – and in Georgia, where the Fulton County district attorney plans to announce charges this summer from the investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.
Still, the twice-impeached former president has repeatedly said that any charges will not stop him from running for president, dismissing all of the investigations as politically motivated witch hunts. That’s a view many GOP voters share, according to recent surveys. Nearly 70% of Republican primary voters in a recent NBC News poll said investigations into the former president “are politically motivated” and that “no other candidate is like him, we must support him.”
Trump was pressed on the investigation into his handling of classified documents and why he didn’t return all of the documents in his possession after receiving a subpoena. He responded by pointing out the classified documents found at the homes of others – including President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. But they both returned the documents once they discovered they had them in their possession.
The FBI obtained a search warrant and retrieved more than 100 classified documents from Trump’s Florida resort in August 2022, which came after he had received a subpoena to return documents in June 2022 and after his attorney had asserted that all classified material in his possession had been returned.
Asked during the town hall whether he showed the classified documents to anyone at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said, “Not really.”
The former president would not say whether he wants Russia or Ukraine to win the war during Wednesday’s town hall, instead saying that he wants the war to end.
“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” he said.
When asked again whether or not the former president wants Ukraine to win, Trump did not answer directly, but instead claimed that he would be able to end the war in 24 hours.
“Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying,” Trump said. “And I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”
Trump said he thinks that “(Russian President Vladimir) Putin made a mistake” by invading Ukraine, but he stopped short of saying that Putin is a war criminal.
That’s something that “should be discussed later,” Trump said.
“If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stopped,” he said.
While a handful of rivals have entered the Republican presidential primary – and Trump’s biggest potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has not yet officially launched a bid – Trump has maintained a healthy lead in early GOP primary polling. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday, 43% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents named Trump unprompted when asked who they would like to see the party nominate in 2024, compared with 20% naming DeSantis, and 2% or less naming any other candidate.
Trump’s participation in the town hall was indicative of a broader campaign strategy to try to expand his appeal beyond conservative media viewers, CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported earlier Wednesday. He’s surrounded himself with a more organized team and has been making smaller retail politics stops while scaling back larger rallies – signs of a more traditional campaign than his 2016 and 2020 operations. He lost that 2020 race by about 7 million votes, although he continues to falsely claim it was stolen from him – claims he stuck to on Wednesday night.
There have been warning signs for the GOP that the obsession with the 2020 election isn’t palatable beyond the base. Many of Trump’s handpicked candidates who embraced his election lies in swing states lost in last year’s midterm elections. And his advisers acknowledge he still has work to do to engage with Republican voters outside of his loyal base of supporters, multiple sources told CNN.
But that didn’t mean Trump was ready to acknowledge the reality that he lost the 2020 election. And if he becomes the GOP nominee in 2024, Trump said Wednesday he would not commit to accepting the results regardless of the outcome, saying that he would do so if he believes “it’s an honest election.”
“If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional details from the town hall.
Republican voters in Pennsylvania made a candidate supported by the GOP establishment their nominee for an open state Supreme Court seat, rejecting another Republican contender more closely aligned with former President Donald Trump’s wing of the party.
CNN projected the victory of Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Carluccio in Tuesday’s primary, which marks a rebound for the more traditional elements of the GOP in this presidential battleground state. She will defeat Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, who briefly halted the certification of the state’s election results in 2020, and had the backing of a key Trump ally, Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano in this election.
Mastriano had pushed the falsehood in his failed 2022 bid for governor that election fraud led to Trump’s 2020 loss in the state. Last year, the Trump-endorsed Mastriano bested the Republican field to win his party’s nomination in the governor’s race, only to suffer a double-digit defeat to Democrat Josh Shapiro in the general election.
Carluccio now will face Democrat Superior Court Judge Daniel McCaffery in the fall.
The Republican and Democratic nominees are vying for an open seat on Pennsylvania’s high court, following the death of former Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat, last year.
The outcome of November’s election will not tip the partisan balance on the high court, where Democrats currently hold a 4-2 majority on the seven-member body, but it could narrow the gap and start to lay the foundation for a shift in power in future election cycles, experts say.
“It could create a situation where, very shortly, the partisan balance on this court could be up for grabs,” said Douglas Keith, who researches judicial elections at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
State supreme courts are the final arbiters on key issues, ranging from election ground rules to abortion policies. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has upheld the state’s no-excuse mail voting law, and last year selected the state’s congressional map, breaking an impasse between the then-Republican controlled legislature and the state’s Democratic governor.
