Tag Archive for: Attorneys General

17 State AGs Refuse to Allow Biden to Insert Abortion into Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

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As the Biden campaign continues to push abortion as its primary focus ahead of the November elections, the administration made yet another move to ensure that abortion remains front and center by moving to insert the issue into the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act earlier this month — a move that earned a strong rebuke and lawsuit from a group of 17 Republican state attorneys general.

In mid-April, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that it was controversially adding abortion into its draft rules for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, allowing workers to “ask for time off to obtain an abortion and recover from the procedure.” But critics say the legislation was never intended to address abortion and was merely meant to give pregnant women commonsense accommodations in the workplace, including time off for medical appointments, options to sit down and stand up while working, exemptions from heavy lifting, time off for postpartum recovery, bathroom, breastfeeding, food, and water breaks, considerations for morning sickness, and more.

In response, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit last week against the EEOC, claiming that the abortion rule is unconstitutional, among other concerns. “[U]nelected commissioners at the EEOC seek to hijack these new protections for pregnancies by requiring employers to accommodate elective abortions — something the Act clearly did not authorize,” said the AG coalition in a statement. “The EEOC’s rule constitutes an unconstitutional federal overreach that infringes on existing state laws and exceeds the scope of the agency’s authority.”

State attorneys general who signed onto the lawsuit include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

Last week, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) joined “Washington Watch” to discuss why he joined the lawsuit against the EEOC’s actions.

The original text “is a wonderful, bipartisan supported [bill] — and we don’t say that very often with things that come out of Washington — to make sure that we accommodate pregnant women in the workplace because we want to have healthy pregnancies and children that come to birth,” he noted. “[L]et’s make sure that we fill a gap in federal law to ensure that pregnant women have those accommodations. … And now, the EEOC that was tasked by Congress to come out with some very specific aspects of what that looks like, now want to make sure that states like Alabama would have to violate state law to somehow or another accommodate a woman who wants an abortion. Alabama is not going to stand for that, along with the [16] other states that are a part of this coalition.”

Marshall went on to point out that even pro-abortion Democrats explicitly stated that the bill had nothing to do with abortion when it was passed, which still hasn’t stopped the Biden administration’s actions.

“One of the Democratic sponsors of this bill made it very clear on the floor of the Senate that this bill had nothing to do with abortion [and] assured his colleagues on both sides of the aisle the intention of this bill,” he observed. “And yet, despite its clear language, what we see is [the] Biden administration co-opting a valid, appropriate law to be able to enforce this pro-abortion agenda. I know we shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s one of the reasons why I’m so proud of my colleagues across the country on many pro-life issues, because we’re standing in that gap that we need in this country to make sure that we can push back on an administration that’s just simply gone too far.”

Marshall further made it clear that state attorneys general have a particularly important role to play in pushing back against the Biden administration’s tendency to try unconstitutional tactics to get its policies into place.

“This is an unelected, unaccountable group,” he underscored. “… [W]e’ve seen this on multiple fronts with this administration, whether it be attacking pro-life states like Alabama. We’ve seen it with this radical gender ideology that’s being pushed through multiple federal programs. It’s why, uniquely, attorneys general in this important time in our nation have the opportunity to be able to hold [the administration] in check.”

The Alabama attorney general additionally pointed to how state law will have strong legal footing against the measure in court.

“[W]hat we see also with this particular rule is an effort to impose a federal policy of this administration on a state like Alabama, whose law is abundantly clear that we are a pro-life state in our Constitution,” Marshall explained. “… [T]o somehow or another use an unaccountable body like the EEOC to circumvent valid state law and constitutional provisions, we think we’re on solid legal footing to be able to push back and to win. … The key right now is attempting to get that initial injunctive relief, to be able to hold this rule in abeyance before its full implementation. But we feel very confident about the work of our colleagues, grateful for the efforts of Tennessee and Oklahoma to lead this charge, but do feel strongly that we’re going to prevail.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITOR NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Former AG Bill Barr: ‘Biden Administration Is Greater Threat to Democracy’ than Trump

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A one-time Trump ally is pointing out that the former president is not a threat to America, but the radical agenda of the Democratic Party is. In a Saturday interview, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr explained that he will be voting for his old boss Donald Trump in November, despite his criticisms of the former president.

“I’m not happy with the choice,” Barr said, referring to a Trump-Biden matchup. “But it is a choice, and at the end of the day we have to select between two individuals. … I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think will do the least harm to the country and … that’s clearly Trump and a Republican administration.”

