Mar 17
2025
The coming MAGA assault on voting rights
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House Republicans have introduced a bill that would upend voting rights. Among those at risk for disenfranchisement are 69 million married women who have taken their husband’s last name.
Reports the Center for American Progress: “Leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives has declared that passing the legislation is one of their top priorities for the 119th Congress.”
Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.
Because documentation would need to be presented in person, the legislation would, in practice, prevent Americans from being able to register to vote by mail; end voter registration drives nationwide; and eliminate online voter registration overnight—a service 42 states rely on.
Western New Yorkers pay high electricity bills. Data centers, like the one in Lockport and the one planned for the STAMP industrial park in Genesee County, are energy hogs that drive up the electricity bills for the rest of us.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and leaders of the state Legislators are on board for an additional $4.4 billion in corporate subsidies, which Reinvent Albany calls an “unconscionable waste of public funds.”
Across the United States, the average state legislator is paid $44,320. Here in New York, they make $142,000.
New York established conviction integrity units to deal with misconduct by prosecutors that led to the conviction of innocent people. District attorneys rarely admit to abuses, however. New York Focus reports on one instance, in Erie County, where the system worked, except that the wrongfully convicted had to drop her claim of prosecutorial misconduct in order for the DA to agree to exonerate her.
Trump’s hostility towards Canada is already having an economic impact on border communities, including Western New York. Cross-border travel has declined, along with sales tax collections for Erie County, because fewer Canadians are coming here to shop.
Freedom of speech in the Trump era:
- The administration has forbidden, or in some cases discouraged, the use of some 200 words in government documents and websites. Words like pollution, injustice, tribal and Black. Take a look for yourself.
- The mayor of Miami Beach wants to evict a theater owner who showed No Other Land, the documentary that won an Academy Award this year because it casts Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands in a bad light.
- ICE agents seized Mahmoud Khalil because he exercised his First Amendment rights to protest the Israeli war on Gaza. The Marshall Project reports he’s not the only immigrant with legal protections who has been seized. The Intercept lays out what’s at stake. It’s nothing less than our freedom of speech.
The Trump administration has said it will end federal funding to Columbia University unless it cedes control over its international studies department and changes other policies, including those involving admissions, to the government’s liking. Trump says he wants to target other universities, as well.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomTrump’s EPA, under former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, has made a frontal assault on regulations adopted under previous administrations to protect the public from pollution and climate change.
There’s another Trump tracking website to follow, Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, which sets the record straight on all the nonsense Elon Musk is spewing about government waste. Speaking of Musk nonsense, last week he retweeted a post that declared Hitler, Stalin and Mao were not responsible for the deaths of millions that occured during their dictatorial reins. You know, like the Holocaust.
Joey Bosa, who just signed with the Bills, is apparently a Trumper. His brother Nick, a 49er, definitely is. Just sayin’. The Bosas aren’t the only ones, as several Bills golfed with the president last month.
