Ohio Lawmakers Prepare for the First Week of Lame-Duck Session

After taking a break over the summer and part of the fall for the general election, lawmakers are returning to the Ohio Statehouse to consider many different bills before the two-year session of this general assembly ends in December.

The committees and floor votes which occur after an election, known as a lame duck session, work to conclude urgent or unfinished bills that lawmakers have introduced. Once the session ends, lawmakers will either overlook or reject the bills and legislators, returning incumbents, and newly-elected officials will have to reintroduce the pieces of legislation and restart the committee process.

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Growing Body of Evidence Disputes Claims That Puberty Blockers Are Safe, Reversible

Puberty blockers are widely touted by doctors and transgender activists as a safe and fully reversible way to pause puberty for children with gender identity issues, but a growing body of evidence is challenging those claims, according to The New York Times.

The drug prevents the surge in bone density that would normally occur during puberty, and patients can see lifelong bone issues that are never resolved, according to the Monday NYT article. Medical professionals are also challenging claims that the drug is reversible, arguing instead that blocking puberty permanently cements a child’s transgender identity and puts them on a path to lifelong biomedical intervention.

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Project Veritas: Connecticut Private School Teacher Details Sexual Behavior and Appeal of Female High School Students (Explicit Content)

An English teacher and writing center director at the elite Greens Farms Academy in Westport, Connecticut, who revealed to a Project Veritas (PV) undercover reporter details about his sexual fantasies of high school girls, has reportedly been placed on leave.

Born and raised in Iran, Iman Rasti has served as director of the school’s writing center, a middle school English teacher, and a seventh grade dean at the private school in Fairfield County, where tuition for the high school grades is $51,460 per year.

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Biden Pulls Back on Pledge to Codify Roe v. Wade

President Joe Biden raised eyebrows Monday telling reporters that he expects no progress on the abortion issue in the second half of his term.

“I don’t think they can expect much of anything other than we’re going to maintain our positions,” Biden said when asked by a reporter what Congress would do on abortion following the midterms. “I’m not going to get into more questions. I shouldn’t even answer your question.”

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FCC Member: ‘TikTok Is China’s Digital Fentanyl’

Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr said that TikTok is “China’s digital fentanyl” and that the social media platform is “a very sophisticated surveillance app.”

“At the end of the day, TikTok is China’s digital fentanyl,” Carr, a Republican and one of five FCC commissioners, said Friday on Fox News.

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Nine Texas and Nebraska Cities Became ‘Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn’ on Election Day

Four Texas cities and six villages in Nebraska voted on Election Day on ballot measures that would outlaw abortion within their jurisdictions.

Of the 10 ballot measures, only one was rejected by voters, reported Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, at Live Action News.

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Marijuana Decriminalization Ballot Measures Approved in Five Ohio Cities

Activists in the state have been working to enact local cannabis reform over recent election cycles. While decriminalization did not qualify for every municipal ballot that advocates targeted for 2022, six Ohio cities voted on policy changes.

Five of the six Ohio cities approved local marijuana decriminalization ballot initiatives during the midterm election.

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Top Conservative Groups, Lawmakers Call for Delay of GOP Leadership Elections

A group of leading conservative research and political activist organizations have called on the House and Senate Republican Conferences to delay leadership elections, challenging the leaderships of Rep. McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell.

The two-paragraph letter has called for the elections to be delayed until after Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff election, between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, on December 6. Former Rep. David McIntosh of Indiana, who heads the Club for Growth and was a signatory to the letter, has said that the elections must be delayed “until we know the outcome of all the elections—specifically the Georgia runoff and the remaining 23 House races,” per a statement on the group’s website.

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Ohio Board of Education Votes in Favor of Resolution to Reject LGBTQ Additions to Title IX

The Ohio Board of Education’s executive committee voted in favor Monday to move forward with a resolution that could reject proposed changes to broaden the definition of sex-based harassment and discrimination to include gender identity and sexual orientation for LGBTQ students.