“I think getting control over the border, stopping the lawlessness in our cities, building up the strength of the United States in an ever-more-dangerous world … these are critical things that have to be done,” Barr opined. “And we’ll get them done under a Trump administration.” The former AG added, “At the same time, I think the Biden administration is, in fact, the greater threat to democracy. I think they have a totalitarian temper, they have bought into the progressive movement, and they’re trying to squelch opposition and freedom of speech.”

Upon leaving the Trump administration, Barr became a critic of the former president, calling him “a consummate narcissist” and a “fundamentally flawed person,” largely in relation to Trump’s handling of the 2020 election results. Referring to his prior criticisms of Trump, Barr said Saturday, “I don’t think Biden should be anywhere near the Oval Office, that’s the fact.” He later said, “At the end of the day, you have to remember, serving in his administration, I was fine with his policies. I think his policies were good policies. My problems came with his behavior which I found very troubling after the election.” Barr added:

“And I think the idea that he’s going to be an autocrat and take over power like some right-wing dictator is not the threat facing our country. The threat to our country is from the far-left and the drift that’s been occurring toward really a socialistic system and one that brooks no opposition, that cancels people, that has only one viewpoint taught in colleges, that tries to push parents out of the picture when it comes to the education of their children. It is a heavy-handed bunch of thugs, in my opinion, and that’s where the threat is.”

Barr made similar, though less certain, comments in February. Addressing the Forum Club of Southwest Florida, Barr said, “Voting for Trump is playing Russian roulette with the country. Voting for Biden is outright national suicide.” Ex-Republican Representative Liz Cheney immediately lashed out at Barr, saying that the former AG was “absolutely wrong” in his assessment. Failing to address incumbent president Joe Biden’s growing unpopularity and his administration’s abuses of power, she quipped, “So electing Donald Trump’s not Russian roulette — electing Donald Trump would mean putting in power a man who’s committed to unraveling our constitutional framework. So Bill Barr is just wrong on that.” Cheney also added that, this November, “the most important thing is to defeat Donald Trump, and I’ll do whatever it takes to do that.”

Barr reiterated this position in an earlier interview last week. Barr posited, “I’ve said all along, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country. And in my mind, I will vote the Republican ticket. I will support the Republican ticket.” He continued, “I think the real danger to the country — the real danger to democracy, as I say — is the progressive agenda. Trump may be playing Russian roulette, but a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion.”

Barr served as attorney general during the last year of Trump’s presidency. Previously, he had served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Legal Experts Sound Alarm on Biden Admin’s Pattern of ‘Unlawful Overreach’

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In the wake of the Biden administration’s recent efforts to use federal agencies to regulate on matters outside their jurisdiction, legal experts are expressing dismay at what they say is a pattern of unconstitutional overreach by Biden’s government in order to achieve political ends.

Last year, the Biden administration moved forward with a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rule that threatened to pull federal funding for school lunches from schools that did not adopt the administration’s new interpretation of Title IX, which specified that the prohibition on discrimination based on sex must “include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.” Observers noted that a program designed to help feed low-income children was now being entangled with a policy rooted in highly controversial gender ideology.

In December, a group of 21 Republican state attorneys general filed suit against the Biden administration after it finalized another federal rule through the Department of Transportation (USDOT) which required states to create benchmarks for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R) called the rule “another unlawful and overreaching regulation,” and the attorneys general pointed out that Congress had not given the USDOT authority to regulate emissions or to direct how states must roll out their policy decisions.

On Thursday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) pointed to numerous further examples of the Biden administration’s overreach on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.”

“One of the things people ought to pay attention to is the phrase ‘whole of government,’” he noted. “You’re starting to hear this from bureaucrats and politicians in Washington over and over again. That should be a red flag for you when you hear ‘whole of government.’ … It’s kind of a code that they’re going to use [in order for] agencies that have absolutely nothing to do with the thing at hand to try to accomplish something that they don’t have authority to do.”

“For example,” Yost continued, “the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] is there to regulate the stock markets and stock trading and commodities trading. They publish rules, and it’s a regulatory agency — pretty dry and dusty. Well, under the whole of government approach, the Biden administration is using them to try to enter into fossil fuels and energy policy and climate change. What does the SEC and stock markets have to do with whether we drive electric cars or not or fossil fuel development?”

Yost further pointed to a November 2021 rule the Biden administration attempted to implement through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “They tried to get OSHA involved in the COVID wars. OSHA is all about [having] guardrails around the catwalks. Let’s make sure that there’s safety features around the vats of acid so that workers don’t get hurt. They tried to use that department and that authority to make sure that every employee of a company that had more than 100 employees, which was over 80 million Americans, had to have the vaccine … if they wanted the government’s permission to work. The Supreme Court knocked it down … but it’s that whole of government mindset where they try to take every bureaucratic alphabet soup agency to do something that [it] was never designed to do.”

