Federal judge John Broomes ruled on the side of attorneys general in Kansas, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming, claiming that Title IX was meant to protect biological women from discrimination in education.
A federal court in Kansas on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations from taking effect in four states, becoming the latest court to stop the new controversial rules from taking effect in August.
Read More
President Joe Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan has legal experts divided, with some citing similar problems to his previous plan struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education Plan is an income-based student loan repayment plan that provides full loan forgiveness in certain cases.
Read More
A judge ruled Monday that barring Kansas drivers from identifying as transgender on their licenses did not violate their constitutional rights.
Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a lawsuit against Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly in July 2023 after the governor’s office said that the state would continue to issue driver’s licenses reflecting a person’s gender identity despite the Kansas Legislature passing a bill requiring only biological sex on government IDs, according to the Kansas Reflector. Judge Teresa Watson upheld her previous ruling from last year barring the Kansas Department of Revenue from adding options other than a person’s biological sex to driver’s licenses and further stated that the law did not violate transgender individuals’ rights under the state constitution, according to court documents.
Read More
The Left loves to tout universal mail-in voting. Liberal enclaves like California, Hawaii, and Oregon have implemented it, while activists push aggressively to impose mail-in voting on Americans. But even as they push it, despite repeated instances of fraud, the Left simultaneously attacks any efforts to make vulnerable mail voting more secure. Indeed, the Left holds outright disdain for even minimal safeguards for mail ballots.
Read More
The Marion Police Department says its raid of a Kansas newspaper’s office and the home of the paper’s owners was justified without a subpoena because the law allows raids when a reporter is a suspect in an offense.
Marion’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies on Friday raided the Marion County Record’s office as well as the home of Joan Meyer and her son, Eric Meyer, on Friday. Joan Meyer, who was 98 but in “otherwise good health for her age,” according to the Record, died Saturday after being stressed from the raid.
Read More
Montana Republican legislators are the latest GOP state officials to be targeted, receiving threatening letters containing white powder after Tennessee and Kansas Republicans received similar suspicious mail in recent days, officials say.
Meanwhile, four days after the Cordell Hull Building legislative offices in Nashville were locked down upon Republican leaders received threatening mail, an FBI official tells The Tennessee Star that the incident remains under investigation and that the agency has no comment at this time.
Read More
A school district that gave preschoolers a book on cross-dressing has changed its procedures for giving out books after news of the incident surfaced last week.
As first reported exclusively by The Lion and The Heartlander news sites, a 4-year-old preschooler in the Turner School District in Kansas City, Kansas, took home the book Jacob’s New Dress. It’s a picture book in which a little boy wears girls’ clothes and even competes with his friend Emily to be a princess.
Read More
Google agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states after an investigation found that the tech giant participated in questionable location-tracking practices, state attorneys general announced Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it a “historic win for consumers.”
Read More
A Kansas teacher has been awarded nearly $100,000 after being suspended from her school due to her refusal to use a transgender-identifying student’s new name in class.
Read More
In October 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of the unilateral powers she was using when she declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whitmer had been using a 1945 law – which was prompted by a three-day race riot in Detroit three years earlier – that had no sunset provision in it and didn’t require approval by the state legislature.
In May 2021, Whitmer told a news agency that if she still had that 1945 state-of-emergency law, she would use those powers, but not for anything related to a pandemic.
Read More
Joe Biden issued an executive order Wednesday that will attempt to force taxpayers to fund abortions on demand, including for women who travel to pro-abortion states to obtain late-term abortions.
Read More
Minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the 49-year-old constitutional right to abortion, President Biden addressed the nation. “Voters need to make their voices heard. This fall, Roe is on the ballot.”
Make that late summer. On Aug. 2, Kansas will become the first state to vote on reproductive rights since the landscape-altering U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which took away the federal guarantee of abortion and gave the issue back to the states.
Read More
The already struggling meat industry suffered another blow after extreme temperatures in Kansas killed at least 2,000 cattle across the state.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the estimated total of dead cattle comes from facilities that reached out to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (DHE) for help in disposing of the carcasses. The Kansas Livestock Association said that the cause of death was heat stress as a result of extremely high temperatures and humidity.
Read More
Missouri and Kansas are no strangers to border conflict. No, we’re not talking about the chaos that inspired “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” The fear today is over cross-border job poachers. However, that doesn’t justify giving Fidelity Security Life Insurance $12.7 million just to stay inside Kansas City. No one gets a gold medal in a race to the bottom — but politicians will waste endless taxpayer dollars trying to tell you that they’re “winning.”
Read More
Most of the nation’s 48.2 million public K-12 students are assigned to their schools based on geographic school districts or attendance zones, with few options for transferring to another public school district. This method of school assignment intertwines schooling with property wealth, limiting families’ education options according to where they can afford to live.
