Tag: legislative bodies

US Supreme Court faces ‘outright defiance’ from Alabama | CNN Politics

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It was a legitimate surprise when the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court ordered Alabama’s conservative-dominated state government last month to redraw its congressional map and include either a second majority-Black congressional district or something quite close to it.

It may be equally surprising that Alabama appears to have said no.

Instead of simply complying with the Supreme Court’s order in the Allen v. Milligan case, Alabama’s legislature redrew the congressional map to lower the Black voting-age population in the existing Democratic seat held by Rep. Terri Sewell from about 55% to just over 50% and then increased a second district’s Black population percentage to about 40%.

The new map approved by Alabama’s legislature and governor will go before federal courts for review in August, so this story is far from over.

And it will combine with fights over congressional maps in other states, especially New York, in such a way that control of the House could very much be at stake.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, seemed to defend the legislature’s insolence in the face of the federal courts’ orders when it approved the new map Friday.

“The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups,” she said in a statement.

CNN’s Dianne Gallagher noted in her report that the old congressional map was invalidated by a three-judge federal district court panel that included two judges nominated to the bench by former President Donald Trump.

They concluded the plan by which Alabamians selected their congressional delegation in 2022 likely violated the Voting Rights Act because Black voters have “less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.”

Before the 2022 midterm election, the US Supreme Court had tabled action on Alabama’s map, which helped Republicans win the barely there four-seat House majority they currently hold.

Gallagher and CNN’s Tierney Sneed wrote last month that the Allen v. Milligan decision could have consequences for other states and reignite a series of lawsuits in multiple states.

“Outright defiance of the Supreme Court’s order,” is how Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, described the new map to CNN’s Dana Bash Monday.

“In this moment, it is up to our federal courts to protect Black voters and also to protect their own authority here,” she later added.

The background here is that Alabama’s population is about 27% Black, but the Black population in the state is focused on a number of counties that are overwhelmingly African American – an area known as the state’s Black Belt, although it is named for the area’s fertile soil. The interest of giving the voters of the Black Belt, many of whom are Black, representation in Congress, is all over the Supreme Court’s decision.

Coincidentally, earlier this year, President Joe Biden named Alabama’s Black Belt, site of many key moments in the Civil Rights Movement, as a National Heritage Area.

To Nelson, the math suggests that since Black Alabamians represent about a quarter of the state’s population, they should get representation from more than one of the seven lawmakers representing Alabama in Congress.

But the issue is larger than simple math since Alabama, both historically and currently, is marked by polarized voting conditions.

“This is a mandate by civil rights laws to make sure that there’s fairness in our systems, that Black voters and other voters who have been historically discriminated against have an opportunity to have representatives who will speak to their interests and give voice to their concerns,” she said.

Alabama had asked the Supreme Court to essentially nullify Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, something many court watchers thought the conservative majority was primed to execute.

But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined liberals on the court to throw out the Alabama map.

The Supreme Court also rejected out of hand the idea that the Gulf Coast area represents a community of interest on par with the Black Belt. The new map, according to the state attorney general’s office, still tries to keep the Gulf Coast community together in a single district.

In a statement, the attorney general’s office argued the new map is fair and complies with the principles of the Voting Rights Act and seeks to unite the Black Belt counties.

The other political story here is that, like most congressional districts nationwide, not one of the districts in which Alabamians voted in the 2022 midterm elections was even relatively competitive. The only winning candidate who got less than two-thirds of the vote was the Democrat, Sewell. And she still got more than 63% of the heavily Democratic district.

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April 12, 2021
Texas sends ban on gender-affirming care for minors to governor’s desk | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Texas legislature Wednesday night voted to ban gender-affirming care for most minors, sending a bill to the governor’s desk that, if enacted, would put critical health care out of reach for transgender youth in America’s second-most-populous state.

Senate Bill 14 would block a minor’s access to gender reassignment surgeries, puberty blocking medication and hormone therapies, and providing this care to trans youth would lead to the revocation of a health care provider’s license.

The legislation was held up for days by protests and procedural delays by Democrats in the House. House Republicans approved an amendment that makes minor exceptions for children who had begun receiving non-surgical gender-affirming care before June 1, 2023, and underwent 12 or more sessions of mental health counseling or psychotherapy six months prior to beginning prescription drug care.

Children to whom those exceptions apply can continue their care but must “wean” off from the treatment with the help of their doctor. The Senate vote to agree to that change was the last step required for final passage.

“Here in Texas, we will protect our kids! Thank you to everyone who supported and helped pass my bill. I look forward to @GovAbbott’s signature soon,” bill sponsor state Sen. Donna Campbell tweeted after the Senate’s vote.

If signed by Abbott, the ban will take effect September 1.

Gender-affirming care spans a range of evidence-based treatments and approaches that benefit transgender and nonbinary people. The types of care vary by the age and goals of the recipient, and are considered the standard of care by many mainstream medical associations.

Though the care is highly individualized, some children and parents may decide to use reversible puberty suppression therapy. This part of the process may also include hormone therapy that can lead to gender-affirming physical change. Surgical interventions, however, are not typically done on children and many health care providers do not offer them to minors.

Some Republicans have expressed concern over long-term outcomes of the treatments. But major medical associations say that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria – a 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.

If Abbott signs the bill, it would make Texas the fifteenth state to restrict access to gender-affirming care for trans youth this year. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning the care in his state Wednesday and Oklahoma placed their own care ban on the books at the beginning of May. Around 125 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.

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April 12, 2021
DeSantis expected to enter 2024 presidential race next week | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to enter the 2024 GOP presidential race next week, two Republicans familiar with the matter told CNN, initiating his much-anticipated bid to wrestle the future of the party from former President Donald Trump.

DeSantis will file paperwork declaring his candidacy next week with the Federal Election Commission, one Republican said, with a formal announcement expected the following week in his Florida hometown of Dunedin. DeSantis is likely to soft-launch the campaign as early as Wednesday to coincide with the filing of the paperwork, according to a Republican consultant close to the governor’s political team.