Justices on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court serve 10-year terms. After the first election, they run in so-called retention elections without opponents.
Much of the attention in the Pennsylvania contest centered on the GOP primary between Carluccio and McCullough, who halted certification of the 2020 results – including Joe Biden’s victory in the state – in a ruling that was swiftly overturned by the state Supreme Court.
McCullough, who lost a 2021 bid for the Supreme Court, calls herself “a strict constitutionalist judge,” and touted her rulings against pandemic restrictions and the state’s mail-in voting law in the campaign.
But Carluccio had the backing of the state Republican Party and a national GOP group that’s active in judicial elections, the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Judicial Fairness Initiative, which has weighed in with $600,000 in advertising to boost Carluccio.
In a statement to CNN this week, Carluccio said she would leave “personal and political opinions at the door and look at each case without bias and only determine the constitutionality of what’s before me.”
Carluccio said she hasn’t questioned the outcome of any election, but she said she is concerned by what she called the “conflicting, and sometimes unclear,” decisions on the state’s mail-in voting law in recent years by the state Supreme Court.
In 2019, the state legislatures passed a no-excuse mail-in voting law, known as Act 77, with bipartisan support. But it has become the target of criticism from some Republicans after it was employed in the contentious 2020 election that saw Biden flip the state. The high court has weighed in on aspects of the law multiple times. In 2020, for instance, the court ruled that ballots in two counties with missing dates on the outside of the ballot return envelope could be counted. In the 2022 election, however, the court ordered that mail ballots with missing or improper dates on the return envelopes should be kept out of the count and deadlocked on the underlying legal questions.
“Our election laws must be applied consistently across all counties, regardless of the election year,” Carluccio said in her statement. “And, when part of our electorate has concerns about the integrity of our elections, rather than dismiss their concerns, the response should be bold transparency in the administration of our elections.”
The modest spending in the under-the-radar Pennsylvania high court race stood sharp contrast to the record-setting spending that candidates and outside groups plowed into a Wisconsin Supreme Court election last month that, in the end, flipped control of that state’s high court to liberals. (A Kantar Media/CMAG analysis for the Brennan Center found that the ad spending for the Wisconsin high court seat hit $28.8 million as of early April, and some estimates put the likely final tally of all spending in that election even higher.)
In an interview ahead of Tuesday’s election, Penn State political scientist Michael Nelson said the GOP primary represented a “good opportunity to get a sense of where the energy in the party is, what segment of the party is able to get their people to go on the polls on a random Tuesday in May when there hasn’t been wall-to-wall television advertising.”
“Given that the Mastriano wing of the Republican Party was so dominant in the elections last fall, it will be interesting to see whether they can keep up that momentum or whether the standard-issue conservative wing of the party is able to rebound,” he added.
A federal judge has given the Department of Homeland Security until next Tuesday to decide how it will handle a conservative think tank’s request for Prince Harry’s US immigration records.
The Heritage Foundation has asked the US government via the Freedom of Information Act to see his visa application, citing his admission of past recreational drug use in his memoir. The group is questioning whether immigration officials properly granted Prince Harry’s application, since admission of past drug use can be grounds to reject a visa application.
At a hearing Tuesday in Washington, DC, federal judge Carl Nichols gave DHS until June 13 to determine whether or not it will expedite or respond to a request for the records.
Several agencies within the department, including US Border Patrol, have denied the FOIA requests, but the agency’s headquarters has not yet made a determination.
In court filings, DHS has noted that the US Customs and Border Protection agency originally denied the requests from Heritage because the group did not have Prince Harry’s authorization or consent to release the information.
“A person’s visa … is confidential,” DHS attorney John Bardo said in court Tuesday.
DHS attorneys have also said that an injunction to expedite the FOIA requests is not appropriate in the case since Heritage has, among other things, not shown how they will suffer irreparable harm if the information is not quickly released.
Attorneys for the Heritage Foundation see the case as part of a larger effort to uncover non-compliance with the law by DHS in different areas – including accusations from Republican lawmakers that DHS is “deliberately refusing to enforce the Country’s immigration laws and is responsible for the current crisis at the border,” court filings read.
When asked about the privacy aspect of their records request, attorney Samuel Dewey, who represents Heritage, said Prince Harry’s privacy on the issue of past drug use has been “extraordinarily diminished” given his public remarks on the subject.
