Last month, Texas lawmakers convened for a special legislative session to debate some of the most extreme anti-immigrant bills any state legislature has ever considered. Already, one such bill — SB 4, which threatens humanitarian workers and family members of undocumented immigrants with severe criminal penalties — was passed by both chambers and is now headed to Gov. Greg Abbott to be signed into law. With just days left in the current legislative session, the legislature is attempting to short-circuit debate and rush through an even more fanatical bill that manufactures a new state crime so that Texas police may arrest, jail, and deport people.

If enacted, HB 4 would easily rank among the most radically anti-immigrant bills ever passed by a legislature. The anti-immigrant agenda advancing in the current special legislative session has been fueled by groups with links to white supremacy. Just last month, it was revealed that Texans for Strong Borders — an anti-immigrant advocacy group connected to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes — urged Gov. Abbott to call a special legislative session to take up anti-immigrant legislation such as HB 4.

One of the versions of this legislation being considered would make it a state crime to attempt to enter the State of Texas from Mexico between ports of entry, and authorize state police and sheriffs to arrest, prosecute, and imprison anyone suspected of violating this new and unprecedented state law. Another version would go a step further and purports to authorize these officers — who are not trained in immigration law — to also deport people they suspect of violating this law.

In federal immigration proceedings, people have a right to due process and an opportunity to demonstrate that they should not be deported because, for example, they have lawful immigration status, are U.S. citizens, or are eligible for humanitarian protection. No such safeguards are in place under this version of HB 4. In fact, people suspected of illegal entry will be deprived of the basic rights afforded by federal immigration law and Texas criminal law: The bill suggests they can be summarily ordered removed to Mexico without even an opportunity to speak to a lawyer.

HB 4 is preempted by federal law and unconstitutional for good reasons. No state has ever empowered its police to deport people, but we’ve seen before that laws authorizing local law enforcement agents to investigate immigration offenses lead to racial profiling. Citizens and immigrants with permission to be in the U.S. would be at risk of wrongful arrest, detention, and deportation. This unprecedented move will distract police officers from investigating actual crimes, deter victims of human trafficking from coming forward, and in turn, make our communities less safe.

Ultimately, lawmakers are pretending they can stop people from coming to the U.S. by turning local law enforcement into border patrol. Evidence already shows that deterrence policies from fleeing persecution and instead create more disorder and harm. Laws like HB 4 would unnecessarily waste taxpayer dollars under the guise of national security and public safety, all while harming our communities and the integrity of federal immigration laws.

This bill is unprecedented, but the script is far too familiar.

HB 4, in all of its forms, is founded on the idea that there is an “invasion” at our Southern border. This is the same logic, rooted in white supremacy, that motivated the man who killed 23 people and wounded 22 others during a shooting at an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019. This rhetoric has repeatedly been backed by Texans for Strong Borders. And it’s no surprise that last month, reports revealed that that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who also serves as President of the Texas Senate — received $3 million from a conservative PAC also connected to white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes.

The hateful narrative these voices are pushing has real consequences. We’ve already seen vitriolic state policies like Operation Lone Star lead to the tragic drownings and other deaths of people and children seeking safety. We cannot allow other harmful anti-immigrant policies take root — not in Texas, not in any state.

With the fate of HB 4 to be decided in coming days, our lawmakers must not feed this dangerous myth that harms both immigrants and non-immigrants alike.

Texans have a critical opportunity to act now and demand that their representatives vote no to policies that criminalize migrants and divide our communities. We can’t allow our elected officials to misuse our legal systems to do the work of white supremacists.

Source : ACLU

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The Texas Payday Law requires employers to pay their employees in full, on time, and on scheduled paydays. The law also tells how and when employers can pay wages.

The Payday law helps employees who were not paid their wages correctly. Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) suggests talking to the employer before filing a wage claim because most problems can be solved by talking to the employer first. 

If an employee believes they are owed wages, they need to file a wage claim within 180 days from the original date the wages were supposed to be paid. 

If the employer filed for bankruptcy, TWC cannot investigate the claim and the employee may need to file directly with the Bankruptcy Court.