A 2019 Senate Joint Economic Committee report found that homes near highly rated schools were four times the cost of homes near poorly rated schools. This presents a real barrier for many families – and 56% of respondents in a 2019 Cato survey indicated that expensive housing costs prevented them from moving to better neighborhoods. The challenge has only deepened as housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic, putting better housing and education options out of reach for many.
Read More
Twenty-one states have filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s continued mask mandate on public transportation, including on airplanes.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody are leading the effort. Moody filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida along with 20 other attorneys general. DeSantis said the mask mandate was misguided and heavy-handed.
Read More
Redistricting has caused a Kansas swing U.S. House district to tilt in partisan makeup towards the GOP.
Kansas’ Third Congressional district, long-considered a swing district, went from a D+4 partisan rating prior to redistricting to a R+3 according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ratings system.
Read More
Record amounts of fentanyl and other drugs are being seized in Kansas after they’ve made their way north from Mexico and the state’s attorney general, Derek Schmidt, said he is trying to stop it. He joined a coalition of other Republican attorneys general at the Texas-Mexico border to see first-hand how the Biden administration’s open border policies are contributing to crime in Kansas.
In one briefing with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the AGs learned that Texas state troopers alone had seized enough fentanyl last year to kill over 200 million people. They also arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants for committing state crimes, including for child trafficking and drug smuggling, seized over five tons of methamphetamine, and over $17 million in cash as part of Operation Lone Star, Texas’ border security initiative.
While it’s “good news that they’re seizing more, there’s no reason to think that there’s less of it eluding seizure at the border because the border’s wide open in large swaths,” Schmidt told The Center Square. “I don’t think it’s a good news number. I think it’s an indication of the increased volume coming across the border, not an indication of increased success in stopping it at the border.”
Read More
Democrats four years ago rode a blue wave to governors’ mansions across the country, flipping Republican-held seats in the Midwest, Northeast and West alike.
Now, however, many of those governors face Republican challengers amid a political environment that looks potentially promising for the GOP, meaning that contentious races may lie ahead in some of the nation’s most pivotal battleground states. Republicans have already had two strong showings in states that lean Democratic, flipping the governor’s seat in Virginia and coming surprisingly close in New Jersey, a state that voted for President Joe Biden by 16 points in 2020.
Governors in less competitive states are also facing primary challengers from the left and right, making for multiple bitter, closely-followed primaries between candidates from different wings of the same party.
Read More
The governor of Kansas has vetoed a bill that would have banned biological males from participating in women’s sports.
Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the “The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” Thursday, saying in a news release that the legislation “sends a devastating message that Kansas is not welcoming to all children and their families, including those who are transgender — who are already at a higher risk of bullying, discrimination, and suicide,” according to local outlet KMBC.
“As Kansans, we should be focused on how to include all students in extracurricular activities rather than how to exclude those who may be different than us,” Kelly said. “Kansas is an inclusive state and our laws should reflect our values. This law does not do that.”
Read More
Thirteen states sued President Joe Biden’s administration over an American Rescue Plan provision prohibiting states from cutting taxes after accepting coronavirus relief funds.
The 13-state coalition argued that the provision included in the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package preventing states from cutting taxes if they accept relief from the federal government is unconstitutional. The coalition, led by Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
“Never before has the federal government attempted such a complete takeover of state finances,” Morrisey said in a Wednesday statement. “We cannot stand for such overreach.”
Read More
A group of red states sued President Biden and members of his administration on Wednesday over his decision to revoke a key permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, The Hill reported.
The lawsuit is led by Montana and Texas, and backed by 19 other states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Read More
Democratic state leaders around the country who planned on introducing expanded health care measures such as a public option have now been forced to delay those plans as a result of pandemic budgetary difficulties.
Read More
As of early August, 34 US states mandate the use of masks in public to limit the spread of COVID-19.
The efficacy of face masks has been a subject of debate in the health community during the pandemic. Because health experts disagree on their effectiveness, countries and health agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization and the CDC, have done a reversal on their mask recommendations during the pandemic.
Read More
The Kansas City Chiefs are locked in to win the Super Bowl if they battle as aggressively on Sunday as a trio of Senate candidates did for President Donald Trump’s support at the GOP debate in this Kansas City suburb Saturday.
Rep. Roger Marshall, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and, to a lesser extent, Kansas Senate Leader Susan Wagle, touted their support for Trump on a host of issues during the hour-long debate.
Read More
On Wednesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – live from Washington DC Leahy spoke with Kansas Senate candidate and We Build the Wall’s general counsel, Kris Kobach.
Read More
by Grace Carr The Kansas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state constitution affords women “fundamental” access to abortion. “[T]he Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights affords protection of the right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise…
Read More
by Kevin Daley The Supreme Court declined to review three cases relating to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood at the state level Monday, over a vigorous dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas. The dissent was significant because it indicates that Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the high court’s liberal…
Read More