Abbott announces redistricting will be included in Texas special session
The governor said in a release that the session will tackle '[legislation] that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.'
Abbott said last month he would be calling a special session, noting a handful of bills that were either filed without signature or were vetoed that would be under consideration during the special session. However, those items did not initially include redistricting.
'We delivered on historic legislation in the 89th Regular Legislative Session that will benefit Texans for generations to come,' Abbott said in the release Wednesday. 'There is more work to be done, particularly in the aftermath of the devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country. We must ensure better preparation for such events in the future.'
His announcement comes after reporting last month that President Trump's political team was pushing for mid-cycle redistricting.
Though Texas is not due to draw new House lines until after the 2030 Census, Republicans are looking to defend a narrow 220-212 House majority next year and are contending with the traditional headwinds typically associated with the president's party during midterm cycles.
Republicans control the state legislature, governor's office and state Supreme Court, meaning the party will be able to easily overcome any Democratic opposition to redrawing the state's maps. However, it remains unclear how that litigation could play out if it makes its way through the federal court system, particularly as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama's maps in 2023 for likely violating the Voting Rights Act.
Another looming question is whether redistricting the maps could endanger Republicans in nearby districts and make their seats potentially more competitive.
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Americans overwhelmingly view the cost of child care as a significant issue, and most support initiatives to offer free or low-cost day care and to require employers to provide paid family leave for parents of babies, according to a new poll. But they're divided over how to solve the problem and what role the government should have in that solution. About three-quarters of U.S. adults see child care costs as a 'major problem,' but only about half say helping working families pay for child care should be a 'high priority' for the federal government, according to the June poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The coronavirus pandemic was a tipping point, revealing the child care industry's vulnerabilities. The latest congressional package of tax cuts included tax credits and benefits for parents and businesses that assist employees with child care. Those changes have been praised by some, while others say millions of families at lower income levels wouldn't get the full credit and would be affected by cuts in Medicaid and food stamps. The poll findings help explain the difficulty advocacy groups, elected officials and families navigate in trying to address the high costs of care: While most agree it's a problem, there isn't a simple fix. For instance, while government-funded child care is popular, that might not be everyone's first choice. Many U.S. adults also think it's better for children with two parents to be cared for full time by a parent. 'Everyone kind of agrees that it's a problem that we need to address,' said Sarah Rittling, executive director of the First Five Years Fund advocacy organization. 'By having this issue out there, it really is driving a lot of bipartisan conversations.' Most Americans support initiatives to offer child care or additional time for working families to spend with babies. About two-thirds support providing free or low-cost day care for children too young to attend public school, and a similar share favor requiring employers to provide paid family leave for new parents. Women are more likely than men to support the proposals, and Democrats are more likely than Republicans, but each is popular across the board. Mary Banek, a nurse anesthetist of Midlothian, Texas, said she helps take care of her 1-year-old grandson so he doesn't need day care. When she had her kids, she left the workforce and got a license to start a day care from her home to watch 12 children, including her own, so she could generate income. Banek said she's surprised at the high fees at day cares these days. 'I don't know what's happened and why it is so expensive,' Banek said, adding maybe there's a way to cap costs. She doesn't feel the government should foot the cost. Many think parents should be caregivers While many solutions focus on families with working parents, there isn't broad agreement this is the best arrangement for children. Just under half of U.S. adults, 45%, say children with two parents are better off when one parent doesn't have a job and raises the children. Only about 1 in 10 say children are better off when both parents work full time, and about 4 in 10 say it doesn't make a difference. Vice President JD Vance has tried to push for ideas that would encourage Americans to have families but has opposed government spending on child care, saying children benefit from having a parent or family member at home as a caretaker. About half of men say children with two parents are better off when one is the full-time caregiver, compared with about 4 in 10 women. Stephen Yip-Wineman, 45, a high school teacher from Murrieta, California, who describes himself as a moderate, said he feels society doesn't see the value of parents choosing to be caretakers. 'A lot of people are pushed into the idea that everyone in their family is going to work and that's the way of being a productive member of society,' Yip-Wineman said. 'They think staying home and taking care of the kids is somehow not contributing.' Yip-Wineman has two children ages 12 and 14, and their mother stays home, but he says his ideas of having a parent do the caretaking don't have to do with making the mother the primary caretaker. 'Having a parent raise the kids is not about pushing traditional Christian values and trying to keep women out of the workplace," he said. "It's about trying to be more personally engaged with each other.' Are changes happening? 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Organizations want increased funding for federal early-learning and care programs, including a child care program for low-income families and an early-education program called Head Start. Trump's Republican administration backed away from a proposal this year to eliminate funding for Head Start. Other groups, including Child Care Aware of America, have pointed out the new law's cuts in Medicaid would result in a loss of health coverage for many child care workers. ___ The AP-NORC poll of 1,158 adults was conducted June 5-9, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
