states taking action

Beshear said that letters will start going out to the first 46,000 Kentuckians who will have more than $100 million in medical debt erased. He said that more than 130,000 would eventually have their debts wiped out. People cannot sign up — they will receive a letter if their debt is eligible for erasure.

“We purchase medical debt for a fraction of what is owed and erase it based on the person's income or how much they owe relative to what they earn,” said Courtney Werpy Story, vice president of government initiatives with Undue Medical Debt. “There is no application, there is no paperwork, there are no hoops to jump through. A letter arrives telling them that some or all of their medical debt is gone.”

That bill was vetoed and never became law, but I was able to pass a law last year that drew from it to create an early warning system for AI safety by requiring companies to disclose their safety plans and dangerous AI incidents. That law has been replicated in 3 states.

Time and again, the work we do here in California becomes the blueprint for the nation. 

And while I’m proud of the work we’ve done, there is so much left to do to protect the public from AI risks. AI is getting more powerful by the day, and we need to act quickly to get out ahead of its risks.

Whether at the state or federal level, we need strong safety standards for AI development backed by severe penalties for companies who break the rules. We need independent regulators to enforce those standards and update them as the technology evolves. We need kill switches. And we need to to back these laws up with real teeth.

I will keep fighting to make sure that our future is written by you and me, not by some pale AI imitation.

As always, please do not hesitate to reach out to my office with anything you may need. We are here to help. You can contact my office at (415) 557-1300 or through my office website.


Sincerely and in solidarity,

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This week, New Jersey ordered the operator of one of the East Coast’s largest planned data centers to pay a $1.1 million fine for secretly installing and operating gas generators in violation of the state’s Air Pollution Control Act.

DataOne got hit with the fine after an investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News in August shared thermal drone footage showing that 45 of the 62 gas generators were operating. None of the generators had permits required for generators with 37-kilowatt capacity or higher, despite running at 1,982-kw capacities more than 50 times higher than the state limit.

“Under state ownership, children and families will experience this remarkable property together at a price point in line with what our Maryland state park visitors can afford,” said Angela Crenshaw, director of the Maryland Park Service, during an opening event for the state park on Saturday. “That represents a meaningful shift from a private past.”

“To be clear, gender-affirming care remains legal in Maine and will remain accessible to all patients at Maine Family Planning’s 18 clinics,” said Olivia Penngington, associate vice president of public affairs for the state’s largest reproductive healthcare provider.

“We will do everything in our power to provide this lifesaving care across the state and we will never turn patients away for their inability to pay or their lack of insurance coverage.”

“Want a success story? In July, we recorded the 10,000th successful crossing on our I-90 Snoqualmie Pass wildlife overcrossing,” WSDOT shared in a social media post. “Between that overcrossing and our 11 undercrossings on Snoqualmie Pass, we’ve seen nearly 40,000 crossings since 2014.”

That means trail cameras picked up at least 10,000 instances of an animal using the wildlife corridor to cross the interstate safely.

“Between 2019-2023, we removed 39,258 carcasses from state highways,” WSDOT added on social media. “In the stretch of I-90 Snoqualmie Pass where the overcrossing and undercrossings exist… that number has shrunk to nearly zero.”

“Wildlife crossings also carry an economic benefit. On average, a deer collision carries an economic cost of around $15,000. For elk, that figure jumps to $54,000. Fewer collisions can save the state hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.”

Agrivoltaics places panels above or among crops and grazing land rather than taking the field out of production. That distinction is the whole point of the program. New Jersey is dense and its farmland is under development pressure, so a solar buildout that competes with agriculture for acreage runs into a hard political limit. Dual-use is the attempt to route around that limit by using the same acre twice.

Interest ran well ahead of the award. The first solicitation drew 33 preliminary proposals totaling roughly 140 MW, against the 52.06 MW the board actually approved. Projects must sit on unpreserved farmland already in active agricultural or horticultural use. Eligible teams must include a landowner, a farmer and a solar operator, and the farmer has to participate meaningfully in planning and operation rather than simply leasing the ground.

But a staggering 44 states have argued that these platforms are, in fact, gambling and should be subjected to state gaming laws and taxes.

“The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi’s (exchange) is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps,” the appeals panel wrote Friday, adding that “Kalshi’s attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks betting are unpersuasive.”

The judges also said it was “disingenuous” for Kalshi to argue in court that its products weren’t sports-betting when it previously used that phrasing in marketing materials.

The following essays, like the chapters in the book from which they are drawn, Fight Back: How States Can Counter Authoritarianism (New Press, forthcoming 2027), suggest why this situation is not irreversible. They demonstrate that state and local governments have constitutional and legal powers that can be harnessed as a force to challenge repressive federal actions and to advance a more substantive and meaningful kind of freedom and equality — terms that can be understood, and conditions that can be enjoyed by conservatives and liberals alike.