During his term and a half in office, Robert Bentley, a doctor, refused to expand Medicaid in Alabama. Now that he’s out of politics, he says that was a mistake and has pleaded with the Alabama Legislature and his successor to change their minds.

However, Bentley’s Ghost of Governors Past routine did little to persuade Kay Ivey.

“On the question of expanding Medicaid, she remains concerned for how the state would pay for it long-term,” Ivey’s spokeswoman said when my AL.com colleague Patrick Darrington asked if now she would change her mind.

Ivey’s been saying that since Bentley turned in his notice. You’d think in the eight years she’s been in office, she might have found a way. After all, she found more than $1 billion for a new prison, and she directed millions to a waterpark in Montgomery.

When veteran U.S. diplomat Kurt Campbell traveled to the Solomon Islands to counter Beijing’s influence in the South Pacific country, he quickly saw just how far China would go to spread its message.

The Biden administration’s Asia czar woke up one morning in 2022 to a long article in the local press about the U.S. running chemical and biological labs in Ukraine, a claim that Washington calls an outright lie. Started by Russia, the false and incendiary claim was vigorously amplified by China’s vast overseas propaganda apparatus.

...Two years later, the claim still reverberates online, demonstrating China’s sprawling effort to reshape global perceptions. The campaign, costing many billions per year, is becoming ever more sophisticated thanks to artificial intelligence. China’s operations have caught the attention of intelligence analysts and policymakers in Washington, who vow to combat any actions that could influence the November election or undermine American interests.

The key tactic: networks of websites purporting to be legitimate news outlets, delivering pro-China coverage that often parallels official statements and positions from Beijing.

On Sept. 28, 2024, the district court struck down a provision of the law that makes it a felony to assist voters with their absentee ballots as unconstitutional. Now, pro-voting and civil rights groups in Texas cannot be criminally charged for their vote by mail assistance efforts.

The Justice Department announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against the State of Alabama and the Alabama Secretary of State to challenge a systematic State program aimed at removing voters from its election rolls too close to the Nov. 5 general election, in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

“The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “As Election Day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law. Officials across the country should take heed of the National Voter Registration Act’s clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election. The Quiet Period Provision of federal law exists to prevent eligible voters from being removed from the rolls as a result of last-minute, error-prone efforts. The Justice Department will continue to use all the tools it has available to ensure that the voting rights of every eligible voter are protected.”

Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists by no later than 90 days before federal elections. The Quiet Period Provision applies to certain systematic programs carried out by states that are aimed at striking names from voter registration lists based on a perceived failure to meet initial eligibility requirements — including citizenship — at the time of registration. The Quiet Period is an important protection for voters, because systematic removal programs may be error-ridden, cause voter confusion and remove eligible voters days or weeks before Election Day who may be unable to correct the state’s errors in time to vote or may be dissuaded from voting at all. States may remove names from official lists of voters in various ways and for various reasons, but they may not carry-on this kind of systematic removal program so close to a federal election.

On Aug. 13, the Secretary of State announced the launch of a “process to remove noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama.” This was 84 days before the Nov. 5 general election. The Justice Department’s review found that both native-born and naturalized U.S. citizens have received letters stating that their voter record has been made inactive and that they have been placed on a path for removal from Alabama’s statewide voter registration list. The letter directs recipients who are in fact U.S. citizens and eligible to vote to complete and submit an attached State of Alabama Voter Registration Form. In turn, that form instructs that people may not register to vote in the 14 days before an election. This systematic voter removal program, which the State is conducting within 90 days of the upcoming federal election, violates the Quiet Period Provision.

In 2020, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) was sued by several of its employees. USAGM oversees U.S.-funded international broadcasting outlets, including the Voice of America (VOA). The plaintiffs, five USAGM senior managers and VOA’s program director, alleged that USAGM CEO Michael Pack, who was appointed by President Trump in 2020, “[had] sought to interfere in the newsrooms of the USAGM networks, in violation of their eighty-year practice … of journalistic autonomy.” Plaintiffs accused Pack of “seek[ing] to quash … coverage that is insufficiently supportive of President Trump,” as well as “any coverage, unless unfavorable, of President Trump’s political opponents.” These actions, the plaintiffs charged, ran afoul not only of statutory commands but of the First Amendment. USAGM responded that VOA and the other networks speak on behalf of the government and lack any First Amendment rights in so doing. In taking the actions that he did, Pack was simply “exercis[ing] his [own] authority to ‘direct and supervise’ and to ‘assess the quality, effectiveness, and professional integrity of’ USAGM” reporting.