“We’re only focused on the specific issue that’s drawn all the press attention: the drug use,” Dewey said. “He’s talked about, he’s written about it extensively. He has waved any privacy interest he has in his drug use. He has bragged about it (in his memoir) and sold that.”
To CNN, Dewey added: “This is a case that concerns Prince Harry, but what it’s focused on is DHS’s conduct.”
Separately on Tuesday, Prince Harry testified in a case in London against the publisher of a UK tabloid, alleging the media organization used illegal methods in their reporting, namely by hacking his phone.
It was the first time in over a century that a member of the British royal family has testified in court.
With a sense of relief that the conservative Supreme Court did not use a major Alabama redistricting case to further gut the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates and election attorneys are preparing for a new flood of redistricting litigation lawsuits challenging political maps – especially in the South – they say discriminate against minorities.
In the 5-4 case decided Thursday, Alabama must now draw a second majority-Black US congressional district after Republicans were sued by African American voters over a redistricting plan for the 27% percent Black state that made White voters the majority in six of the seven districts.
The six White majority districts are represented by Republicans; the Black majority district is represented by a Democrat.
“I don’t think it’s going to stop Republicans from drawing racist maps,” Aunna Dennis, executive director of the voting rights group Common Cause, told CNN. “But I think that this empowers those of us pushing back and fighting that.”
The majority opinion – written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by the court’s three liberals and, in most parts, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh – effectively maintained the status quo around how courts should approach Voting Rights Act lawsuits that allege a legislative map discriminates by race.
By letting old precedent around the Voting Rights Act to stand in the case, called Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court has likely emboldened voting rights advocates to bring cases they previously thought would have been doomed.
Several election law attorneys and voting rights advocates have suggested to CNN they believe the decision could have a ripple effect across the South, in states like Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas where cases claiming Section 2 violations are already working through the courts.
According to the Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning voting rights media platform that tracks election litigation, there are 31 active federal cases involving Voting Rights Act redistricting claims similar to those in the Alabama case.
“I suspect that there are a number of states with lawyers who were considering filing a lawsuit similar to the Milligan lawsuit, but they held off because the prospects of how everyone thought Milligan would go were so dim. But now, you’re going to have a whole range of suits filed,” said Alabama voting rights attorney J.S. “Chris” Christie, who filed one of the two lawsuits that were before the justices in the Milligan case.
“Some of those will win, and some of them won’t. All redistricting suits are not the same,” Christie said, noting that Kavanaugh did not join an important part of Roberts’ opinion, depriving that section of a majority.
Still, he said, “Lawyers who file these types of lawsuits are going to be encouraged and are going to pursue those cases aggressively, knowing that the Voting Rights Act precedents are there.”
The ruling was a shock. The right-leaning high court, sometimes in decisions penned by Roberts himself, had been on a spree of landmark rulings over the last several years that had whittled down the scope of the Voting Rights Act. And in the flurry of emergency litigation last year ahead of the 2022 midterms, the Supreme Court repeatedly put on hold lower court rulings – including in the Alabama case – that would have ordered the redrawing of political maps ahead of last year’s elections, helping Republicans to narrowly reclaim the US House.
That meant that, at least in Alabama, the election was carried out under a redistricting plan that the Supreme Court has now affirmed to be likely unlawful.
“The fact remains that the Supreme Court previously allowed the same map that they just determined unconstitutionally, and systemically diluted Black votes be used in the 2022 election,” the Congressional Black Caucus said in a statement.
In Alabama, lower courts said early last year that the state’s congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power. The courts ordered it redrawn in a way that was expected to produce a second majority-Black district, which would have shifted the partisan makeup of the state’s congressional delegation from 6-1 to 5-2.
But, in February 2022, the Supreme Court put those decisions on hold until the justices could hear and decide the case themselves.
At the heart of the dispute in the Alabama case was the way that, under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, race was used to determine if a map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting procedures “not equally open to participation by members” of a protected class, like racial minorities. Alabama was putting forward an argument for a supposedly “race-blind” approach to VRA redistricting compliance, that if endorsed, would have defanged the provision.
Already, the Supreme Court led by Roberts had gutted a separate provision of the VRA that required certain jurisdictions (including Alabama and other states in the South) with a history of racially discriminatory voting policies to get federal approval for the maps that they drew.
