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Tag: state lawmakers

  • As FEMA Helene money slowly arrives, NC lawmakers wonder: Are there faster options?

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    Top lieutenants of Gov. Josh Stein’s administration overseeing Hurricane Helene recovery testify in front of state lawmakers on Thursday, May 22, 2025. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)

    As Gov. Josh Stein’s top lieutenants for Hurricane Helene recovery sat before North Carolina lawmakers on Wednesday, they recited a familiar line: federal aid money was arriving far slower than the state was able to work.

    Days before the storm’s one-year anniversary, the officials told the General Assembly that applications submitted for a major grant program had been pending before FEMA for months. And although the state stood up its homebuilding program in record time, federal regulations and processes meant that the first full reconstructed home likely would not be complete until January.

    Those projections led lawmakers from both parties toward the same line of questioning: is there any way to make all of this go faster?

    “Should we really, in the state, be in the housing business?” asked Rep. Brenden Jones (R-Columbus). Rep. Zack Hawkins (D-Durham) wondered if “maybe the state will be better off being more invested in some of the state-funded solutions.” And Sen. Julie Mayfield (D-Buncombe) asked whether the state could effectively pre-empt reimbursement from the feds on a key grant program: “Is that the way it works? Or do they actually look at every (application)?”

    “All we need from FEMA is their checkbook,” Sen. Tim Moffitt (R-Henderson) said.

    The slow trickle of aid is familiar for major disaster recovery, a years-long process that takes billions of dollars. But the Trump administration’s operation of FEMA — requiring top-level sign-off on all spending and enforcing new layers of scrutiny on all aid — has slowed the flow of money even more to western North Carolina and frustrated state officials and lawmakers alike. North Carolina has received federal funds to cover 9% of total damages; Stein has requested funding to cover 48%.

    Trump, as well as some Republican members of Congress, have on multiple occasions expressed a desire to move the bulk of disaster response operations and funding down to the state level. But for now, that responsibility remains with FEMA.

    Money for Helene does continue to flow piecemeal. FEMA greenlit an additional $48 million for North Carolina on Monday, and $64.2 million the week prior. But Matt Calabria, who leads the governor’s western recovery office, said Wednesday that the state’s applications under a specific rebuilding grant program had been waiting for action by FEMA since February.

    “That’s a good exemplar for the kinds of dynamics we’re running into right now,” Calabria said.

    That chunk of money, called the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, is designed to fund projects to prevent future disasters: relocating developments on floodplains, installing levees and floodwalls and retrofitting older buildings. North Carolina could be eligible to receive up to $1.6 billion under the program, officials said Wednesday. Both local governments and property owners can apply for grants. But “no homes have been approved” for the program as of Wednesday, Calabria said.

    FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the status of North Carolina’s hazard mitigation grant applications.

    Jonathan Krebs, Stein’s advisor for western North Carolina, told lawmakers the state couldn’t go ahead with projects under the program and hope for reimbursement from FEMA later. The most likely result from that, he said, would be rejection — though he admitted that would be better than the current limbo.

    Matt Calabria (left), who leads the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, and Jonathan Krebs, Gov. Josh Stein’s advisor for western North Carolina, testify for state lawmakers on Hurricane Helene recovery efforts on Jan. 29, 2025. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)

    “We would love for them to say no, because then we could move onto other solutions,” Krebs said. “Right now, they’re saying nothing.”

    Meanwhile, the state continues to trudge toward rebuilding homes under Renew NC, the state’s homebuilding operation that will use around $800 million in federal dollars.

    State officials have kick-started casework on applicants despite still waiting on that federal money, using $120 million provided by state lawmakers. Renew NC has completed repairs on one home, and four others are now in the “pre-construction” phase, according to a state dashboard.

    Work on the first home to need full reconstruction is expected to start “fairly soon,” said Stephanie McGarrah, who leads the Department of Commerce division overseeing the program. She estimated that construction could be complete around January.

