Sarah Huckabee Sanders targeted in lawsuit over book ban: report
"Why most young voters will never vote Republican [...]8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes."
Sarah Huckabee Sanders says all are welcome in Arkansas… as long as they're cis, hetero & Republican Story by Queerty • May 6 [...]Not only is Arkansas the fourth poorest state in the nation with a mounting affordable housing crisis and massive food insecurity, but since taking office in January, Sanders has signed several different laws controlling people’s behavior–from banning books and the gender-neutral term “Latinx”, to policing what bathrooms trans and nonbinary people can use, to restricting teachers from talking about race, sexual orientation, or gender identity in the classroom. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171852849
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in March signed Arkansas Act 372 into law. The measure is expected to go into effect Aug. 1.
The Arkansas Library Association and the Central Arkansas Library System are among the groups who filed the lawsuit jointly on Friday.
Critics say the law is extreme and unenforceable.
Arkansas Library Association President Carol Coffey is among those who have assailed the controversial measure.
“Library workers across Arkansas are rightly concerned that the overly broad edicts of Act 372 will prevent them from serving their patrons as they have always done, by providing a wide variety of materials to fill their information needs, and perhaps more importantly, materials that allow each child to see themselves in the books in their library,” Coffey said in a statement.
“The primary mission of the Arkansas Library Association is to support libraries and library workers and to defend intellectual freedom. We join in this lawsuit because it is the best way for us to fulfill our mission.”
The lawsuit alleges the new law violates the state’s constitution’s 1st and 14th amendment protections.
The Arkansas law follows a national trend.
Attempts to ban or restrict access to books at public libraries set a record in 2022 with more than 1,200 such challenges, according to the American Library Association, more than double of what was seen the previous year.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
“The last two years have been exhausting, frightening, outrage inducing.”
How crime is igniting new conflicts between red states and blue cities
"Why most young voters will never vote Republican [...]3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost."
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein Updated 10:05 AM EDT, Tue March 14, 2023
[...]
With so many forces converging, all signs suggest the conservative drive to constrain liberal local prosecutors and assert more control over policing in heavily Democratic big cities has not nearly peaked. Indeed, former President Donald Trump has already pledged that if returned to the White House he will push a suite of aggressive federal policies to counter what he has called “radical left” and even “Marxist” prosecutors. In his dark, rambling speech earlier this month at CPAC, Trump declared that if reelected he would direct the Justice Department to launch civil rights investigations against the progressive prosecutors “to make them pay for their illegal race-based enforcement of the law.”
The Republican governors and state legislators pushing these preemption proposals mostly argue that they are necessary to combat high crime rates in municipalities under Democratic control. “Action must be taken to ensure that district attorneys are held accountable for their actions and carry out their duties by enforcing the laws we have on our books,” Texas GOP state Sen. Tan Parker said when introducing a bill earlier this year that would allow the state’s attorney general to remove local prosecutors.
But the push is also being fueled by the resistance from some prosecutors in the blue counties of red states to enforce the wave of new socially conservative bills that have burned through those states since 2020, including bans on abortion and gender affirming surgery for minors. Andrew Warren, the elected Democratic state attorney in Hillsborough County, Florida, who DeSantis removed from office last year, for instance, had indicated he would not enforce the 15 week abortion ban the governor has signed into law.
“For progressive prosecutors this is a politically self-inflicted wound,” said Thomas Hogan, a former federal prosecutor and elected Republican district attorney in Chester County outside Philadelphia, who has emerged as a leading critic of the liberal district attorneys. “When you … stand up on the tallest building in your jurisdiction and holler at the legislature that you are not going to follow their law, somebody is going to pay attention,” he added. “When you do something like that you are basically waving a red cape in front of a bull.”
In the states, these battles have unfolded almost entirely along party lines, with Republicans pushing these initiatives and Democrats resisting them. Yet national Democrats may have muddled their message against the preemption of local criminal justice authority when so many of them in Congress, as well as President Joe Biden, joined the recent Republican-led congressional effort to overturn a sweeping criminal justice reform approved by the Washington, DC, city council.
Though the congressional vote raised somewhat different issues than the state fights, the decision by so many Democrats to endorse the override effort underscores how much momentum elevated public concern about safety and disorder is generating for tough-on-crime policies. That message has been reinforced by the defeat of Mayor Lori Lightfoot in Chicago’s recent mayoral primary, last year’s recall of San Francisco’s reform-oriented district attorney Chesa Boudin, and the election of Eric Adams behind a crackdown platform in New York City.