Payments Subject to Payday Law

The Payday Law applies to different types of payments, including:

• Compensation for services provided regardless of how they are calculated.
• Commissions and bonuses according to an agreement between the employee and employer.
• Certain fringe benefits required by the employer’s policy or through an agreement with the employer.

Source : TWC

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A bipartisan group of state lawmakers plans to spend part of its time in Austin this year highlighting the state’s increasingly fragile water infrastructure.

Texas Water Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on creating a sustainable water system in Texas, announced the new group, called the Texas House Water Caucus, this week.

The caucus, believed to be the first of its kind at the Capitol, includes 38 legislators from the Texas House of Representatives, led by Rep. Tracy King, D-Batesville. King chaired the House Natural Resources Committee during the last regular legislative session. The caucus won’t focus on passing or advocating for any specific pieces of legislation, those familiar with the group say. Instead, it will prioritize educating fellow state lawmakers about water security issues.

“The caucus was really informed by a recognition of the amount of turnover at the Capitol and how many of our Texas water champions were leaving office,” said Sarah Schlessinger, CEO of Texas Water Foundation. “It’s about getting folks comfortable and knowledgeable about what’s happening and to prioritize water as an important topic this session.”

Aging infrastructure and limited investments have left Texas’ water infrastructure fragile, especially in rural communities, where a lack of human resources compounds the problem.

Last year, there were more than 3,000 boil-water notices issued across the state. Such warnings are often issued when water quality is in doubt. Contributing factors can include water main breaks and drops in water pressure. According to a Texas Tribune analysis of data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, seven of the 10 water entities that issued the most boil-water notices last year were in rural parts of East Texas.

The pace of boil-water notices has not slowed.. Since the new year, there have been at least 79 of them, or about six notices per day, according to a spokesperson from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Texas’ water supply is also becoming less reliable as the state’s population continues to grow and strain already limited resources. Hotter temperatures caused by climate change accelerate water evaporation from Texas rivers and reservoirs, which account for roughly half of Texas’ existing water supply.

“Water security is critically important to all Texans and our economy,” King said in a statement. “We must continue to innovate, invest and strategize long-term to manage our water resources efficiently.”

The House Water Caucus was formed through a transparent process, where any representative could participate, Schlessinger said. She added that she expects more members to join as the legislative session progresses.

“Water is one of those topics where it’s easy to get bipartisan support around,” she said. “It’s a topic that is very unifying.”

But a challenge is understanding the complexities of Texas’ water supply and funding systems in different regions of a geographically diverse state. To address this knowledge gap, the group plans to launch a website for finding water resources. The tool will include legislative reports related to water and publications from nonprofits and research institutes, as well as maps and visualizations.

The caucus will also hold meetings at the Capitol to educate legislative staff about water infrastructure and conservation.

Historically, water-related policies have been passed in the wake of disasters such as floods or droughts. The caucus is intended to elevate water issues to the forefront so lawmakers prioritize water policy even when there is no discernable disaster.

“Water is one of the most important policy issues facing the state,” said state Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, one of the members of the caucus. “Hopefully we’re not just reactive to droughts and we can really make good headway in preparing Texas for the future.”

Perry Fowler, executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, said he is hopeful that the legislature will use some of the historic state budget to address water issues, including staffing shortages.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, one-third of employees in the water sector will be eligible to retire in the next 10 years.

“We’re going to need to have more personnel on the water board,” Perry said. “There are significant workforce concerns that are out there.”

Source : Texas Tribune

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With the clock ticking on the postelection lame-duck session of Congress, tech reformers are pushing for votes on a package of bills that stalled over the summer. Three bills—the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Open App Markets Act, and the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act—would write special competition rules for large tech companies in ways that could fundamentally change how tech platforms moderate content like hate speech, disinformation, and incitement to violence. The Senate Judiciary Committee has sent all three bills to the Senate floor. But whether any of these three bills becomes law likely depends on whether Democrats and Republicans can hold a fragile coalition together in which each side ignores the thing that scares them most about the other: Republicans’ fear of big government that interferes in the market, and Democrats’ fear of harmful content proliferating online.

