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  • Alabama bills on lottery, tax exemptions, absentee voting on table for 2nd half of session

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    Alabama lawmakers start the second half of the 2024 legislative session this week with major issues pending, including a plan for a lottery and more state-regulated gambling.

    The Republican-led Legislature has passed Gov. Kay Ivey’s top priority, a school choice bill that will allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private school or home school.

    Those issues and some others, including new restrictions on absentee voting assistance and efforts to eliminate state-funded programs that promote diversity, were long expected during the first half of the session, but lawmakers had to pivot quickly on a new topic after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling caused in vitro fertilization clinics to pause their operations because of legal liabilities. The Legislature passed a bill intended to allow clinics to resume services to families but leaving important legal questions about IVF unresolved.

    Since the session started Feb. 6, the Legislature has used 15 its maximum 30 meeting days. The session can last up to 15 weeks, until May.

    Gambling

    On Feb. 15, the House passed a proposed amendment to the state constitution to allow voters to decide whether to authorize a lottery, casinos, and legal sports betting.

    The Senate followed three weeks later by passing a scaled-back plan, with the lottery but no full-scale casinos or sports betting. Instead of casinos, the Senate plan would allow pari-mutuel betting on dog racing and horse racing via simulcast at the state’s four former greyhound tracks and three other locations. The seven facilities could also offer gambling on computerized machines called historical horse racing that operate similar to slot machines.

    Both the House and Senate plans call for compact negotiations with the Poarch Band of Creek Indians to allow the tribe to offer full-scale casino games at its facilities on tribal land in Atmore, Wetumpka, and Montgomery, which now offer electronic bingo. The House plan calls for a compact to include a fourth casino for the Poarch Creeks in northeast Alabama.

    Both versions would set up a new gambling commission with a law enforcement arm to regulate and limit gambling.

    The question now is whether the House and Senate can reach a compromise that will muster the required three-fifths vote for a constitutional amendment to pass the Legislature and go on the ballot for voters.

    No statewide gambling proposal has gone on the ballot since 1999, when voters rejected Gov. Don Siegelman’s lottery plan.

    Prescription drugs

    HB238by Rep. Phillip Rigsby, R-Huntsville, which would add a $10.64 fee to prescriptions, among other provisions, has drawn opposition from health insurers and advocates who say it would be a tax on customers.

    But pharmacists say the fee would keep rural, independent pharmacies from folding and save Alabamians money in the long run. They say pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), third-party companies that negotiate prescription costs with insurance companies, often reimburse pharmacies less than it costs to fill a prescription. A health care attorney who helped write the bill said PBMs should pay the new fee. But nothing in the current bill appears to protect the fee from being passed along to customers.

    The bill won approval in a House committee, putting it position for a vote by the full House.

    Absentee voting

    SB1 by Sen. Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, would make certain forms of assistance with absentee voting a crime.

    Republicans said the restrictions are needed to prevent “ballot harvesting,” the mass distribution and collection of absentee ballot applications and ballots to influence election outcomes.

    The GOP majority in the State House has advanced the bill on party line votes, moving it through the Senate and then the House, which amended it.

    When lawmakers return Tuesday, the Senate could give the bill final passage or send it to a conference committee. Either way, it looks like its on its way to becoming law.


    Also on the checklist for the Legislature as it returns to work is a bill looking for final Senate approval that would prohibit government institutions, including state agencies, public schools and colleges, from funding a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) office and from sponsoring DEI programs.


    See more here: Alabama bills on lottery, tax exemptions, absentee voting on table for 2nd half of session - al.com

  • Prichard mayor vows to stop bills removing University of Mobile from city

    Prichard Mayor Jimmie Gardner said Monday the city will fight “tooth and nail” to kill a pair of Mobile lawmakers’ bills that would de-annex the University of Mobile from Prichard.

    Joined by Rep. Napoleon Bracy, D-Prichard, Gardner told reporters at a press conference that Prichard will not stand by and allow the Alabama Legislature to remove the private Christian university from the city it called home more than six decades ago.


    Read the rest of the story here: Prichard mayor vows to stop bills removing University of Mobile from city | News | lagniappemobile.com

  • Supreme Court Voices Skepticism Over Social-Media Censorship Claims Against Government

    The Supreme Court appeared doubtful Monday of claims that the government violated the Constitution when it urged social-media platforms to remove what the feds labeled as misleading posts about Covid-19 and other public safety risks, absent some threat of official retribution. 

    The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with several individuals who complained that online platforms suppressed their antivaccine views at the government’s request, filed the First Amendment suit in 2022. Lower courts have largely sided with the plaintiffs, but the high court during oral arguments on Monday voiced more sympathy with the Biden administration’s defense.

    Liberal justices questioned whether any plaintiffs suffered harms that gave them a right to sue. And justices across the spectrum expressed skepticism that the government’s interactions with the platforms, even if heated, amounted to official restraint. 

    For one, said Chief Justice John Roberts, “the government is not monolithic.” Different individuals, agencies and branches of government can have different views, he said, and the media has contacts with a variety of official sources.

    But while the government claims a right to the bully pulpit, lower courts have deemed its practices censorship, finding that the sometimes emphatic efforts of White House, FBI and public health officials to warn platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to take down certain posts violated free-speech rights. 

    The government’s appeal is one of a raft of Supreme Court cases involving online speech this year. In February, the justices heard tech industry challenges to Florida and Texas laws restricting content-moderation practices, or the platforms’ power to decide which posts stay up.

    Last year, a federal district judge in Monroe, La., likened government efforts to an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth” and issued an order broadly barring officials from communicating with social-media companies about online content. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans, later narrowed the injunction but agreed that the federal government likely overstepped by pushing private companies too hard to suppress disfavored speech.

    A decision on the case brought by Missouri and Louisiana is expected by July.

    READ MORE: Supreme Court Voices Skepticism Over Social-Media Censorship Claims Against Government - WSJ

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