The state moves to preempt local prosecutorial authority has directly followed the increased electoral success of so called “progressive prosecutors” committed to reducing incarceration rates, confronting racial inequities in the criminal justice system and more aggressively prosecuting police misconduct. The first of the “progressive prosecutors” were elected in the mid-2010s,after the racial justice protests flowing out of Ferguson, Missouri, but the movement really accelerated after the nationwide uprising over the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Today, there are between 50-60 prosecutors considered part of the movement – including in major jurisdictions such as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia – with jurisdiction over populations equaling about one-fifth of the US total, said Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a group that supports criminal justice reform. And while San Francisco last year recalled Boudin, Turner pointed out that virtually all the progressive district attorneys who sought reelection have won it.
The push by Republican-controlled legislators to preempt more local authority over criminal justice enforcement began soon after these prosecutors took office. In 2019, the GOP-controlled legislature in Pennsylvania passed a bill to shift authority over prosecuting some gun possession offenses from Philadelphia’s liberal DA Larry Krasner to the state. In the 2021-2022 legislative session, Iowa,Tennessee and Utah also passed bills to constrain local prosecutors or to make it easier to force their removal, according to a recent compilation by the Local Solutions Support Center. Over those same two years, as cities faced growing demands from activists to shift funding from law enforcement to social services, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Missouri passed laws preventing local jurisdictions from reducing their police budgets.
As the LSSC argued in its recent survey of preemption, “After going unchallenged for centuries, prosecutorial discretion has come under fire only after local prosecutors have begun to use it to combat – rather than entrench – systemic racism.”
Efforts to supersede local control of law enforcement decisions in Democratic-leaning cities and counties are proliferating in red states again this year.
In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state House and Senate have each passed legislation that would establish a new statewide commission to investigate, discipline and remove local district attorneys. The bill, which has the strong support of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, has raised eyebrows especially because it is advancing as the elected Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating the attempts by Trump, as well as Georgia GOP officials, to overturn the result of the 2020 election there.
The Republican-controlled Texas legislature is considering seven different proposals to override or ease the removal of local prosecutors. Last week, the state’s powerful and deeply conservative Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick identified as one of his priority bills for the current legislative session a measure that would allow the state to remove any local prosecutor who “prohibits or materially limits the enforcement of any criminal offense.” Another bill would allow the state attorney general to appoint district attorneys from neighboring counties to prosecute cases of alleged election fraud if the local DA will not.
In Missouri, the state House of Representatives has approved legislation that would shift authority for prosecuting violent crimes from elected local prosecutors to a special prosecutor appointed by the governor once a county’s crime rate crosses a certain level. The House has also passed legislation that would shift operational control over the police department in St. Louis to the state. And last month, Bailey, the state’s Republican attorney general, began a legal process to force from office Kimberly Gardner, the St. Louis circuit attorney.
In Mississippi, the Republican-controlled state legislature is advancing legislation to expand state control over policing and the courts, and largely displace local authority, in Jackson, the predominantly Black capital city.
In Florida, beyond removing Warren, DeSantis’ office has also begun an investigation that may culminate in the removal of Monique Worrell, the elected Democratic state’s attorney in Orange County, centered on Orlando. DeSantis argues she mishandled the case of a 19-year-old man recently arrested for shooting three people in the city.
Taken together, these initiatives constitute an unprecedented challenge to the independence of local prosecutors, said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies state preemption of local decisions. “This is a straightforward attack on a system we’ve had in place for hundreds of years: local elections of local prosecutors,” he said.
Some of those targeted by these efforts, such as Krasner and Warren, are White. But in most cases, these efforts target Black local officials in heavily minority jurisdictions, including the mayors of St. Louis and Jackson; the county attorneys in the counties centered on Atlanta, Orlando, and St. Louis are all Black women.
In testimony before a state legislative committee considering the Georgia bill, Willis noted the proposal has emerged only after the number of county prosecutors who are racial minorities has recently nearly tripled in Georgia, to the point where they now oversee a majority of the state’s population. “I’m tired and I’m just going to call it how I see it,” Willis told another group of legislators “I, quite frankly, think the legislation is racist. I don’t know what other thing to call it.” The Black mayors of St. Louis and Jackson Mississippi have made similar charges.
Hogan agreed the racial dimension of the conflict complicates the politics of the state efforts. But he believes those pushing preemption can rebut the charges of racism by pointing out that “the citizens of those cities and right now the folks who are suffering the most in the violence of those cities are the poor, minority citizens.” Hogan likened the state efforts to preempt prosecutors to the movement for mandatory minimum sentences and federal sentencing guidelines that emerged after the 1960s to constrain sentencing decisions by judges that critics considered too lenient.
Yet on balance, Hogan said he believes the red states are mistaken to seize control from local prosecutors and law enforcement as they are doing. Hogan argues that as in San Francisco’s recall of Boudin, voters fed up with crime and urban disorder will eventually reject the progressive prosecutor movement. That would provide a more lasting shift, he maintainrf, because state “attempts to jump in and cut off the democratic process” will leave open the question of whether the progressive policies would have succeeded if left in place.“People would be better off letting voters and reality make a correction here in the long run,” Hogan said.