The Supreme Court’s emergency move last year to allow the Republican-drawn Alabama map to stay in place had cascading effects in lawsuits across the country.
Some cases, like a challenge brought to Alabama’s state legislative redistricting plan, were put on hold.
In a Georgia case that concerned both the congressional and state legislative redistricting plans, a federal judge said that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in at least some of the districts they were challenging, but he declined to grant the preliminary injunction, in part citing the Supreme Court’s emergency order.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, also froze a lower court order in a legal challenge brought against Louisiana’s congressional map that made similar arguments as the Milligan case, as Louisiana legislators had drawn just one majority-Black district of the six districts in the 33% percent Black state.
The justices paused the case, where a federal judge was preparing to redraw the Louisiana map if the Republican lawmakers refused to do so, and said they were taking up the lawsuit but putting it on hold until the Milligan case was decided.
Now the challengers’ lawyers in that case are anticipating that the Supreme Court will send it back to lower courts, where they were poised to prevail under the approach to VRA redistricting cases that the justices have now left undisturbed.
Cases in Texas, Mississippi and elsewhere that inched ahead while the Milligan case was pending will go to trial without the threat that the challengers would need to prove their case under a drastically different Section 2 standard.
“If anything, we no longer need to make adjustments that we had potentially been preparing for because the state of the law remains unchanged,” said Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Sarah Chen, whose group is involved in several challenges to Texas maps, including a lawsuit over Galveston County’s redistricting plan.
“The Supreme Court did not endorse the radical changes proposed by Alabama in their arguments, the same changes that are also endorsed by opposing counsel in this Galveston redistricting matter,” Chen added.
While challenges to statewide maps are what get the most national attention, the ruling’s effect on how the VRA is applied to local races like county commission elections and school board seats “is really going to impact voters’ everyday lives,” according to Christie, the Alabama voting rights attorney, who said that Thursday’s opinion will be “huge” in a newly filed challenge to a county commission map in the state.
“Attorneys who file these types of lawsuits are going to be encouraged to pursue these cases knowing that the VRA precedent is there,” he said.
Even before they get into a courtroom, voting rights advocates see the Milligan ruling as valuable for discouraging state and local map drawers from diminishing the political power of communities of color, as it squelched expectations that the Supreme Court was about to make VRA challenges more difficult to bring.
“I am disappointed in today’s Supreme Court opinion but it remains the commitment of the Secretary of State’s Office to comply with all applicable election laws,” Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, the defendant in the Alabama case, said in a statement after the ruling.
In North Carolina, voting rights advocates had been reeling from a major defeat with the state Supreme Court recently ruling that North Carolina courts couldn’t police partisan gerrymandering. (Litigation over the state’s congressional plan is also before the Supreme Court in a legal dispute that does not concern the Voting Rights Act). They are finding a silver lining in that, thanks to Thursday’s ruling, the GOP legislators will be redrawing North Carolina’s political maps knowing Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters remain in force.
“We would hope that they would really take this decision to heart that they would make a genuine good faith effort to comply with Section 2,” said Hilary Harris Klein, the senior counsel for voting rights with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
Thursday’s ruling, said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “puts state legislatures and local redistricting bodies on notice that the Voting Rights Act is here to stay and if they deny communities of color the representation they deserve, that they will face lawsuits.”
Microsoft
(MSFT) and the video game giant Activision Blizzard
(ATVI) will face off Thursday against the US government in a high-stakes battle over one of the largest technology acquisitions in history.
The showdown in federal court will have the CEOs of both companies taking the stand to defend their $69 billion merger against claims that the combination could violate US antitrust law and harm millions of consumers.
The outcome of the fight will shape the future of the multibillion-dollar games industry. It will also impact enormously popular gaming franchises such as “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft,” which Activision owns and would be transferred to Microsoft under the deal.
Also testifying will be the top financial executives from both companies; senior leaders from Microsoft’s Xbox division; the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer; and a vocal critic of the deal, Sony gaming CEO Jim Ryan.
The days-long affair begins Thursday and is scheduled to run through next week.
In bringing the case, the Federal Trade Commission is asking a US district court judge for an injunction that would temporarily halt the deal. That would keep the companies from closing their merger, at least until the FTC’s in-house court rules in a separate proceeding on whether the acquisition is anticompetitive.