However, another source cautioned that the planning remains a moving target, and DeSantis is known to surprise even his closest allies and advisers with last-minute changes. DeSantis, who often boasts that he runs an operation free of leaks, may be further motivated to throw out the script to vex the media outlets who have preempted his announcement, the source said.

“With him, it’s always a possibility,” the source added.

But the machinery for a launch is already in motion as dozens of his top fundraisers and donors have been summoned to South Florida under the assumption they will be asked to begin building up a war chest for a DeSantis presidential campaign. By officially submitting his paperwork, his supporters can begin soliciting donations on his behalf.

About 100 hotel rooms have been reserved at the Four Seasons in Miami, which will host receptions for donors, briefings with DeSantis’ political team and sessions where attendees will dial for dollars, according to two sources familiar with the details. The goal is for each fundraiser to bring in between $100,000 and $150,000.

A spokesman for DeSantis’ political operation did not respond to a request for comment.

An announcement around the Memorial Day weekend is on the earlier side of the timeline that the governor’s political operation had targeted six months ago when it eyed a launch after Florida’s legislative session. This suggests DeSantis is responding to donors and supporters anxious to see him get in the race and more directly challenge Trump. Polling shows the former president remains firmly in the lead while DeSantis has lost some momentum during the belabored rollout of his expected campaign, which has included a book release and tour, a dozen appearances at local GOP fundraisers, an international trip, the creation of a super PAC, a donor retreat near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and a blitz through conservative media.

Along the way, DeSantis has stumbled at times, drawing poor reviews for his oscillating takes on the Russia-Ukraine war, prolonging his clash with Disney into a second year and getting caught flat-footed as Trump unveiled endorsements from Florida Republicans in Congress just before the governor visited Washington to build support.

However, DeSantis’ allies believe the trajectory of the race will change significantly once he is officially a candidate and responds to Trump’s broadsides and more vigorously shares his vision for the country.

According to The New York Times, DeSantis told donors and supporters during a call Thursday that there were only three credible candidates in the race – himself, President Joe Biden and Trump – and that only he and Biden had a chance of winning the general election.

DeSantis said on the call, which was organized by Never Back Down, a super PAC closely aligned with the governor, that data from swing states was “not great for the former president and probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of him,” the Times reported.

DeSantis has spent the last couple of weeks tying up loose ends – rapidly signing dozens of bills that have reached his desk, meeting with donors in Tallahassee and South Florida, and shoring up endorsements to boost his launch. He spent Saturday in Iowa, where he appeared to one-up Trump, making an unannounced visit to a BBQ joint in Des Moines – minutes from where the former president had canceled a rally due to threat of weather. While in the state, DeSantis laid the framework for his case against Trump.

“If we make 2024 a referendum on Joe Biden and his failures and we provide a positive alternative for the future of this country, Republicans will win across the board,” DeSantis told Iowa caucus voters in Sioux Center. “If we do not do that, if we get distracted, if we focus on the election in the past or on other side issues, then I think the Democrats are going to beat us again, and I think it will be very difficult to recover from that defeat.”

On Friday, DeSantis will travel to another early nominating state, New Hampshire, to meet with state lawmakers – many of whom endorsed him earlier this week – for a policy round table, according to three sources familiar with the planning.

Never Back Down has in recent weeks rolled out dozens of key endorsements for the governor in Iowa and New Hampshire. On Wednesday, the super PAC also announced endorsements from 99 Florida lawmakers – a show of force from the rank-and-file Republicans who helped push DeSantis’ agenda through the state legislature this spring.

“Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature have worked together to achieve historic results and produce conservative victories for the people of Florida – turning the state into a beacon of freedom and the fastest growing state in the nation,” Never Back Down spokeswoman Erin Perrine said.

Trump’s campaign dismissed the Florida endorsements as politically motivated, noting that DeSantis had not yet signed the state budget, for which he has line-item veto power over the pet projects of state lawmakers.

“There are some brave legislators who have stood up to DeSantis’ Swamp-like behavior and resisted his intimidation tactics in order to do what is right for Florida and the country,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said. “Those who he can’t control – including almost the entirety of the Florida federal congressional delegation – have endorsed President Trump because he’s the only candidate who can beat Joe Biden and take back the White House.”

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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April 12, 2021
Voting rights advocates in the South emboldened by Supreme Court win | CNN Politics

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CNN
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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.”

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April 12, 2021
Europe is leading the race to regulate AI. Here’s what you need to know | CNN Business

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London
CNN
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The European Union took a major step Wednesday toward setting rules — the first in the world — on how companies can use artificial intelligence.

It’s a bold move that Brussels hopes will pave the way for global standards for a technology used in everything from chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to surgical procedures and fraud detection at banks.

“We have made history today,” Brando Benifei, a member of the European Parliament working on the EU AI Act, told journalists.

Lawmakers have agreed a draft version of the Act, which will now be negotiated with the Council of the European Union and EU member states before becoming law.

“While Big Tech companies are sounding the alarm over their own creations, Europe has gone ahead and proposed a concrete response to the risks AI is starting to pose,” Benifei added.

Hundreds of top AI scientists and researchers warned last month that the technology posed an extinction risk to humanity, and several prominent figures — including Microsoft President Brad Smith and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — have called for greater regulation of the technology.

At the Yale CEO Summit this week, more than 40% of business leaders — including Walmart chief Doug McMillion and Coca-Cola

(KO) CEO James Quincy — said AI had the potential to destroy humanity five to 10 years from now.

Against that backdrop, the EU AI Act seeks to “promote the uptake of human-centric and trustworthy artificial intelligence and to ensure a high level of protection of health, safety, fundamental rights, democracy and rule of law and the environment from harmful effects.”

Here are the key takeaways.

Once approved, the Act will apply to anyone who develops and deploys AI systems in the EU, including companies located outside the bloc.

The extent of regulation depends on the risks created by a particular application, from minimal to “unacceptable.”

Systems that fall into the latter category are banned outright. These include real-time facial recognition systems in public spaces, predictive policing tools and social scoring systems, such as those in China, which assign people a “health score” based on their behavior.