Turner of the Vera institute, noting how many of the progressive prosecutors have won reelection, disputes the idea that their voters will reject the movement. But he also views the drive for more state control as “profoundly anti-democratic” since it involves state legislatures overriding the choices of local voters to set criminal justice priorities for their communities. Roy likewise pointed out that the progressive prosecutors did not engage in a “bait and switch” but rather were elected after explicitly promising the shifts in direction that they are executing. In that way, she said,the red state legislatures, “are directly subverting what local communities are asking for.”
Exacerbating this conflict is the fact that in many red states GOP control of legislatures and governorships is rooted in their dominance of exurban, small town and rural areas far from the urban centers that are the targets of these preemption efforts. Severe gerrymanders that dilute urban influence compounds the challenge for the population centers in many of the states pushing preemption agendas.
Trump has pledged to extend this preemption agenda to the national level. Beyond his call for Justice Department investigations of local prosecutors, Trump has said he will push legislation to authorize federal lawsuits against local district attorneys by anyone who claims they were harmed by their refusal to prosecute certain crimes. Perhaps most dramatically, Trump has repeatedly declared that in cities “where there has been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets including the national guard until law and order is restored,” as he put it in his recent speech to the CPAC convention.
The push to seize more authority over criminal justice comes after a decade in which red states have dramatically expanded their efforts to tighten their control over blue cities on almost every front.
250,000 Floridians Get Kicked Off Medicaid as DeSantis Rakes in Big Donor Cash
"Why most young voters will never vote Republican [...]7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day"
"One of these individuals is a seven-year-old boy in remission from Leukemia who is now unable to access follow-up—and potentially lifesaving—treatments," said local advocacy groups.
Jake Johnson Jun 05, 2023
Hundreds of thousands of poor Floridians have been kicked off Medicaid in recent weeks as their Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, travels the country for his 2024 presidential bid and rakes in campaign cash from big donors.
Florida is among the states that have begun unwinding pandemic-era rules barring states from removing people from Medicaid during the public health emergency. Late last year, Congress reached a bipartisan deal to end the so-called continuous coverage requirements, opening the door to a massive purge of the lifesaving .. https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-expansion-has-saved-at-least-19000-lives-new-research-finds .. healthcare program.
A dozen states have released early data on the number of people removed from Medicaid as they restart eligibility checks, a cumbersome process that many people fail to navigate.
So far, the statistics are alarming: More than 600,000 people across the U.S. have been stripped of Medicaid coverage since April, according to a KFF Health News .. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/medicaid-unwinding-state-data-coverage-loss/ .. analysis of the available data, and "the vast majority were removed from state rolls for not completing paperwork" rather than confirmed ineligibility.
"That's the fourth-highest rate in the country," Cohn noted.
But DeSantis, who has said he wants to "make America Florida," appears unmoved by the staggering number of people losing Medicaid in his state as he hits the campaign trail. The governor relied heavily on large contributors to bring in more than $8 million during the first 24 hours of his presidential bid.
"Families with children have been erroneously terminated, and parents are having trouble reaching the DCF call center for help with this process."
Late last month, DeSantis' administration insisted it "has a robust outreach campaign" aimed at ensuring people are aware of the hoops they have to jump through to keep their Medicaid coverage, such as income verification.
In Florida, a four-person household must make less than $39,900 in annual income to qualify for Medicaid.
The state's early data indicates that 44% of those who have lost coverage in recent weeks were removed for procedural reasons, like a failure to return paperwork on time.
"One of these individuals is a seven-year-old boy in remission from Leukemia .. https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/state/florida-mom-left-with-no-answers-on-medicaid-as-her-child-waits-for-treatment .. who is now unable to access follow-up—and potentially lifesaving—treatments," a coalition of groups including the Florida Policy Institute and the Florida Health Justice Project wrote to DeSantis. "Families with children have been erroneously terminated, and parents are having trouble reaching the DCF call center for help with this process. Additionally, unclear notices and lack of information on how to appeal contribute to more confusion."
"Letters that she's seen say 'your Medicaid for this period is ending' rather than providing a specific reason for disenrollment, like having too high an income or incomplete paperwork," the outlet noted. "If a person requests a hearing before their cancellation takes effect, they can stay covered during the appeals process. Even after being disenrolled, many still have a 90-day window to restore coverage."
The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that around 15.5 million people—including 5 million children—are likely to lose Medicaid coverage nationwide over the next year and a half as states resume eligibility checks made necessary by a system that doesn't guarantee healthcare to all as a right .. https://www.commondreams.org/news/medicare-for-all-introduced .
"Many people don't realize that they've been disenrolled from Medicaid until they show up at the pharmacy to get their prescription refilled or they have a doctor's appointment scheduled," Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, toldThe Washington Post last week.
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