But this week’s fight over a preliminary injunction may prove decisive for the deal as a whole. Microsoft has said that a victory for the FTC at this stage “will effectively block the transaction” overall.
In this hearing, the FTC does not need to prove that the deal is anticompetitive. It just needs to show that the agency would be likely to succeed in doing so if the case moves ahead, and that otherwise its ability to enforce US antitrust law would be harmed.
The clash comes as Microsoft and Activision face down a contractual July 18 deadline to consummate the deal. Failure to close, or any permanent court order to block the merger, could force Microsoft to pay a $3 billion breakup fee to Activision, according to the deal’s terms.
The FTC lawsuit has put Microsoft under the harshest antitrust scrutiny in the US in more than two decades. It also could be a crucial test for the FTC at a time when it’s trying to rein in the tech industry broadly, with mixed success.
In its initial challenge to the merger in its in-house court last year, the FTC alleged the deal would harm competition by turning Microsoft into the world’s third-largest video game publisher — allowing it to raise video game prices with impunity, restrict Activision titles from rival platforms and harm game quality and player experiences on consoles and gaming services.
Some of those concerns have also been raised internationally. The UK government has challenged the acquisition, and the New Zealand government on Tuesday warned that the deal could be anticompetitive.
Microsoft has sought to address the concerns by hammering out multi-year licensing agreements with competitors such as Nintendo and Nvidia to ensure that their platforms will continue to receive popular titles if the deal goes through.
The company has also put forth an 11-point pledge to keep its platforms open, a commitment that applies not only to the Activision Blizzard deal but to virtually all of Microsoft’s gaming business going forward.
Last month, Microsoft said the European Union would require it to license Activision games “automatically” to competing cloud gaming services as a condition of allowing the merger to proceed in the EU. That commitment, Microsoft said, “will apply globally and will empower millions of consumers worldwide to play these games on any device they choose.”
Although EU regulators have said the concession addresses their concerns, officials in the US and the UK are continuing with their legal opposition to the deal.
The standoff particularly focuses attention on FTC Chair Lina Khan, a tech industry critic who has argued for litigating difficult cases and for introducing novel legal theories to help adapt US antitrust law to the digital age.
Khan won a significant victory last year when the FTC forced Nvidia to abandon its attempted acquisition of the chipmaker Arm. The deal would have combined two companies in adjacent industries in what is known as a vertical merger, a type of deal that is rarely blocked in the United States.
But Khan also suffered a setback when the FTC unsuccessfully tried to block Facebook-parent Meta from acquiring Within Unlimited, a virtual reality startup. The FTC had argued that the acquisition was an attempt by Meta to quash competition in the nascent VR industry, but earlier this year, a federal judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction of the kind the FTC now seeks against Microsoft. The FTC dropped its case against Meta soon after.
Civil rights groups representing plaintiffs in a high-profile congressional redistricting case are urging a federal court in Alabama to reject a controversial new map crafted by the Republican-dominated legislature, saying it perpetuates a violation of the nation’s landmark voting rights law.
In a late-night court filing Friday, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and multiple attorneys asked a three-judge panel to direct an official to devise a new map that complies with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The plaintiffs in the case said legislators who drew and approved the maps didn’t comply with a court mandate to create a second congressional district where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
Instead, they argued, lawmakers were “focused on pleasing national leaders whose objective is to maintain the Republican Party’s slim majority in the US House.”
State officials, who have defended the map as fair, have until August 4 to respond to the new filings.
The dispute has drawn national attention after critics accused Alabama legislators of openly defying the US Supreme Court and its directive to give Black voters more political power in the state.
And the outcome of the legal battle in Alabama – along with court skirmishes in several other states over congressional redistricting – could help determine whether Republicans retain their slim majority in the House after next year’s elections.
In this case, the Republican supermajority in the Alabama legislature approved a new map on July 21, weeks after the US Supreme Court said that an existing map – with just one majority-Black congressional district out of seven in a state where Black residents make up 27% of the population – likely violated the decades-old federal voting law by diluting the voting power of Black residents. The high court, by a 5-4 majority, affirmed a lower court decision that had ordered the state to redraw the congressional maps to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”
But the map approved this month and signed into law by Alabama’s GOP Gov. Kay Ivey instead boosted the share of Black voters in the majority-White 2nd Congressional District from roughly 30% to nearly 40%. It also reduced the Black voting-age population in the state’s only majority-Black district to around 50% from about 55%.