    Jones, the House majority leader, had heard testimony earlier from Samaritan’s Purse — a Christian aid organization that has been rebuilding homes in western North Carolina separately from government programs. The group is currently building 30 mobile homes and 40 fully furnished homes in the region, vice president Luther Harrison said Wednesday. Jones wondered whether the state was better off leaning on groups like Harrison’s for a larger chunk of work.

    North Carolina has received more than 3,000 applications to its Renew NC Single-Family Housing Program to help low- to moderate-income families who experienced significant storm damage.

    “Do you think it would be wise for this body to start funding the outside groups … that can move way faster than state government?” Jones asked.

    Those organizations fill valuable gaps on construction that “the federal government cannot fund,” Krebs responded. But many of the properties handled by non-government groups are often lower-cost ones; for more expensive projects, its a harder sell, he said.

    “When that average value starts getting really high, I think that’s where state and federal solutions start having to step in,” Krebs said, referencing major bridges specifically.

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  • Nigeria lifts emergency rule in Rivers State after 6 months of political crisis

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    ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria’s president lifted emergency rule and removed the suspension of a state governor and lawmakers in oil-rich Rivers State on Wednesday after six months of emergency rule in response to a protracted political crisis and oil pipeline vandalism, according to a statement on social media.

    The choice to impose emergency rule was meant “to arrest the drift toward anarchy in Rivers State,” said President Bola Tinubu in a statement defending the choice.

    “This is undoubtedly a welcome development for me and a remarkable achievement for us. I therefore do not see why the state of emergency should exist a day longer than the six months I had pronounced at the beginning of it,” he said.

    The crisis in the southern oil-producing region of Rivers State began after a political confrontation between incumbent Gov. Siminalayi Fubara and state lawmakers. Some lawmakers attempted to impeach Fubara, accusing him of illegally presenting the state budget and altering the composition of the legislature. Fubara has denied these accusations.

    The oil-producing region of Nigeria has seen militant attacks targeting oil pipelines for years.

    During the period of emergency rule, Nigeria’s retired former navy chief Vice Admiral Ibokette Ibas, ruled the state.

    The Nigerian constitution allows emergency rule to maintain law and order in rare circumstances.

    The last emergency in Nigeria was declared under President Goodluck Jonathan in 2013, in the northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe during the height of the Boko Haram insurgency. However, the state governors were not suspended then.

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  • Polling memo reveals risk for Indiana Republicans as they weigh redistricting

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    A majority of Indiana voters oppose mid-decade redistricting in their state, a new poll shows, as White House officials host Hoosier Republicans in Washington Tuesday amid President Donald Trump’s redistricting pressure campaign.

    The survey from left-leaning firm Change Research — which was commissioned by Count US IN, an Indiana-based nonprofit focused on increasing voter turnout and was obtained by POLITICO — shows several vulnerabilities for Republicans as Trump’s push to protect the GOP’s House majority sparks a nationwide redistricting arms race.

    Fifty-two percent of registered voters in Indiana — which Trump won by 19 points last year — said they are against Republicans revising their maps, with 43 percent “strongly” opposing the effort.

    That opposition rises to 60 percent after voters are informed of arguments for and against redistricting. The memo summarizing the survey breaks down some responses by party affiliation, but not all. The poll of 1,662 registered voters was conducted online between Aug. 18 to 21 and has a margin of sampling error of 2.6 percent.

    The unfavorable views of redistricting come as some four dozen of Indiana’s GOP lawmakers visit the White House on Tuesday for what’s being billed as a state leadership conference to coach legislators on how to sell the president’s agenda back home. The lawmakers are slated to meet with the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, per a person familiar with the planning. The group is expected to include Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston, whose daughter, Liz Huston, is one of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s assistants.

    The visit was put on the books before Vice President JD Vance and administration officials traveled to Indiana to prod Gov. Mike Braun and top state lawmakers into redistricting. But it falls against the backdrop of the White House ratcheting up pressure on red states to redistrict.

    Meanwhile, the Indiana poll gives Democrats some potential messaging guidance as they race to counter Texas’ new map and the potential for more GOP pickups across Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and Florida — even thought Republicans hold a supermajority in Indiana’s Legislature. GOP lawmakers outnumber Democrats there four-to-one in the Senate, and hold 70 seats in the House to Democrats’ 30.