San Francisco Chronicle
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Trump's budget is a setback for the fight against climate change — but it's not the end of the story
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Dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act was a remarkably shortsighted move, and no one — not Republicans or Democrats, city dwellers or rural inhabitants — will emerge unscathed. For many of us who have dedicated our careers to fighting climate change, this was a gut punch. But all is not lost. After Republicans secured passage of Trump's budget last week, I sent a letter to the staffers at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit dedicated to global climate action where I'm executive director, assuring them that the antidote to fear and worry is action. In the coming weeks and months, those of us who care about climate change need to get off the mat and get back to work. There is still much we can do. The federal government doesn't have a monopoly on climate action, and there are many pathways still available to building a better future. To start, we should focus on the international stage. While decisions made in the United States still matter a great deal, it is not the whole climate ball game. Indeed, over 90% of the world's emissions are now produced outside the United States. And the atmosphere doesn't care about national borders. Fortunately, the rest of the world is not sitting still, and many climate solutions are accelerating in other countries. Whether we look at China, Europe, Latin America or elsewhere, it is clear that the future belongs to clean energy. Solar energy is now the fastest-growing energy source in human history, growing at 20%-30% annually. Fossil fuels' days are ultimately numbered. Even in the United States, we can still make tremendous progress. Yes, the budget bill is all but certain to slow down the move to clean energy in America — and hand a huge economic advantage to China — but it will not stop the transition. The long-term future of energy in the United States, like everywhere else, will ultimately be green. Solar energy, wind power, battery storage, LED lighting, heat pumps and electric vehicles are getting better, cheaper and easier to build every year. They continue to beat the most optimistic forecasts, every year. Economics are shifting, and clean energy is gaining momentum over fossil fuels. The smart money is on green energy, which is why investors and businesses continue to put their money there. And clean energy's competitive advantage is only getting stronger. Clean energy will eventually be an unstoppable force in the market, no matter what 'drill, baby, drill' Trump and his fossil fuel bankrollers want. Looking beyond Washington, we can also leverage the critical role that cities, states and public utility commissions play in advancing climate action. Many states, including California and Minnesota, have been pioneers in clean energy through their ambitious investments and policies. 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San Francisco Chronicle
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A century after a man was convicted of teaching evolution, the debate on religion in schools rages
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — One hundred years ago, a public high school teacher stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching human evolution. His nation is still feeling the reverberations today. The law books record it as State of Tennessee v. John T. Scopes. History remembers it as the ' Monkey Trial.' The case ballooned into a national spectacle, complete with a courthouse showdown between a renowned, agnostic defense attorney and a famous fundamentalist Christian politician who defended the Bible on the witness stand. In a sweltering, pre-air conditioning courtroom, the trial became a linchpin for a tense debate that wasn't just a small-town aberration. 'This is a broad-based culture war of which the Scopes trial is just one place lightning struck,' says James Hudnut-Beumler, professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, new state laws requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms are facing legal challenges. As the Supreme Court leans right, there is an ongoing conservative push to infuse more religion — often Christianity — into taxpayer-funded education. Advocates of religious diversity and church-state separation are countering it in capitols, courts and public squares. 