Over the past few years, Democrats and Republicans have made common cause in seeking to rein in Big Tech. But the two parties have struggled to find areas of agreement on a wide range of other critical issues, ranging from environmental policy to health care. Nevertheless, in seeking to reform the rules governing competition in the tech sector, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) has stood alongside Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) to try to curb Big Tech power, and Republican Rep. Ken Buck (Colo.) has joined hands with Democratic Rep. David Cicilline (R.I.) to advance antitrust legislation. Despite Democrats’ and Republicans’ long-standing disagreements and their conflicting visions of what a better internet might look like, what has been the magic formula that has enabled them to work together?

The answer is simple: Republicans support proposals to reform antitrust law when—and only when—Democrats include provisions that would make it harder for tech platforms to moderate content in ways conservatives think disadvantage them. 

Despite the clear political benefits of this strategy, it requires Republicans and Democrats to subsume other competing values and priorities beneath the goal of curbing tech platform power. For Republicans, it requires them to brush aside their distaste for government interference with the free market and for giving government agencies more power to regulate business practices. Democrats must pretend that limiting platforms’ ability to moderate harmful content on their platforms is not directly at odds with their concerns about the proliferation of exactly this type of online content. Democrats have pressured tech companies to be more rigorous in restricting hate speech, content that could harm people of color and women, and misinformation about elections, public health, and the environment. But restricting platforms’ ability to differentiate between content providers based on viewpoint will make it harder for them to moderate this harmful speech.

The most prominent example of this strategic compromise is Klobuchar’s proposed American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). AICOA would bar large tech platforms from adopting policies that would give preference to their own products over others’. For example, when users search for a restaurant in their area, Google might not be able to provide a unit at the top of their feed that includes a phone number, directions, and a link to online ordering. But the bill also holds companies liable if they “discriminate in the application or enforcement of the terms of service of the covered platform among similarly situated business users.” A further requirement—“in a manner that would materially harm competition”—was added to that provision, and others, in an effort to protect content moderation (by focusing on economic harms), but no one really knows what it would mean in practice. 

Taken together, these provisions would restrict platforms’ ability to enforce their content standards: A covered platform that takes action to moderate content could be dragged into court if they are accused of making anti-competitive decisions on what content to host or remove. During Senate debates on the bill, Cruz noted, approvingly, that AICOA would “make some positive improvement on the problem of censorship” because “it would provide protections to content providers, to businesses that are discriminated against because of the content of what they produce.” 

A number of Democrats have pleaded with AICOA’s sponsors to amend the bill to ensure that platforms can still take action against hate speech and misinformation, but AICOA remains unchanged. Klobuchar, it seems, simply can’t afford to drop or revise the ban on discrimination by platforms, lest the bill lose crucial Republican support. For now, the bill looks stuck.

The same goes for the Open App Markets Act (OAMA), introduced by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). OAMA focuses only on app stores but would make content moderation even harder in that context. The bill purports to ban self-preferencing in app stores’ search results—for example, treating an app “unequally” compared to a platform’s own app or those of its “business partners.” But courts may interpret that provision to ban discrimination more broadly. Courts will likely reach the same result simply because most app developers are “business partners” with the covered platforms, if only because they share revenue from in-app ads and purchases. “Extremist outlets and disinformation sites could sue platforms for blocking them,” warned Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). She explained, Alex Jones’s “Infowars may sue Apple for being kicked out of the app store, while other conservative political outlets are left up.”

The one bill that might actually move—and quickly—is the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). JCPA is supposed to ensure that serious journalistic outlets get paid for their content. But as with AICOA and OAMA, Republicans and Democrats have aligned on a strategy that marries market reform and content moderation. JCPA exempts publishers from antitrust law when they form cartels to collude in negotiating with tech platforms over the “pricing, terms, and conditions” under which platforms can access the content of publishers in a cartel. The JCPA would prevent platforms from discriminating against cartel members based on the “views expressed” by their content, and would prevent cartels of news publishers from denying admission to a publisher based on viewpoint. That means extremist, pseudo-journalistic publishers of hate speech, misinformation, and incitement to violence (such as Gateway Pundit, Infowars, and Project Veritas) could benefit from the bill. Ironically, the same news publishers that have long argued that tech platforms are responsible for proliferating low-quality, dangerous content now support a bill that could limit tech companies’ ability to exclude such content from their platforms.