    Nearly two-thirds of the survey respondents said gerrymandering should be illegal. And a full two-thirds expressed opposition to Washington politicians meddling in their state’s politics. While Indiana is considered ruby-red, registered independents make up a larger share of the electorate than Republicans or Democrats.

    Meanwhile, an overwhelming 81 percent of respondents agreed with a Democratic argument in the survey that redistricting “should be conducted in a balanced way to ensure fairness and that our communities are not disenfranchised for political gain” — versus the Republican argument provided to respondents that because Indiana is a mostly Republican state, “the majority should be able to draw our districts in a way that benefits Republicans whenever they want.” That included 68 percent of Republicans, and more than 90 percent of independents and Democrats.

    And 45 percent of respondents said they’d be “somewhat” or “much” less likely to vote for their state representative for reelection if they elect to pass a redrawn congressional map.

    That’s higher among Democrats — a whopping 88 percent — versus 55 percent of independents and just 12 percent of Republicans. Conversely, 40 percent of GOP respondents said they were somewhat or much more likely to vote for someone who voted for redistricting, while 34 percent said it would not change their vote and 14 percent were unsure.

    The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The potential for backlash comes as Trump’s push drives a rift among Indiana’s Republican officials. Some, like the state’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, have embraced Trump’s effort. All nine of Indiana’s GOP members of Congress have backed it. But several Republican state lawmakers have openly opposed it, with one hard-right representative panning it as “politically optically horrible.” Former Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said a mid-decade redistricting effort would “just be wrong.”

    Meanwhile, Braun, the state’s current governor, has remained noncommittal on calling a special legislative session to consider a new map.

    The White House isn’t letting up on its pressure campaign. Along with outreach from top administration officials, Trump’s political operation and MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk have threatened to support primary challenges of GOP state lawmakers who don’t fall in line.

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  • When the White House calls, do state lawmakers listen?

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    On the eve of the Texas House voting on a new congressional map, President Donald Trump ordered his “Republican friends” in the state legislature to get it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk “ASAP.”

    They’re taking heed — the state House passed the map on Wednesday and the state Senate is expected to do so this evening, just days after Democrats ended their out-of-state protest and returned to Austin — clearing the way for passage by the end of the week. Trump’s direct message to Texas Republicans is the president applying his standard pressure campaign playbook that has worked on Capitol Hill to a new audience: state lawmakers.

    When Trump wants something, he’ll often directly ask for it himself. And the president really wants to see GOP states take up mid-decade redistricting to carve out more Republican seats.

    Texas Republicans, including Abbott, initially didn’t want to take on the gambit. But the White House forced their hand, setting off a redistricting arms race across the country that Republicans are well-positioned to win. Should states like Indiana, Missouri and Florida move forward with mid-decade mapmaking, Republicans could pick up as many as 10 new seats ahead of the midterms, and it’s unclear at this point if any Democratic-led states beyond California will jump in to blunt the GOP advantages.

    Indiana is the latest target of the White House’s political operation, and Trump’s allies are even making the unusual consideration of backing primaries to Indiana state lawmakers who won’t accept the mission — an unusually direct involvement from a president in a state legislature. Some Indiana Republicans have expressed public resistance to falling in line — like state Rep. Ed Clere, who told POLITICO that “under no circumstances will I vote for a new map.”

    Clere, a longtime member from Southern Indiana, said he doesn’t want to see emergency special sessions called unnecessarily, and he believes too many procedural and legal hurdles stand in the way. “What Texas and California are doing is simply wrong for America,” he said. “It is the political equivalent of the cold war concept of MAD — mutually assured destruction. Indiana needs to take the high road.”

    Democrats are mostly powerless to respond to the White House’s intrusion into state legislatures. “I cannot recall another time that this has happened,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to state legislatures. “At the core here, the president is pressuring these lawmakers to change the maps, because that is the only way that Republicans can win.”

    Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has put the onus on the legislature to take up redistricting. While legislative leaders have not revealed their plans, the pressure campaign is working on the congressional delegation, which one by one has come forward in support. And state lawmakers have been summoned to a White House meeting Aug. 26, according to invitations reviewed by POLITICO, where redistricting will likely be top of the agenda.

    Another state that is surely on the White House’s radar: Ohio, which — unlike the handful of states choosing to remake their maps — is required under state law to redraw its map ahead of 2026. The White House may apply similar pressure to Buckeye Republicans to go for a maximalist approach, as Republicans there debate whether to carve out two or three seats during their process.

    “You have to appreciate the hands-on engagement,” said Indiana Republican strategist Marty Obst, who predicted that Indiana will convene a special session on redistricting. “If [state lawmakers] know that the White House is active, and they know for the president himself this is a top priority, it’s going to be very hard for them not to carry that out.”

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  • The People Rooting for the End of IVF

    The People Rooting for the End of IVF

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    Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on March 11, 2024

    Chaos reigns in Alabama—or at least in the Alabama world of reproductive health. Three weeks ago, the state’s supreme court ruled that embryos should be treated as children, thrusting the future of in vitro fertilization, and of thousands of would-be Alabama parents, into uncertainty. Last week, state lawmakers scrambled to pass a legislative fix to protect the right of prospective parents to seek IVF, but they did so without addressing the court’s existential questions about personhood.

    Meanwhile, those in the wider anti-abortion movement who oppose IVF are feeling hopeful. Whatever the outcome in Alabama, the situation has yanked the issue “into the public consciousness” nationwide, Aaron Kheriaty, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. He and his allies object to IVF for the same reason that they object to abortion: Both procedures result, they believe, in the destruction of innocent life. And in an America without federal abortion protections, in which states will continue to redefine and recategorize what qualifies as life, more citizens will soon encounter what Kheriaty considers the moral hazards of IVF.

    In his ideal world, the anti-abortion movement would make ending IVF its new goal—the next frontier in a post-Roe society. The problem, of course, is that crossing that frontier will be bumpy, to say the least. IVF is extremely popular, and banning it is not—something President Joe Biden made a point of highlighting in his State of the Union speech last week. (A full 86 percent of Americans support keeping it legal, according to the latest polling.) “Even a lot of pro-lifers don’t want to touch this issue,” Kheriaty acknowledged. “It’s almost easier to talk about abortion.” But he and his allies see the Alabama ruling as a chance to start a national conversation about the morality of IVF—even if, at first, Americans don’t want to listen.

    Read: The anti-abortion movement’s attack on unwanted pregnancies

    After all, their movement has already won another unpopular, decades-long fight: With patience and dedication, pro-life activists succeeded in transforming abortion rights from a niche issue in religious circles to a mainstream cause—eventually making opposition to Roe a litmus test for Republican candidates. Perhaps, the thinking goes, pro-lifers could achieve the same with IVF.

    The typical IVF procedure goes like this: A doctor retrieves a number of eggs from a woman’s ovaries—maybe eight to 10—and fertilizes them with sperm in laboratory conditions. The fertilized eggs will grow in the lab for a few days, before one or more embryos will be selected for transfer to the woman’s uterus. A patient using IVF to get pregnant will likely have several embryos left over, and it’s up to the patient whether those extras are discarded, frozen for future use, or donated, either to research or to another couple.

    In the Alabama case, three couples were storing frozen embryos at an IVF clinic, where they were mistakenly destroyed. When the couples sued the clinic in a civil trial for the wrongful death of a child, the state supreme court ruled that they were entitled to damages, declaring in a novel interpretation of Alabama law that embryos qualify as children. The public’s response to the ruling can perhaps best be described as panicked. Two of the state’s major in-vitro-fertilization clinics immediately paused operations, citing uncertain legal liability, which disrupted many couples’ medical treatments and forced some out of state for care. Lawmakers across the country raced to clarify their position.

    But the ruling shouldn’t have come as such a shock, at least to the pro-life community. After all, “it’s a very morally consistent outcome” with what anti-abortion advocates have long argued—that life begins at conception—Andrew T. Walker, an ethics and public-theology professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told me: “It’s the culmination of other pro-life arguments about human dignity, brought to the IVF domain.”