Yost went on to underscore the importance of the American court system in maintaining the rule of law going forward. “We have to rely on the genius of the Founders, the separation of powers. The courts and Congress both have the ability to rein in an overreaching executive. Congress hasn’t been too interested in doing that of late. But fortunately, in a lot of places, courts are doing their jobs as attorneys general are going to court and challenging these things.”

“We have to realize we’re in a battle,” Yost concluded. “This is not a civil debate. … These folks don’t care about the norms. They don’t care about the rules or the rule of law. We are in a pitched battle, and we need everybody to help.”

Perkins concurred. “We’ve got to be informed. We’ve got to be voting. We’ve got to be engaged, making sure that we have those that respect the rule of law [in office] because our system doesn’t work without that.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Meta Is ‘Manipulating Platforms to Make Kids More Addicted’: State AG

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In the wake of strong evidence pointing to the link between the declining mental health of young people and the rise of addictive social media sites, 41 state attorneys general have filed suit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for manipulative business practices that they say intentionally target kids in order to ensnare them in social media addiction.

In October, 41 states and the District of Columbia filed litigation against Meta as reports of record high levels of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and suicide, continue to surface. Studies have shown that American teenagers have experienced a significant rise in depression over the last two decades, as the share of teens experiencing major depressive episodes steadily rose from 7.9% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2018. Since then, the persistent increase has continued unabated. In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three out of five teenage girls felt depression and one in three had seriously considered suicide in 2021.

As psychologists such as Jean Twenge have observed, the rapid increase in youth mental health issues has dovetailed almost exactly with the ubiquitous rise of smartphones and social media apps. Twenge’s most recent book “Generations” details how Generation Z’s skyrocketing use of social media directly correlates with less time spent in person with friends, less sleep, and increased loneliness.

The issue has become so alarming to health officials that in May, the U.S. Surgeon General released an unprecedented advisory warning that social media use poses a “profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

As a result, public officials have decided that studies and advisories are not enough — they believe that the architects of social media themselves must claim some amount of responsibility for the crisis. On Tuesday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss the litigation he has filed against Meta.

“We’ve exposed the manipulative practices of the Meta platform that designed features in order to make kids addicted,” he contended. “And lo and behold, screen time is bad for kids. And I think one of the problems here is that Meta has hidden their head in the sand and refused to obtain data or scientific studies to measure the negative harmful impacts on kids, and deprived the public of access to that information. … [T]hey were manipulating their platform[s] to make kids more addicted, [and] they were doing it to obtain personal information to maximize their profits. And it’s putting kids at risk.”

Bailey went on to argue that Meta’s actions specifically violated his state’s consumer protection laws.

“The mental and emotional impact of the addictive features of Big Tech social media platforms, specifically Meta in this instance, have been immediately impactful on children in a harmful way, and it violates the consumer protection laws of the state of Missouri,” he asserted. “[T]he platform is depriving parents of access to information necessary upon which to make good decisions about the health and safety of their children when they’re there, fraudulently attempting to make the kids addicted to the platform that violates the law, and we’re going to hold them accountable.”

Bailey further observed that the litigation showcases a rare example of bipartisanship, in which a coalition of 41 Republican and Democrat state AGs are coming together to put pressure on Meta for allegedly harming the mental health of children.

“[C]hild safety should be a bipartisan issue,” he underscored. “I’m proud to have joined with like-minded colleagues in other states that want to put the safety of children first and hold wrongdoers in the Big Tech social media world accountable. And certainly we’ve seen a repeated pattern of behavior from Meta, not only to abuse children in this context and to deprive the public of access to information, but to violate our constitutional rights to free speech by acquiescing to government censorship demands. … [T]his is a full court press, all hands on deck approach to make sure we’re holding this monolithic monopoly accountable.”

The Missouri attorney general also highlighted specific goals that the state litigation seeks, including monetary compensation for victims. “We … think there should be some monetary compensation for the victims,” he maintained. “We’ve got to build a fund to study this problem, figure out how bad it is, the negative emotional and mental impacts on kids, and make sure that they’re treated and taken care of in the aftermath of this fraudulent behavior.”

Bailey concluded by pointing out the parallels in the social media case with the evidence that was uncovered in the 1990s of tobacco companies attempting to hide evidence of the addictive nature of their products. “I think history will look back on this moment in time and celebrate that we took a stand to protect children against this pernicious behavior very quickly.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.