The legislation also sets tight restrictions on “high-risk” AI applications, which are those that threaten “significant harm to people’s health, safety, fundamental rights or the environment.”

These include systems used to influence voters in an election, as well as social media platforms with more than 45 million users that recommend content to their users — a list that would include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The Act also outlines transparency requirements for AI systems.

For instance, systems such as ChatGPT would have to disclose that their content was AI-generated, distinguish deep-fake images from real ones and provide safeguards against the generation of illegal content.

Detailed summaries of the copyrighted data used to train these AI systems would also have to be published.

AI systems with minimal or no risk, such as spam filters, fall largely outside of the rules.

Most AI systems will likely fall into the high-risk or prohibited categories, leaving their owners exposed to potentially enormous fines if they fall foul of the regulations, according to Racheal Muldoon, a barrister (litigator) at London law firm Maitland Chambers.

Engaging in prohibited AI practices could lead to a fine of up to €40 million ($43 million) or an amount equal to up to 7% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

That goes much further than Europe’s signature data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, under which Meta was hit with a €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) fine last month. GDPR sets fines of up to €10 million ($10.8 million), or up to 2% of a firm’s global turnover.

Fines under the AI Act serve as a “war cry from the legislators to say, ‘take this seriously’,” Muldoon said.

At the same time, penalties would be “proportionate” and consider the market position of small-scale providers, suggesting there could be some leniency for start-ups.

The Act also requires EU member states to establish at least one regulatory “sandbox” to test AI systems before they are deployed.

“The one thing that we wanted to achieve with this text is balance,” Dragoș Tudorache, a member of the European Parliament, told journalists. The Act protects citizens while also “promoting innovation, not hindering creativity, and deployment and development of AI in Europe,” he added.

The Act gives citizens the right to file complaints against providers of AI systems and makes a provision for an EU AI Office to monitor enforcement of the legislation. It also requires member states to designate national supervisory authorities for AI.

Microsoft

(MSFT) — which, together with Google, is at the forefront of AI development globally — welcomed progress on the Act but said it looked forward to “further refinement.”

“We believe that AI requires legislative guardrails, alignment efforts at an international level, and meaningful voluntary actions by companies that develop and deploy AI,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.

IBM

(IBM), meanwhile, called on EU policymakers to take a “risk-based approach” and suggested four “key improvements” to the draft Act, including further clarity around high-risk AI “so that only truly high-risk use cases are captured.”

The Act may not come into force until 2026, according to Muldoon, who said revisions were likely, given how rapidly AI was advancing. The legislation has already gone through several updates since drafting began in 2021.

“The law will expand in scope as the technology develops,” Muldoon said.

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April 12, 2021
States accelerate efforts to block Chinese purchases of agricultural land | CNN Politics

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Washington
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A growing number of states are considering or have passed measures this legislative term to ban “foreign adversaries” and foreign entities – specifically China – from buying farmland.

Proponents of the laws, mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well, have frequently cited concerns about food security and the need to protect military bases and other sensitive installations. But the moves have stoked anxieties among some experts on US-Chinese relations, including those who see echoes of past discriminatory laws in the United States like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Florida last month joined a list of at least seven other states – including Virginia, North Dakota, Montana and Arkansas – to pass variations of such bills this session, according to the National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), which is tracking the issue and conducts research on agricultural and food law. Similar measures are percolating in more than two dozen states and there’s a bill in Congress that seeks to federalize the issue, the NALC said.

States have previously sought to limit foreign investment, said Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the NALC. What’s new, Brown says, is that some lawmakers are taking aim at specific countries and their governments.

“2023 is really swinging for the fences here, with a majority of states having some kind of proposal, at least one proposal,” Brown told CNN.

Of slightly more than 40 million acres of agricultural held by foreign investors in the United States, China held less than 1% of that land – or 383,935 acres – as of the end of 2021, according to a report from the US Department of Agriculture.

Florida’s law, signed on May 8, prohibits most citizens from “foreign countries of concern” from purchasing land on or within 10 miles of any “military installation or critical infrastructure facility,” including seaports, airports and power plants. It was signed alongside a different bill that bans internet applications like TikTok on Florida government devices, a similar area of focus for state politicians who have concerns about Chinese influence.

The foreign countries of concern that are named include China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Iran, along with agencies and governments operating on their behalf. In public remarks, governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis repeatedly called out China.

“Today, Florida makes it very clear: We don’t want the (Chinese Communist Party) in the Sunshine State. We want to maintain this as the ‘Free State of Florida.’ That’s exactly what these bills are doing,” DeSantis said at a bill signing in May.

Following the bill’s passage, a group of Chinese citizens who live and work in Florida, along with a real estate company with primarily Chinese and Chinese-American clients, sued state officials, alleging the law would violate their equal protection and due process guarantees under the US Constitution. CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.

Virginia’s legislation doesn’t name China, though Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has specifically cited the CCP in advocating for the new law. Montana’s applies to “foreign adversaries” as designated by the US Commerce Department, a list that includes China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

Brown said the 2023 laws are part of a larger “political flashpoint” prompted out of concerns over Chinese companies attempting to build agricultural sites near military bases in North Dakota and Texas. States including Arkansas and Indiana already had laws restricting certain foreign investments prior to this year’s legislative push.

In North Dakota, a US subsidiary of Chinese company Fufeng Group attempted to build a wet corn milling plant in Grand Forks that would have sat near an Air Force base there and thus pose what the Department of the Air Force called a “significant threat to national security.”

The head of Fufeng’s US operation denied the company has a “direct relationship” with the Chinese government in an interview with the Grand Forks Herald last year.

“We’ve got lots of places in North Dakota they could have built that plant without being a security risk, but instead, they chose to buy land right next to an Air Force base,” North Dakota Republican state Rep. Lawrence Klemin, who co-sponsored the state’s bill, told CNN. “We’ve got two Air Force bases in North Dakota, and we’ve got lots of places where we don’t have them, so why didn’t they do that?” Klemin’s bill was signed in April.