As with AICOA, JCPA’s hopes for passage depend on maintaining the alliance between Democrats pushing for antitrust reforms and Republicans seeking to limit the power of Big Tech to “censor” speech they favor. When cracks appear in that alliance, the legislation flounders. 

During the markup of the journalism bill, Klobuchar was forced to withdraw JCPA after Cruz introduced an amendment on precisely this issue. After deliberations, the two compromised on new language that says deals struck between cartels and platforms can’t address content moderation or “curation.” Cruz claimed that his amendment “secured significant protections against Big Tech censorship.” He also included a statement of support from the Daily Caller—a publication that the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed to have a “white nationalist problem”—which said the bill would “prevent[] news organizations from colluding with tech companies to suppress or censor conservative voices.” 

This last-minute compromise illustrates the larger problem: It should prevent cartels organized under JCPA from forcing tech companies to carry content they don’t want. But it won’t stop the law from being weaponized against content moderation. JCPA still bans “retaliation”—a term defined so broadly (“refusing to index content or changing the ranking, identification, modification, branding, or placement of the content”) that essentially any content moderation decision could be framed as “retaliation” against a publisher participating in a negotiation. 

More generally, the new language probably won’t prevent platforms from having to pay for content they don’t want. That’s partly because payment obligations remain tied to “access,” a term defined broadly to include merely “crawling” or “indexing content.” That’s exactly what platforms often do before they can decide whether content violates their community standards. It’s also what happens when users upload content (especially videos) that may be eligible for monetization. The bill would also likely force platforms to pay for content they carry but that they deem ineligible for monetization because it includes, for example, hate speech or harassment.

The alliance between Democrats pursuing antitrust reform and Republicans seeking to protect speech they think helps them appears to be a shrewd political strategy that will increase the possibility of Congress enacting legislation to reform the tech sector. It is clear that both parties recognize its value and have used it as the basis for modifying tech reform proposals to increase their chance of passage. The JCPA was originally introduced by Rep. Cicilline in 2018 during the 115th Congress, and then subsequently reintroduced in the House and the Senate in 2019 during the 116th Congress and in 2021 during the 117th Congress. None of the previous versions of the legislation includes the provisions on viewpoint, and, perhaps not coincidentally, none of the previous versions was voted out of committee.

The alliance also distracts lawmakers from considering substantive possibilities that might be more impactful in addressing the underlying problems. For instance, JCPA’s supporters say they want to support struggling news publishers and increase the quality of local news. So why not tackle that problem directly? Why not consider public interest journalism models, such as through direct support (like PBS and NPR), through tax incentives for nonprofit models (like ProPublica and the Texas Tribune), or through policies that decrease newsroom costs or subscription costs (like Canada’s measures to provide tax rebates for publishers’ labor costs and to increase news subscriptions by making them tax deductible)? These options have been largely absent from the debate—probably because they meet neither Democrats’ desire to curb platform power nor Republicans’ desire to reduce content moderation.

The bills’ downsides may be worthwhile to the proponents of reform. Supporters of AICOA and OAMA argue that a nondiscrimination rule is necessary to promote more competition in the market. JCPA’s supporters argue that publishers must be permitted to collude so that they can negotiate fairly with tech platforms. Perhaps. 

But amid disagreements about the merits of these proposals to reform antitrust enforcement in the tech sector, it is important for policymakers to not pretend that they will come without a cost. Legislators should acknowledge that their efforts to constrain tech company power will also constrain the companies’ power to moderate harmful content, and should more honestly and transparently account for the benefits and costs of this approach. A left-right alliance between critics of tech platforms may make it possible for Congress to pass tech reform, but only at a steep price to company efforts to moderate harmful content on their platforms.

Source: Lawfare Blog

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