Voting rights experts say the state has a history of racially polarized voting, making it harder for candidates favored by Black voters to win in a district where Black residents account for less than 50% of the voting-age population.
“The new CD2 … does not provide Black voters a realistic opportunity to election their preferred candidate in any but the most extreme situations,” the plaintiffs argued in the new filings.
In Alabama, most Black voters have supported Democrats. If the federal judges approve a map with a second majority-Black district, that could result in two Democrats representing the state in the House.
House Republicans hold just a narrow edge on Democrats, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alabama case has given Democrats fresh optimism that their side will prevail in legal fights aimed at increasing the share of Black voters in congressional districts in Louisiana, Georgia and several other states.
In a sign of the high political stakes, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has weighed in on the debate and told reporters that he spoke to Alabama lawmakers as they met for the special session to redraw the map to comply with the court order.
The Justice Department filed a so-called “statement of interest” on Friday but did not side with any party in the dispute. The agency outlined factors the judges should consider in its analysis and called on the court to impose its own map if it determines that the one drawn by lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act.
A court hearing on objections to the legislature’s map is set for August 14.
Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.
Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.
“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.
That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”
Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”
There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.
But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.
“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”
But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.
The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.
At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.
In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.
As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.
In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)
While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.
“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”
The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.
“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.
Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.
“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.
“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”
In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”
Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.
For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.
Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.
“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”
Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.
Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.
More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.
“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”
Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.
“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.
But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.
Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.
“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.
As Fox News faces legal peril over its coverage of Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies, one of its most featured Republicans, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is trying to gut the free speech protections that may ultimately save the network from financial ruin.
DeSantis and his GOP allies in the state legislature have proposed a sweeping overhaul to defamation laws here that would make it far easier to sue news organizations in Florida. The legislation, fashioned to punish media outlets over their coverage of conservatives, would turn the state into a battleground over the future of the First Amendment.
But in doing so, DeSantis has sparked warnings from the right that his attempts to target the mainstream media will result in headaches for conservative outlets as well. Among the most vulnerable, opponents have said, could be the media organizations that have done the most to promote DeSantis amid his ascent in the GOP.
“I understand the emotion behind this bill, but you cannot legislate on emotion and this bill is a sword that will cut both ways,” said Trey Radel, a former Republican colleague of DeSantis in the US House who hosts a weeknight radio show on a Florida Fox News affiliate. “This bill has the potential to stifle, if not shut down, center right media and conservative talk radio.”
The legislation as introduced takes direct aim at the landmark US Supreme Court ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, which created a higher barrier for public figures to sue for defamation. The decision has been a bedrock of US media law since the case was decided in 1964, protecting news outlets from expensive lawsuits for mistakes made during the course of reporting by requiring plaintiffs to prove the reporter or outlet demonstrated “actual malice” when publishing erroneous information about a public figure.
Fox News has leaned heavily on the ruling in defending itself from Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit. Dominion in its lawsuit has alleged Fox “recklessly disregarded the truth” during its 2020 presidential election coverage by pushing various pro-Trump conspiracies about the company’s voting technology.
Fox attorneys cited New York Times v. Sullivan five times in its March 7 court filing asking for a summary judgment. In public statements, the network has repeatedly insisted it is protected by the precedent set in that case.
“Despite the noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” Fox News Media said in one such recent statement.
But if Florida Republicans get their way, those protections would be eroded. House Speaker Paul Renner acknowledged last week that the bill his chamber is considering “is designed to challenge current constitutional law” and “tee up a court case.” The push comes as two of the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have openly expressed a willingness to revisit the high court’s ruling in Sullivan, with Thomas calling the court’s libel precedent “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”
DeSantis has for years quietly eyed going after the media’s First Amendment protections, first floating legislation targeting libel laws in December 2021, according to emails obtained by CNN. Stephanie Kopelousos, the governor’s director of legislative affairs, sent draft bill language to the office of the state Senate president, though it was not filed for the 2022 legislative session.
His intentions became public last month at an unusually staged event during which DeSantis, seated behind a studio desk like a news anchor with “TRUTH” emblazoned on a screen behind him, signaled his willingness to turn Florida into a test case to challenge Sullivan.
“It’s our view in Florida that we want to be standing up for the little guy against some of these massive media conglomerates,” DeSantis said.
But that was several weeks before Dominion unleashed a trove of embarrassing text messages and testimony from Fox executives and personalities that suggested they knowingly aired Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.