Texas is also considering a bill that would bar “hostile nations including China,” in the state from purchasing real property, like agricultural land, as Republican State. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst describes her legislation. The bill initially ignited controversy because it would have barred citizens of China and other adversarial countries from buying land in the state, though the bill was later amended to clarify that it would not apply to lawful permanent residents, US citizens and dual citizens and to include an exception for property considered “residence homestead.”

Several experts on US-China relations with whom CNN spoke warned against knee-jerk responses and called for lawmakers to act on evidence, not suspicion.

“I think there’s a good reason to want to keep control of strategic interests in one’s own country … but these bills about farmland, these bills about just property in general, to me, it’s transparent that they’re rooted in racism and xenophobia again because we’ve seen this before. It really isn’t the first time,” said Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who has conducted research on US exclusion laws.

Yan Bennett, the assistant director of the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, noted that US farmland is appealing for China because the country has food security issues and does not have enough arable land for cultivation.

“When national security is threatened, yes, we need to take action,” Bennett told CNN. “But not every land purchase by a foreign government or a foreign national is a national security threat, so we need to make sure that we distinguish those purchases from those that are actual threats.”

An atmosphere of racism and anti-China sentiment threatens other US interests as well, such as possibly deterring Chinese students from wanting to come to the US and obtain advanced degrees, explained Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center.

“If we’re not careful that we are telling the world’s biggest talent pool that they’re an unwelcomed class or a reviled class here in the United States and that will also have implications for Chinese Americans,” Daly told CNN in February. “Real demonstrable security threats have to be met as such. I’m not saying that the Chinese Communist Party does not have plans and intentions that harm America’s interests – it does, and we need to go after those – but based on evidence.”

In response to efforts in Texas and other states that are considering barring some Chinese citizens from owning US land over national security concerns, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said earlier this year that trade between the two countries is “mutually beneficial.”

“To overstretch the concept of national security and politicize economic, trade and investment issues runs counter to the principles of market economy and international trade rules, which undercuts international confidence in the US market environment,” spokesperson Mao Ning said at a news briefing in February.

Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican and co-sponsor of his state’s new law, dismissed what he called “ridiculous” concerns about his bill perpetuating racism against Asian-Americans, telling CNN in February it is “focused on a country that has established hostility to the United States.”

In the near future, the Chinese spy balloon incident earlier this year will prompt increased attention to “the challenges that we are seeing from the CCP” – and thus the issue of Chinese farmland purchases in the US, predicted Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Washington Republican. The longtime China critic is sponsoring a bill in Congress that would that would ban the purchase of public or private agricultural land in the US by foreign nationals linked to the Chinese government.

“I think people are waking up to the fact that we need to be more aware of what’s going on and prevent something happening that we don’t want to see,” Newhouse said.

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April 12, 2021
New York State Legislature passes bill to protect doctors who prescribe abortion pills for out-of-state patients | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

A bill that would legally protect doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in states where abortion services are outlawed or restricted is now headed to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk after the state legislature passed the legislation on Tuesday.

The bill ensures that doctors, medical providers and facilitators in the state will be able to provide telehealth services to patients out of state, according to a news release from the New York State Assembly.

The new legislation also protects New York health providers from out-of-state litigation, meaning the state will not cooperate with cases prosecuting doctors in New York who provide telehealth abortion or reproductive services to people in other states.

“This bill expands protections for telehealth providers by providing them the same protections afforded to doctors in other states with strong reproductive healthcare shield laws,” according to the news release.

The bill also ensures that New York medical providers, complying with their practice, who offer telehealth services are not subject to professional discipline, “solely for providing reproductive health services to patients residing in states where such services are illegal.”

CNN has reached out to the governor’s office to see if she will sign the legislation.

CNN previously reported Hochul has indicated support for a shield law protecting medical providers of out of state abortion and reproductive services.

Assemblymember Karines Reyes, a registered nurse who sponsored the bill, said she was “proud to sponsor this critical piece of legislation to fully protect abortion providers using telemedicine.”

According to the state assembly’s news release, the bill recognizes the common use of medication abortion drugs, stating that 54% of abortions across the country are now medication abortions.

Speaker of the New York State Assembly Carl Heastie said, “It is our moral obligation to help women across the country with their bodily autonomy by protecting New York doctors from litigation efforts from anti-choice extremists. Telehealth is the future of healthcare, and this bill is simply the next step in making sure our doctors are protected.”

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April 12, 2021
Here’s what’s left for the Supreme Court’s final week of the term | CNN Politics

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Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story ran in early June.

CNN
—

All eyes are on the Supreme Court for its final week, as the justices will release cases on issues such as affirmative action, student loan payments, election law and LGBTQ rights.

Of the 10 cases remaining, several that most capture the public’s attention are likely to lead to fiery opinions and dissents read from the bench.

In addition, they will come down as the court finds itself in the center of a spotlight usually reserved for members of the political branches due to allegations that the justices are not transparent enough when it comes to their ethics disclosures, most recently with Justice Samuel Alito last week.

Here are some of the remaining cases to be decided:

The court is considering whether colleges and universities can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, a decision that could overturn long standing precedent that has benefited Black and Latino students.

At issue are programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that the schools say help them to achieve diversity on campus.

During oral arguments, the right side of the bench appeared ready to rule against the schools. Such an opinion would deliver a long-sought victory for opponents of affirmative action in higher education who have argued for decades that taking race into consideration – even in a limited manner – thwarts the goal of achieving a color-blind society.

John Roberts skewers Harvard attorney’s comparison of race and music skills as qualities in applicants

At the center of another case is a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who seeks to expand her business and create custom websites to celebrate weddings – but does not want to work with gay couples out of religious objections to same-sex marriage.

Smith has not yet moved forward with her new business venture because of Colorado’s public accommodations law. Under the law, a business may not refuse to serve individuals because of their sexual orientation. Smith, whose company is called 303 Creative LLC, said that she is willing to work with all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but she draws the line at creating websites that celebrate same-sex marriage because expressing such a message would be inconsistent with her beliefs.

The state and supporters of LGBTQ rights say that Smith is simply seeking a license to discriminate.

