Court Upholds Rule Barring Gender Identity on Kansas Drivers Licenses

Kansas City road

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.

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Commentary: Mail Ballot Security Is Under Nationwide Assault

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.

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Police Chief Stands by Extensive Raid of Kansas Newspaper and Home Where 98-Year Old Owner Died

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.

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Montana Republican Lawmakers the Latest to Receive Threatening Letters with White Powder

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.

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Cross-Dressing Book for Pre-K Students Crossed the Line in Kansas

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.

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Pennsylvania Set to Receive Part of a Nearly $400 Million Settlement from Google over Location-Tracking Probe

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.”

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30 Months into the COVID-19 Pandemic, at Least a Dozen States Are Under ‘Emergency’ Orders

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.

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Biden Executive Order Attempts to Force Taxpayers to Fund Abortions on Demand

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.

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Commentary: First Vote on Abortion After Roe Reversal

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.

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Over 2,000 Cattle Die from Heat, Humidity in Kansas

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.

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Commentary: The Kansas-Missouri Border War Isn’t Over

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.”

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Commentary: Three States Are Rethinking the Relationship Between Housing and Education Quality

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.

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21 States Join Lawsuit to End Federal Mask Mandate on Airplanes, Public Transportation

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.

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Kansas Swing Congressional District Tilts Towards GOP Takeover

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.

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Attorney General Schmidt: Kansas Sees Large Spikes in Fentanyl Seizures, Drug Overdoses

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.”

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Analysis: Pennsylvania Among the Top Governor’s Races to Watch This Year

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.

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