The committee voted 5-2 to move ahead with the amendment. With the executive committee’s vote, the entire Ohio Board of Education will debate and potentially voted on the resolution on Tuesday.

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Death-Penalty Opponents Want Abolition Bills Passed Before Ohio Session Ends

Death-penalty abolitionists in Ohio this week are organizing a campaign to persuade lawmakers to end capital punishment in their State. 

The nonprofit No Death Penalty Ohio is hosting letter-writing parties in various cities throughout the week in support of a state House bill and an identical state Senate bill to ban executions. While Republicans often support capital punishment and control both legislative chambers, the bills have some GOP support. State Senator Stephen Huffman (R-Dayton) is cosponsoring the Senate measure alongside Senator Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) while Representative Jean Schmidt (R-Loveland) is spearheading the House legislation with Representative Adam Miller (D-Columbus). 

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Commentary: The Systemic Racism of the Teachers Unions

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

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Google Agrees to Nearly $400 Million Settlement with 40 States 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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Commentary: The Real Trump Card in 2024

After a disappointing outcome for the U.S. Congressional midterm elections – Democrats will retain the U.S. Senate  without any net loss of seats, and Republicans poised to retake the U.S. House by a slim majority – political attention is already shifting to the race for 2024 and the White House against President Joe Biden, and to whether former President Donald Trump might run again for the nation’s highest office.

Midterms usually favor the opposition party, with a 90 percent likelihood of picking up seats in the U.S. House from 1906 to 2018, which did happen. The question now is how many seats and if it was definitively enough to win the race. As of this writing, Republicans have 212 seats to Democrats’ 205 seats in races that have been called, and Republicans have leads in nine races not yet called, just barely enough to get a majority.

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Texas AG Paxton Investigating Zuckerberg-Funded Nonprofit for Alleged Partisan Electioneering Efforts in 2020

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a Civil Investigative Demand to the Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) as part of an investigation his office launched to determine whether it “solicited donations under the pretext of protecting voters from Covid-19 while instead using the funds to support partisan electioneering efforts or election oversight roles normally left to state and local officials.”

CTCL, a self-described non-partisan nonprofit organization, according to the bios posted on its own website and other records, “is led by individuals with distinctly partisan backgrounds,” the AG’s office says. CTCL’s founder and executive director, for example, Tiana Epps-Johnson, was among a group of inaugural Obama Foundation Fellows who previously was the Election Administration director for a progressive grassroots organization, the New Organizing Institute. She also worked on the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

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Supreme Court Denies Arizona GOP Chair’s Bid to Block Jan. 6 Panel from Reviewing Phone Records

The Supreme Court on Monday denied Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward’s request to keep her cellphone records from the Democrat-led House Jan. 6 panel.

The court vacated the temporary order that Justice Elana Kagan put in place, pausing the phone records from being shared while the court weighed Ward’s request.

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NYC to Spend More than Half a Billion Dollars Supporting Illegal Migrants

New York City is expected to spend nearly $600 million to support illegal migrants over the course of one year, according to a report released Sunday by the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO).

The city is expected to spend close to $580 million on shelter accommodations, public school, health care, legal assistance and other forms of aid, according to the IBO report. Approximately 23,000 illegal migrants have arrived in the Big Apple since April.

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McCarthy May Not Have the Votes to Become Speaker

In the aftermath of the disappointing 2022 midterm election results, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives have signaled that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) may not have the support he needs to become the next Speaker of the House.

As reported by The Hill, some Republicans have asked that the party’s closed-door leadership election be delayed while the results of the outstanding races come in.

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Top Border Official Resigns Under Pressure After Historic Bad Year of Illegal Migration

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus resigned Saturday night under pressure from President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, vacating a crucial post just two months before a new Congress is seated.

The White House announced the departure just days after Magnus was ordered to resign or be fired. He initially resisted but bent on Saturday.

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