The conservatives on the court were sympathetic at oral arguments to those put forward by Smith’s lawyer. They viewed the case through the lens of free speech and suggested that an artist or someone creating a customized product could not be forced by the government to express a message that violates her religious beliefs.

Moore v. Harper has captured the nation’s attention because Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are asking the justices to adopt a long dormant legal theory and hold that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules established by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections.

The doctrine – called the Independent State Legislature theory – was pushed by conservatives and supporters of Trump after the 2020 presidential election.

The North Carolina controversy arose after the state Supreme Court struck down the state’s 2022 congressional map as an illegal partisan gerrymander, replacing it with court-drawn maps that favored Democrats. GOP lawmakers appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, arguing that the North Carolina Supreme Court had exceeded its authority.

They relied upon the Elections Clause of the Constitution that provides that rules governing the “manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” must be prescribed in “each state by the legislature thereof.”

Under the independent state legislature theory, the lawmakers argued, state legislatures should be able to set rules with little to no interference from the state courts.

The justices heard oral arguments in the case last winter and some of them appeared to express some support for a version of the doctrine. The justices could, however, ultimately dismiss the dispute due to new partisan developments in North Carolina.

After the last election, the North Carolina Supreme Court flipped its majority to Republican. In April, the newly composed state Supreme Court reversed its earlier decision and held that the state constitution gives states no role to play in policing partisan gerrymandering. After that decision was issued, the justices signaled they may dismiss the case.

Anita Hill: America “has lost confidence in the Supreme Court”

The Supreme Court is also considering two challenges to President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, an initiative aimed at providing targeted debt relief to millions of student-loan borrowers that has so far been stalled by legal challenges.

Republican-led states and conservatives challenging the program say it amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student loan debt under the guise of the pandemic.

At the heart of the case is the Department of Education’s authority to forgive the loans. Several of the conservative justices have signaled in recent years that agencies – with no direct accountability to the public – have become too powerful, upsetting the separation of powers.

They have moved to cut back on the so-called administrative state.

In court, Chief Justice John Roberts as well as some other conservatives seemed deeply skeptical of the Biden administration’s plan.

A former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, seeks to sue the US Postal Service because it failed to accommodate his request not to work on Sundays.

A lower court had ruled against the worker, Gerald Groff, holding that his request would cause an “undue burden” on the USPS and lead to low morale at the workplace when other employees had to pick up his shifts.

There appeared to be consensus, after almost two hours of oral arguments, that the appeals court had been too quick to rule against Groff.

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April 12, 2021
How the ‘independent state legislature’ theory, now rejected by SCOTUS, fueled chaos in 2020 and could influence 2024 | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a controversial legal theory that would’ve given partisan state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over US elections.

Former President Donald Trump and his staunch allies used the now-rejected “independent state legislature” theory to justify their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. And many Trump critics warned that, without action from the Supreme Court, these same vulnerabilities would threaten the 2024 election.

In a case about North Carolina redistricting, the Supreme Court ruled that state courts and other state entities can review laws passed by state legislatures setting rules for federal elections. The court’s majority – a coalition of three conservatives with the three-justice liberal bloc – rejected the GOP-backed theory that elected politicians have unreviewable authority to set election rules.

One of the reasons Republicans might want to shift power to state legislatures is because their party has a structural advantage on that front. Republicans currently control the legislatures in four states that Joe Biden carried in 2020 – Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and New Hampshire – and they control two additional statehouses in the battleground states of North Carolina and Florida.

States across the country adjusted their election rules in 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic was raging and before vaccines were available. The changes included adding dropboxes in populated areas and easing the rules for when mail-in ballots can be accepted, among other things.

Many of these tweaks were implemented by state courts, governors, secretaries of state and other state election administrators. But according to the “independent state legislature” theory, these rule changes were illegal, because they didn’t come directly from the state legislature.

This is what formed the basis of many of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump allies, like right-wing lawyer John Eastman, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, used this theory to argue Biden’s victories in key states were illegitimate because they “unlawfully” conducted elections or “failed to follow their own laws.”

This legal theory fueled their unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to nullify millions of votes, and their attempt to reject Biden’s electors when Congress tallied the electoral votes on January 6, 2021.

Still, after the 2020 debacle, conservative legal figures kept up the fight, perhaps with an eye toward 2024. Top Republicans, including Trump and House GOP leaders, continued to peddle the theory. Eastman filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the North Carolina case, urging the justices to give state legislatures full control over elections.

“Federal courts overwhelmingly rejected those Republican arguments before and after the 2020 elections, and the Supreme Court today put the issue to bed,” said R. Stanton Jones, a lawyer who argued against the theory when the case was before the North Carolina Supreme Court.

The high court’s ruling will have a significant impact on the 2024 presidential election, because it closes off some legal pathways for Trump to once again undermine the electoral process.

For starters, there is now Supreme Court precedent rejecting some of the more maximalist but unsettled theories that have been championed by Eastman and other GOP lawyers. (Never mind the fact that amid the 2020 chaos, even Eastman admitted that his harebrained legal proposals would be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, as CNN recently reported.)

But the somewhat limited ruling leaves plenty of avenues for future election-related challenges, regarding how districts are drawn, the deadlines for mail-in ballots, and other key questions.

Legal scholars observed Tuesday that the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, specifically said federal courts have “a duty to exercise judicial review” over state court decisions that influence federal elections. But the majority opinion didn’t set the ground rules.

“By not setting a clear standard for when state courts would go too far in the future, the decision leaves open a number of questions that will have to be resolved in future election-related disputes,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

Indeed, Adam Kincaid, who leads a national GOP redistricting group, said in a statement that Tuesday’s ruling “should serve as a warning to state courts inclined to reach beyond the constitutional bounds of judicial review,” signaling that there are plenty of lawsuits to come.

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April 12, 2021
‘Serious concerns’: Top companies raise alarm over Europe’s proposed AI law | CNN Business

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Dortmund, Germany
CNN
—

Dozens of Europe’s top business leaders have pushed back on the European Union’s proposed legislation on artificial intelligence, warning that it could hurt the bloc’s competitiveness and spur an exodus of investment.