The First Amendment arguments in this case, Turner v. USAGM, reflect a broader tension in the case law concerning the government’s role as “knowledge producer”—that is, its role in producing or conveying information or otherwise fostering knowledge. From the plaintiffs’ perspective, the government ties itself to a mast when it purports to produce journalism. That mast is comprised of the norms of professional journalism, including a strict separation between an operation’s business or political commitments and its journalistic endeavors. This argument is consistent with several strands of Supreme Court case law. For example, the Court repeatedly has held that, although government is not required to subsidize private speech or create speech forums, once it does so, it may not impose restrictions that are based on viewpoint or that are incompatible with the very nature of the speech subsidized or forum created. The defendants, on the other hand, invoked aspects of free speech doctrine that emphasize the government’s broad discretion to control the speech that it produces. This includes the Garcetti rule—stemming from the 2006 Supreme Court case of Garcetti v. Ceballos—whereby government employees generally are unprotected by the First Amendment for their work product speech, meaning speech that they produce as part of their job duties. Garcetti itself arguably is in tension with the Court’s acknowledgment elsewhere to the effect that “speech by public employees on subject matter related to their employment holds special value precisely because those employees gain knowledge of matters of public concern through their employment.”

Similar First Amendment questions are raised by battles currently raging over state legislative proposals to curtail discussions of race and racism in another site of knowledge production: public colleges and universities. The laws’ opponents argue that they are antithetical to the very nature of higher education. They suggest that states tie themselves to the mast of academic freedom norms—including rules of faculty and intradisciplinary governance on matters of scholarship and pedagogy—when they create colleges and universities. The laws’ proponents, on the other hand, emphasize the “public” in public education, suggesting that schools effectively belong to the public, are funded partly by their tax dollars, and that members of the public, through their representatives, must have a say in what is taught and studied at the schools.

...In this essay, I explore the nature and value of government’s knowledge producers in our constitutional order and the legal, cultural, and political threats that they face. In Part I, I explain that public knowledge producers are an essential part of a democratic society, and that their worth depends partly on their having some insulation from political pressure. In Part II, I use the example of international broadcasting, with an emphasis on the USAGM case to argue that such insulation is called for not only as a matter of good policy but as a matter of First Amendment theory. I acknowledge, however, that First Amendment doctrine is more mixed; one can find support for this position, as well as contrary indicia in judicial precedent. I also make the case for more robust doctrinal support to insulate public knowledge producers going forward. In Part III, I explore the broader legal, political, and social contexts. With respect to law, I observe that legislation plays at least as crucial a role in protecting knowledge producers as does the First Amendment. Yet such legislation increasingly is under threat by the Supreme Court’s growing allegiance to unitary executive theory. I also explore parallels between judicial reasoning in some of the First Amendment case law, unitary executive theory, and cultural and political movements against knowledge producers. Finally, I apply some of my earlier analyses to one last set of examples: ongoing legal and political controversies concerning the topic of race in public higher education.

For three years during the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government gave Texas and other states billions of dollars in exchange for their promise not to exacerbate the public health crisis by kicking people off Medicaid.

When that agreement ended last year, Texas moved swiftly, kicking off more people faster than any other state.

Officials acknowledged some errors after they stripped Medicaid coverage from more than 2 million people, most of them children. Some people who believe they were wrongly removed are desperately trying to get back on the state and federally funded health care program, adding to a backlog of more than 200,000 applicants. A ProPublica and Texas Tribune review of dozens of public and private records, including memos, emails and legislative hearings, clearly shows that those and other mistakes were preventable and foreshadowed in persistent warnings from the federal government, whistleblowers and advocates.

Texas’ zealousness in removing people from Medicaid was a choice that contradicted federal guidelines from the start. That decision was devastating in Texas, which already insures a smaller percentage of its population through Medicaid than almost any other state and is one of 10 that never expanded eligibility after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

The hour-long televised debate is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. [Central] and will air on KHOU in Houston and KENS5 in San Antonio.

The extraordinary events have left many voters with whiplash. Republicans have been even more vocal with their support of Trump after the assassination attempt. Democrats have rallied around Harris who has breathed life back into her party’s hopes after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June.

....According to August polling, Trump leads among Texas’ independent voters by 2 percentage points, a narrowing among the key bloc since his 24-point leg up over Biden in June. Harris is gaining ground among women who are independent voters, who prefer her over Trump by a 6-point margin.

In Texas, voters don’t have to officially declare a party to cast a ballot. They can vote in whatever primary they choose. The Texas Tribune spoke to some of those voters who identify as independents about the state of the race, who they expect to vote for and what issues are most pressing to them.

Here are a few of their stories.