    Read: The significance of Michelle Obama’s fertility story

    The central criticism of IVF from Walker and others who share his opinion concerns the destruction of extra embryos, which they view as fully human. For some people, a degree of cognitive dissociation is required to look at a tiny embryo and see a human baby, which is a point that IVF defenders commonly make. (“I would invite them to try to change the diaper of an in vitro–fertilized egg,” Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told me. More soberly, Kate Devine, the medical director of US Fertility, a network of reproduction-focused practices, told me that referring to an embryo as a baby “is unjust and inaccurate and threatens to withhold highly efficacious family-building treatments from people affected by the disease of infertility.”)

    To IVF critics, however, an embryo is just a very young person. “The only real difference between those frozen embryos and me sitting here having this conversation with you is time,” Katy Faust, the president of the anti-abortion nonprofit Them Before Us, told me. “If you believe that children have a right to life, and that life begins at conception, then ‘Big Fertility’ as an industry is responsible for more child deaths than the abortion industry.” Faust’s organization argues from a “children’s rights” perspective, meaning it also believes that IVF is wrong, in part, because it allows single women and homosexual couples to have babies, which deprives children of having both a mother and a father.

    This leads to the other major criticism of IVF: that the process itself is so unnatural that it devalues sex and treats children as a commodity. The argument to which many religious Americans subscribe is that having children is a “cooperative act among husband, wife, and God himself,” John M. Haas, a former president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, has written. “Children, in the final analysis, should be begotten not made.” The secular version of that opinion is that IVF poses all kinds of thorny bioethical quandaries, including questions about the implications of preimplantation genetic testing and the selection for sex and other traits. When a doctor takes babies “out of the normal process of conception, lines them up in a row, and picks which is the best baby, that brings a eugenicist mindset into it that’s really destructive,” Leah Sargeant, a Catholic writer, told me. “There are big moral complications and red flags that aren’t being treated as such.”

    She and the others believe that now is the time to stop ignoring those red flags. The Alabama Supreme Court has offered a chance to teach people about IVF—and the implications they may not yet be aware of. Some couples who’ve undergone IVF don’t even consider the consequences “until they themselves have seven [extra] frozen embryos,” Faust said, “and now they go, ‘Oh, shit, what do we do?’” The more Americans learn about IVF, the less they’ll use it, opponents argue, just as Americans have broadly moved away from international adoption for ethical reasons. Walker would advise faith leaders to counsel couples against the process. “As I’ve talked with people, they’ve come around,” he said.

    The IVF opponents I interviewed all made clear that they sympathize with couples struggling with infertility. But they also believe that not all couples will be able to have biological children. “Not every way of pursuing children turns out to be a good way,” Sargeant said; people will have to accept that “you don’t have total control over whether you get one.”

    Read: The pro-life movement’s not-so-secret plan for Trump

    None of these arguments is going to be an applause line for anti-IVF campaigners in most parts of the country. “I know that my view is deeply unpopular,” Walker told me, with a laugh. The Alabama ruling left Republicans in disarray: Even some hard-line social conservatives in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have tried to distance themselves from it, arguing that they oppose abortion but support IVF from a natalist position. Democrats, meanwhile, are already using the issue as a wedge: If, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, they can connect Republicans’ support for Dobbs to the possible end of IVF, they’ll have an even easier job painting the GOP as extreme on reproductive health and out of touch with the average American voter.

    Even so, the anti-IVF people I interviewed say, at least Americans would be talking about it. Talking, they believe, is the beginning of persuasion. And they’re prepared to be patient.

    Earlier this week, Kheriaty texted me with what he seems to take as evidence that his movement is already making progress. He sent a comment he’d gotten from a reader in response to his latest column about the perils of IVF. “This troubling dilemma wasn’t on top of mind when we embarked on our IVF path,” the reader had written. The clinic had explained what would happen to their unused embryos, the woman said, but she hadn’t realized the issue “would loom” so heavily over her afterward.

    This article originally identified John M. Haas as the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center; in fact, he is a former president of the center.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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