In an open letter sent to EU lawmakers Friday, C-suite executives from companies including Siemens

(SIEGY), Carrefour

(CRERF), Renault

(RNLSY) and Airbus

(EADSF) raised “serious concerns” about the EU AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI rules.

Other prominent signatories include big names in tech, such as Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist of Meta

(FB), and Hermann Hauser, founder of British chipmaker ARM.

“In our assessment, the draft legislation would jeopardize Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty without effectively tackling the challenges we are and will be facing,” the group of more than 160 executives said in the letter.

They argue that the draft rules go too far, especially in regulating generative AI and foundation models, the technology behind popular platforms such as ChatGPT.

Since the craze over generative AI began this year, technologists have warned of the potential dark side of systems that allow people to use machines to write college essays, take academic tests and build websites. Last month, hundreds of top experts warned about the risk of human extinction from AI, saying mitigating that possibility “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

The EU proposal applies a broad brush to such software “regardless of [its] use cases,” and could push innovative companies and investors out of Europe because they would face high compliance costs and “disproportionate liability risks,” according to the executives.

“Such regulation could lead to highly innovative companies moving their activities abroad” and investors withdrawing their capital from European AI, the group wrote.

“The result would be a critical productivity gap between the two sides of the Atlantic.”

The executives are calling for policymakers to revise the terms of the bill, which was agreed upon by European Parliament lawmakers earlier this month and is now being negotiated with EU member states.

“In a context where we know very little about the real risks, the business model, or the applications of generative AI, European law should confine itself to stating broad principles in a risk-based approach,” the group wrote.

The business leaders called for a regulatory board of experts to oversee these principles and ensure they can be continuously adapted to changes in the fast-moving technology.

The group also urged lawmakers to work with their US counterparts, noting that regulatory proposals had also been made in the United States. EU lawmakers should try to “create a legally binding level playing field,” the executives wrote.

If such action isn’t taken and Europe is constrained by regulatory demands, it could hurt the region’s international standing, the group suggested.

“Like the invention of the Internet or the breakthrough of silicon chips, generative AI is the kind of technology that will be decisive for the performance capacity and therefore the significance of different regions,” it said.

Tech experts have increasingly called for greater regulation of AI as it becomes more widely used. In recent months, the United States and China have also laid out plans to regulate the technology. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has used high-profile trips around the world in recent weeks to call for co-ordinated international regulation of AI.

The EU rules are the world’s “first ever attempt to enact” legally binding rules that apply to different areas of AI, according to the European Parliament.

Negotiators of the AI Act hope to reach an agreement before the end of the year, and once the final rules are adopted by the European Parliament and EU member states, the act will become law.

As they stand now, the rules would ban AI systems deemed to be harmful, including real-time facial recognition systems in public spaces, predictive policing tools and social scoring systems, such as those in China.

The Act also outlines transparency requirements for AI systems. For instance, systems such as ChatGPT would have to disclose that their content was AI-generated and provide safeguards against the generation of illegal content.

Engaging in prohibited AI practices could lead to hefty fines: up to €40 million ($43 million) or an amount equal to up to 7% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

But penalties would be “proportionate” and consider the market position of small-scale providers, suggesting there could be some leniency for startups.

Not everyone has pushed back on the legislation so far. Earlier this month, Digital Europe, a trade association that counts SAP

(SAP) and Ericsson

(ERIC) among its members, called the rules “a text we can work with.”

“However, there remain some areas which can be improved to ensure Europe becomes a competitive hub for AI innovation,” the group said in a statement.

Dragos Tudorache, a Romanian member of parliament who led the bill’s drafting, said he was convinced that those who signed the new letter “have not read the text but have rather reacted on the stimulus of a few.”

“The only concrete suggestions made are in fact what the [draft] text now contains: an industry-led process for defining standards, governance with industry at the table, and a light regulatory regime that asks for transparency. Nothing else,” he said in a statement.

“It is a pity that the aggressive lobby of a few is capturing other serious companies in the net, which unfortunately undermines the undeniable lead that Europe has taken.”

Brando Benifei, an Italian member of parliament who also led the drafting of the legislation, told CNN “we will listen to all concerns and stakeholders when dealing with AI regulation, but we have a firm commitment to deliver clear and enforceable rules.”

“Our work could positively affect the global conversation and direction when dealing with artificial intelligence and its impact on fundamental rights, without hindering the necessary pursuit of innovation,” he said.

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April 12, 2021
The crisis pregnancy center next door: How taxpayer money intended for poor families is funding a growing anti-abortion movement | CNN

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CNN
—

A few blocks from the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, America’s battle over abortion is playing out under one roof.

On one side of a squat single-story office building, a Planned Parenthood clinic offers reproductive health care and refers patients for abortions. Next door is a branch of Pregnancy Decision Health Center, a crisis pregnancy center that offers counseling and support for pregnant women – but also works to dissuade them from terminating their pregnancies and has been accused of promoting misinformation about abortion.

Of the two neighboring organizations, only Planned Parenthood provides medical services such as Pap smears, birth control and STD treatments.

But the crisis pregnancy center is the one receiving money from the state government. Ohio has funneled nearly $14 million in taxpayer funds to the center and others like it over the last decade, according to government records – even as state leaders have cut funding that previously went to Planned Parenthood for programs such as breast and cervical cancer screenings. 

Ohio isn’t alone. More than a dozen states devote some of their budget to funding crisis pregnancy centers, a CNN review found. About half of those states distribute federal money intended to help needy families to the centers.

Some of the organizations that receive money have been accused of spreading abortion misinformation or using the funds to advocate anti-abortion causes instead of helping women. 

“Public dollars should go to promoting public health,” said Ashley Underwood, the director of Equity Forward, an abortion rights advocacy group. Crisis pregnancy centers, she said, “solely exist to deter people from getting abortion services.”

Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, a wave of abortion restrictions has swept the country, leaving millions of women with easier access to crisis pregnancy centers than abortion care. Crisis pregnancy centers far outnumbered abortion clinics across the US even before the court’s ruling, and anti-abortion groups are now planning to expand. 