Adding to the intrigue is the lengths to which the conservative network and others owned by Rupert Murdoch, have gone to promote DeSantis ahead of his likely bid for president. In between regular appearances on Fox programming, DeSantis in recent weeks has played catch with “Fox & Friends’” Brian Kilmeade, sat down with TalkTV’s Piers Morgan in the governor’s mansion, toured his hometown with the New York Post’s Salena Zito and granted a rare newspaper interview to David Charter of the Times of London – all reporters who work in Murdoch’s media empire. The New York Post declared the Republican governor “DeFUTURE” after his resounding reelection victory in November.
Fox News declined to comment. But the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch-owned outlet, recently published an op-ed by Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr criticizing other media outlets for their “gleeful” coverage of Fox’s “setback” instead of standing up for the protections created by Sullivan. In a plea that seemed aimed at DeSantis’ efforts, Barr urged conservatives with power not to attempt to weaken libel laws.
“For the foreseeable future, we will likely be on the wrong side of the culture-setting consensus,” he wrote. “There are precious few conservative news outlets as it is. Why make them more vulnerable to the multitude of left-wing plaintiffs’ lawyers?”
Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, the sponsor of the Florida House bill, said he would “take Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch over Bill Barr every day of the week.” Andrade contended that libel laws have become so one-sided, “If you’ve been egregiously defamed by a media outlet, in 2023 you have almost no opportunity for actual recourse.”
Andrade said he planned to tweak the bill to address some of the blowback before its next committee stop, but otherwise intended to charge ahead. The bill’s next vote is not yet scheduled.
“The majority of the concerns are not based in reality,” Andrade said.
Under the Florida bill, the definition of a public figure is narrowed significantly and it puts more onus on an individual to verify a defamatory allegation before publishing. Editing video in a misleading way could be considered defamation in this bill. It also allows someone to sue wherever the material is accessed – in today’s digital world, that could be anywhere in the state – which opponents say will lead to “venue shopping” for favorable judges. Courts must assume any statement made by an anonymous source is false, the bill says, which free speech advocates say would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers.
The bill, which was also introduced in the state Senate with some modifications, has attracted an astounding array of opponents that cross the political spectrum. At a House committee hearing last week, the conservative Americans for Prosperity and the more progressive American Civil Liberties Union both testified against it. Brendon Leslie, the founder of the Florida Voice, a DeSantis-friendly conservative media outlet, warned on Twitter that progressive donors would flood conservative media with lawsuits if the bill became law. Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, called the bill a “blunt instrument” that has made commentary-heavy evangelical and conservative broadcast stations “incredibly nervous.” US Rep. Cory Mills, a Republican from Central Florida, wrote in a letter to state GOP legislative leaders that he was “gravely concerned that (the bills) violate free speech rights.”
Though Sullivan is primarily known for protecting news organizations, the bill could make it easier to sue local bloggers, people who post web comments and other online speakers, opponents have warned.
“It doesn’t just hurt … what’s been referred to as the legacy media,” said Carol LoCicero, a lawyer who has represented The Villages Daily Sun, a newspaper published by the conservative owners of The Villages retirement community. “It hurts people from all points of view. It hurts individuals. Frankly, it will hurt politicians as they’re campaigning for office and making statements about their opponents.”
DeSantis, though, is so far undeterred. He told reporters last week that he didn’t think the bill would “cause much of a difference in terms of free speech.”
“I do think it may cause some people to not want to put out things that are false, that are that are smearing somebody’s reputation,” he said.
Legal experts are skeptical that the bill will be upheld even if it passes. Other Supreme Court justices have so far not shown the same enthusiasm as Thomas and Gorsuch for reviewing its precedent in Sullivan. Dave Heller, deputy director of the Media Law Resource Center, said the proposed legislation is “breathtaking in its hostility toward a free press” and Mark Lerner, an attorney who represented Newsmax in a libel dispute, called the measure “unconstitutional” and said its proponents “who think they’re championing conservative voices may be surprised that it chills them.”
Radel, the former congressman and radio host, said conservative outlets might not survive the legal costs they could face while legal challenges move through the court system.
“That type of scorched earth policy is going to destroy conservative talk in Florida in the meantime,” he said. “I work for a privately owned broadcasting group that will not be able to afford a barrage of lawsuits before we wait for it to go before the Supreme Court.”