'We are fighting on an almost daily basis,' says Robert Tuttle, a religion and law professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. That Tennessee jury found Scopes guilty of violating the state's Butler Act — of teaching 'any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.' A century later, the role of religion in public schools — and whether to keep it out entirely — is still being fiercely debated. Some perceive a threat to their spot in the culture While attempts to interlace America and the divine are not new, from the last half of the 20th century to today they are driven by a perceived threat among white Christians who think their dominant spot in politics and culture is being eroded by secularism or multiculturalism, Tuttle says. Other recent examples of the debate over religion in schools include adding chaplains and Bibles to classrooms, infusing designated prayer time into the school day and expanding voucher programs that can be used at religious schools. At the Supreme Court, the justices effectively stopped the first taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school and gave parents a religious exemption for LGBTQ+-related instruction. Tuttle's scholarship was used in the recent federal appeals court ruling that declared Louisiana's Ten Commandments law unconstitutional, citing a similar Kentucky law the Supreme Court ruled against in 1980. Tuttle and his co-author, Ira Lupu, assert that the principles underlying the Establishment Clause — the First Amendment's ban on the government establishing a religion — remain alive despite arguments that cite a change made in a 2022 school prayer ruling by the Supreme Court. 'We have good reasons not to concede the battlefield to the forces aimed at eliminating the idea of a secular state,' their article states. 'When they overclaim their victories, others should speak up.' The day after the court ruling, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas Ten Commandments bill that had easily passed the GOP-controlled state legislature. Lawsuits have been filed to block it and the Arkansas law that was approved earlier this year. Abbott has taken on a Ten Commandments issue before. He reiterated his support for the new law while celebrating the 20th anniversary of his 2005 Supreme Court victory that prevented efforts to tear down the Commandments monument on the grounds of the state Capitol. 'I will always defend the historical connection between the Ten Commandments and their influence on the history of Texas,' he says in a video posted on X. Texas Values, a conservative Christian law and policy nonprofit, rallied support for the Texas bill. If other ideals are shared in the classroom, the Ten Commandments should be able to be shared as well, says Mary Elizabeth Castle, director of government relations for the organization. A similar argument was made in 1922 by Scopes prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, a onetime populist firebrand who became the face of the anti-evolution movement. 'If the Bible cannot be taught, why should Christian taxpayers permit the teaching of guesses that make the Bible a lie?' Bryan wrote in The New York Times. 'A teacher might just as well write over the door of his room, 'Leave Christianity behind you, all ye who enter here.'' The arc of the religion-in-schools debate is long About 60 years earlier, advances in biblical criticism caused conservative Christians to double down on rejecting anything they believe conflicted with their interpretation of the Bible, human evolution included, says Hudnut-Beumler. He blames weaponized post-World War I rhetoric for spreading anti-evolution beliefs to legislation. He sees parallels to today. 'Whatever we're going through now,' he says, 'it's the product of people manufacturing rhetoric in a way that stokes fear.' Castle sees the 2022 school prayer decision as a step in the right direction. 'There's always just going to be that conflict where people are trying to trample on religious freedom,' she says, 'and so that's why we do the work that we do.' The American Civil Liberties Union, joined by other legal groups, is representing the families in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas that sued to block new Ten Commandments laws. A much younger ACLU, boosted by the star power of defense attorney Clarence Darrow, represented Scopes, who agreed to be a test case challenging the Butler Act and to bring attention to Dayton. Daniel Mach, who directs the ACLU program on freedom of religion and belief, sees a through line between 1925 and what he describes as a present-day assault on the separation of church and state. 'There are those who want to use the machinery of the state — and in particular, our public schools — to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else,' Mach says. 'The constitutional guarantee of church-state separation has served us as a nation quite well over the years in general. And there's simply no reason to turn back the clock now.' In 1925, the ACLU lost the Scopes case. It would be more than 40 years before the Supreme Court would overrule an anti-evolution teaching ban. But the trial, which took place from July 10-21, dealt a big hit to Bryan's reputation. He died days after it ended. Though a brief legal circus, the trial inflamed social divisions. Conservatives and fundamentalists in the Midwest and South felt mocked by those they considered liberal, East Coast elites. 'They were humiliated,' Tuttle says. 'That's internalized, and it carries through.' In the 1940s, tensions flared with a school funding case before the Supreme Court. They returned in the 1960s when the justices ruled against school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings. It was upsetting, Tuttle says, to conservative Christians who saw schools as a source of morality. 'The link you see with the Scopes case is a sense of alienation and devaluing of what civic experience means to them,' he says. Suzanne Rosenblith, an expert on religion in public education at the University at Buffalo in New York, sees the wave of court cases as primarily First Amendment tensions. 'Your argument for removing something can be seen as ensuring that Congress makes no law respecting the establishment of religion. And my wanting something included, that's my way of exercising my right to religious freedom,' she says. 'And it could be on the same issue.' A lesson to be learned from the last 100 years, Rosenblith says, is that America remains a pluralist democracy and needs to be approached as such. 'All sides are going to win some and lose some,' she says. 'But how can we treat each other, especially those with whom we disagree on these significant issues, how do we treat each other more seriously?' ___