Pregnancy center leaders and their state government allies say the organizations deserve taxpayer funds because they provide pregnant women with resources like free diapers and ultrasounds. But some of the centers also lie to women about the safety and potential risks of abortion, according to multiple studies, abortion rights activists, and women who have been to the centers. 

That kind of deception isn’t typical in any other area of health care, said Dr. Amy Addante, an Illinois OB-GYN who performs abortions and has been a vocal critic of crisis pregnancy centers.

“The purpose of these centers is to try to stop someone from having an abortion,” said Addante. “I cannot think of any other medical decision or any other aspect of health care where there is a group of individuals whose only intent is to stop you from receiving that health care.”

Big open windows invite patients and passersby into the waiting room at the Pregnancy Decision Health Center (PDHC). With velvety green chairs, leafy plants, and a coffee station that greets visitors as they come in the door, the crisis pregnancy center could pass for an upscale dental office or spa.

Outside, PDHC’s sign towers over the neighboring Planned Parenthood, literally casting a shadow over the clinic’s entrance. Inside, the contrast is even starker: Planned Parenthood’s waiting room looks run-down – old chairs crowd the small space, faded informational posters cover the walls, and daylight is blocked by signage on the windows and mirrored doors meant to protect patients’ privacy.

Multiple times a week, patients looking for Planned Parenthood mistakenly walk through PDHC’s doors, according to a Planned Parenthood clinician, Jennifer, who asked CNN not to use her last name out of security concerns. Some patients have told Planned Parenthood that PDHC employees told them abortion wasn’t safe or said PDHC tried to delay them and make them late for their Planned Parenthood appointments.

“They’ve provided an array of misinformation, whether it’s about abortion care or even about contraceptive services,” said Lillian Williams, the vice president of health services of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.

Ayla Krueger, a 23-year-old Columbus resident, visited PDHC earlier this month with a friend who was seeking an STD test. She said that during their hour-and-a-half visit, an employee claimed that condoms were only 50% effective, the spread of STDs could only be prevented if people followed “God’s plan” of avoiding sex before marriage, and that if a woman who has an STD gets an abortion, “your STDs travel up your cervix into your organs and could kill you.”

“I was dumbfounded,” Krueger said of the encounter. “My heart was breaking, thinking about girls who don’t understand what they’re walking into there… and possibly getting coerced.”

Experts said that the center’s rhetoric was not medically accurate. “We do worry about ascending infections in abortions and pregnancy, but the risk is really, really low,” said Dr. Jonas Swartz, an OB-GYN and professor at Duke University Medical Center. “Crisis pregnancy centers regularly overstate the risk of abortions and this is just one example of that.”

The center also offers “abortion pill reversal,” according to its website, annual reports and pamphlets at the office. Abortion reversal is a medically dubious, unproven treatment that purports to undo a medication abortion but has been denounced by medical groups and found to be dangerous by researchers. A clinical trial that attempted to study abortion reversal was halted prematurely in 2019 when several participants suffered hemorrhaging.

Kathy Scanlon, PDHC’s president, declined an interview request and didn’t respond to CNN’s questions about Krueger’s allegations or abortion pill reversal.

“Every woman deserves care and compassion when facing an unexpected pregnancy,” Scanlon wrote in an email, adding that the center provides “practical pregnancy care and support ranging from free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to parenting education classes and much-needed baby items” such as diapers and car seats.

Research has found that crisis pregnancy centers commonly disseminate misinformation. A study released last year by The Alliance, an abortion rights advocacy group, found that almost two-thirds of crisis pregnancy centers in nine states promoted false or biased information about abortion on their websites. That included false claims that abortions increased the risk of cancer or infertility.  More than a third of clinics also advertised that they offered abortion pill reversal – and state-funded clinics were more likely than privately-funded ones to offer the unproven procedure and less likely to offer prenatal care, according to the study. 

Similarly, a 2012 academic study of crisis pregnancy centers in North Carolina found that 86% of centers promoted false or misleading medical information on their websites. 

Crisis pregnancy center leaders say they are working to help women. Peggy Hartshorn, who founded the Columbus center and is now the chair of Heartbeat International, one of the largest global networks of crisis pregnancy centers, said the allegations that the groups spread misinformation are “a false narrative.”

She said that the information her centers provide to clients is “very well-researched, medically referenced – we document everything with multiple sources.”

“Deep down in their hearts, women do not want to have abortion,” Hartshorn said. “Pregnancy centers are good for America, they really are.”

In Ohio, a new six-week abortion ban that went into effect after the Supreme Court decision, is currently on hold amid court battles. The Planned Parenthood clinic near Ohio State University doesn’t perform abortions – it refers patients to a Planned Parenthood surgical center on the other side of town that does.

That facility, too, has a state-funded crisis pregnancy center operating across the street. On a recent afternoon, a handful of protesters lined the clinic’s fence with signs depicting bloody fetuses and shouted “you are already a mother” and “abortion is murder” whenever a patient came within earshot. One protester – wearing a reflective vest and holding a clipboard, similar to Planned Parenthood volunteers – tried to direct patients away from the abortion clinic and to the crisis pregnancy center across the street. The center told CNN the protesters weren’t affiliated with their organization.

It’s not rare for pregnancy centers to operate near abortion clinics. More than 100 pregnancy centers around the country are located within 200 meters of an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood location, according to a CNN analysis. Some – in states like Delaware, Indiana and Michigan – are next door to clinics. 

Abortion rights advocates say the intention is to mislead women and block them from accessing abortion.  

“The purpose of co-locating near a legitimate provider is to intercept someone seeking legitimate health care and divert them into walking through their doors instead,” said Tara Murtha, the co-author of a report about pregnancy centers and a spokesperson for the Women’s Law Project. “It’s basically an obstacle course and a systemic barrier to abortion care.”

Despite the groups’ apparent spreading of misinformation, at least 18 states have funded crisis pregnancy centers with taxpayer money, according to a CNN review of government records and statements from state agencies. The largest is Texas, which has sent more than $200 million to the groups over the last decade. 

More than a half-dozen states bankroll crisis pregnancy centers at least partly with funds from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a federal welfare program. Those federal funds are sent to states as a block grant, which gives state officials wide latitude in how to spend it, including on programs like “alternatives to abortion” grants for crisis pregnancy centers. 

Research has shown that a smaller percentage of poor families are now receiving cash assistance from the TANF program than in previous decades.

While about 68% of families with children in poverty received cash assistance through TANF in 1996, when the program was created, that percentage declined to just 21% by 2020, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. The percentage was even lower in some of the GOP-dominated states that use TANF funding to support crisis pregnancy centers, such as Texas and Louisiana.

“When you look at successes in reducing poverty by strengthening the safety net, cash assistance is the most effective way to help families,” said Aditi Shrivastava, who co-authored the study. “We are seeing states spend less of their money directly on cash assistance, and we don’t think that is what the program should be doing.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, some states are piloting new efforts to fund crisis pregnancy centers. Lawmakers in Arkansas and Iowa approved state funding for such groups for the first time this year.

The states have argued that crisis pregnancy centers deserve taxpayer funding because they provide services to pregnant women in need. 

“If we are going to be the most pro-life state in the union, we have to be prepared when those mothers come to a facility and they need help,” Arkansas state Rep. Robin Lundstrum said at a legislative hearing about the state’s new program earlier this year.

In Columbus, Pregnancy Decision Health Center is receiving more than $528,000 from the state government in the current fiscal year, according to government records. All of that comes from federal TANF funds. The funding amounts for about a fourth of the center’s total revenue, while the rest comes from private donations, according to the group’s most recent tax records available.

Despite the large amounts of money, there’s little oversight of how the taxpayer dollars are being used. 

Many of the appropriations are written into spending bills passed by GOP-dominated state legislatures. Pennsylvania, for example, has sent more than $70 million over the last decade to crisis pregnancy centers through Real Alternatives, an anti-abortion group that distributes state funding to crisis pregnancy centers. 

A 2017 report by the state auditor general found that Real Alternatives used hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it received from Pennsylvania “to fund its activities in other states,” in what the auditor said was an example of the group “siphoning funds intended to benefit Pennsylvania women.” Real Alternatives denied the allegations in a statement, saying that they had “no basis in fact or law.”

Michigan, which had contracted with Real Alternatives to distribute funding for crisis pregnancy centers, canceled its contract after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed the funding for it in 2019. In a letter about the veto, Whitmer thanked a watchdog group that had issued a report accusing the organization of only helping a fraction of the pregnant women it had agreed to support.

Real Alternatives, which also receives TANF money from Indiana, said the Michigan report was “riddled with inaccuracies, distortions, half-truths and defamatory statements.”

A bill in the Ohio legislature that would have required crisis pregnancy centers receiving state funding to provide their clients with only medically accurate information died in committee in multiple recent legislative sessions. The state’s GOP legislative leaders did not respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, some of the same red states that have bankrolled crisis pregnancy centers have stripped funding from Planned Parenthood. In Ohio, for example, the group never received state funding for abortions, but for years it received money for other services like cancer screenings, STD prevention and treatment, and sex education for teens.

In 2016, however, Ohio lawmakers banned the state from funding any organization that performs abortions, and the law went into effect after it was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2019. That meant that Planned Parenthood affiliates in Ohio lost about $600,000 a year in state funding, and led to the cancellation of some of their non-abortion health programs.

While Planned Parenthood does receive some additional reimbursements through Ohio’s Medicaid program for providing non-abortion health care to people on Medicaid plans, it no longer receives state grants.

Planned Parenthood also lost additional federal funding under Title X, a program that funds birth control and reproductive health services, under a Trump administration rule. But the organization started receiving that money again this year after the Biden administration reversed the rule.

Maria Gallo, a sexual and reproductive health epidemiologist at Ohio State University, said that state funding for crisis pregnancy centers shows how conservative lawmakers prioritize anti-abortion rhetoric over medical care for women.

“It’s dangerous in part because they are legitimizing (crisis pregnancy centers),” Gallo said. “They are legitimizing that as a source of medical care when they’re not licensed medical facilities.”

Crisis pregnancy centers drastically outnumber abortion clinics in the United States. There were 790 abortion clinics operating in 2021, compared with about 2,600 crisis pregnancy centers, according to a database compiled by Reproaction, an abortion-rights group.

That disparity is only likely to grow in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Hartshorn, the chair of Heartbeat International, said the organization has created an online training program to help people open new pregnancy centers, especially in places without existing ones.

“We need more people, we need more places, and we need more paths to pregnancy health,” Hartshorn said.

A study by the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy found that the groups have taken in more and more money in recent years: They received over $1 billion in revenue in 2019, the most recent year data was available, compared to about $771 million in 2015. 

Several women who went to state-funded crisis pregnancy centers told CNN they felt misled and manipulated by the groups, and disturbed that they were getting taxpayer money.

Last year, a woman who asked to be identified by her middle name, Eve, had just lost her job when she suspected she might be pregnant. She and her boyfriend went to Women’s Care Center in Columbus after finding the group on Google. Money was tight, and she chose the center – which is receiving more than $700,000 from the state of Ohio in the current fiscal year – because it promised free pregnancy testing. 

Eve’s test was positive, and she asked the staff about an abortion. She said they handed her a pamphlet that warned her the procedure could cause infertility – though abortion doesn’t typically affect a person’s ability to become pregnant in the future. For three hours, Eve said the staff pressured her to carry the pregnancy to term.

“It became very clear that they were against abortion really quickly,” said Eve, who left the center feeling upset and later got an abortion. The center didn’t respond to questions about Eve’s visit but said in an email they are “absolutely committed to accuracy, excellence and transparency in all we do.”

One day, Eve said she hopes to have kids. But at the time, she didn’t feel financially or emotionally stable enough to have a baby.

“Nobody wants to make a decision to have an abortion,” Eve said. “And they made me feel really guilty and bad about it.”

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December 31, 1969