Alabama Senate delays vote on restructuring state veterans affairs board
The Alabama Senate Tuesday heavily amended and then delayed a bill that would have restructured the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs board.
Sen. Andrew Jones, R-Centre, the sponsor of SB 67, asked to have the legislation carried over after it was amended nine times.
'We've heard a lot from our veteran's communities about what's important to them. I think it's best that we give folks some time to marinate on this, look at it, understand it,' Jones said.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
The bill came after Gov. Kay Ivey fired former Commissioner Kent Davis over a dispute regarding Davis' alleged handling of federal grants offered through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021. Davis initially refused to step down after Ivey demanded his resignation, but he offered his resignation after meeting with the governor. The Board of Veterans Affairs then asked Davis to withdraw his resignation and voted to keep him, saying they found no wrongdoing, which led to his firing. An attorney for Davis has suggested he is considering pursue legal action.
Jones said during the debate the main purpose of the bill would be elevating Veterans Affairs to a cabinet-level position.
'A lot of folks are still hung up on the sort of personality conflict that happened a few months ago,' he said. 'That's not in this bill at all. The main focus is focusing on veterans (and) meeting their needs.'
The State Board of Veterans Affairs currently has 17 members. Jones' legislation would have initially shrunk it to nine, but after amendments, it was brought up to 15. The governor would appoint nine members, but two must be affiliated with the Alabama National Guard, one must be a woman and one must be a wartime veteran.
The Speaker of the House would have an appointment that would be selected from a list of three names nominated by the largest veteran organization in Alabama and the Pro Tempore of the Senate would have an appointment that would be selected by the second largest veteran organization in the state. Another amendment was added to include two appointments by the lieutenant governor, one at-large and one from a list of three names nominated by the third largest organization. The organizations were not named.
An amendment would require that at least five board members be veterans who served on active duty for a period of 60 days or more and have been honorably discharged.
An appointing authority would have to give veteran organizations notice and would not be allowed to make an appointment without notice of 30 days. The organization would be able to provide three recommendations for consideration.
Another amendment would allow the board to recommend up to three individuals to the governor for appointment as commissioner, though it doesn't have to be considered. It would also provide the commissioner's salary is set by the governor.
Jones said he expects the bill to come back to the Senate floor next week.
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
8 hours ago
- USA Today
What happens if gay marriage is overturned? The question alone is horrifying.
The more we talk about gay marriage as if it's something that could be questioned legally, the more the public will begin to question whether Obergefell was a mistake. A recent appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court seeks to overturn the landmark 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, giving the entire LGBTQ+ community reason to be fearful – even if the case is unlikely to be heard by the court. Kim Davis, a former county clerk from Kentucky, filed a petition in late July asking the court to appeal a decision that she must pay $360,000 in damages and legal fees for refusing to issue a gay couple a marriage license after the Obergefell decision came down. According to the appeal, this infringed upon Davis' First Amendment right to freedom of religion. There are a variety of reasons gay marriage is likely safe despite this appeal, including changing opinions on the court, public support for same-sex marriage and the 2022 Respect For Marriage Act. It doesn't change the fact that the very notion of this right being overturned is a reminder to the LGBTQ+ community that our rights are dependent upon the whims of politicians and judges, and could easily disappear. I don't trust this Supreme Court to leave same-sex marriage alone In 2015, Davis wound up in jail for six days for contempt of court when she refused to grant a marriage license to gay couples in Rowan County, Kentucky. One couple who were refused a license, David Moore and David Ermold, sued Davis for violating their constitutional right to marry. Moore and Ermold were awarded $50,000 each in damages, plus $260,000 for legal fees. Davis attempted to appeal the ruling with the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals but was denied this March. She then sent her appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in July, which is how we ended up here. Mat Staver, Davis' lawyer, told Fox News he believes this case will be heard by the nation's highest court based on the fact that three of the dissenting justices from Obergefell – Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito – are still on the court. Other legal scholars aren't so sure that five justices are willing to overrule the case. Robbie Kaplan, a lawyer who argued in defense of LGBTQ+ rights in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 in a ruling that eventually paved the way for Obergefell, told Axios it would cause a lot more legal problems than it's worth. "It's not just a recipe for administrative chaos," Kaplan said. "It also would result in an almost indescribable amount of (needless) suffering and heartache." Opinion: I was the named 'opposition' in Obergefell v. Hodges. I've never been happier to lose. I'm skeptical that the very court that sent abortion rights back to the states cares about the legal complications that a ruling like this could cause. In the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, Thomas even issued a concurrent opinion saying he believed Obergefell should be reconsidered. The Supreme Court has also asked Moore and Ermold to respond to Davis' petition, which hints at the possibility that this case could be considered by the court. Kim Davis' petition reminds us our rights are revocable Davis' appeal isn't the only attack on gay marriage since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and Republicans took the majority in Congress. Resolutions were introduced in five states that would have formally asked the Supreme Court to review Obergefell. In two of those states, Idaho and North Dakota, the resolutions passed the House of Representatives before failing in the Senate. While these measures were unsuccessful, it's a sign of growing discontent among Republican politicians with the legality of same-sex marriage. In June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted for a resolution to ask the court to reconsider gay marriage. A denomination may have no legal authority in our secular government, but the resolution signals that we should be worried. Opinion: I told you GOP would come for marriage. Southern Baptists just proved my point. The fact that these resolutions were even introduced is scary for the LGBTQ+ community. It's a sign that there are still people out there who think we shouldn't be able to marry the people we love, that our rights as couples should differ from the rights of straight couples merely based on a few verses in the Bible. It's a reminder that the rights we fought for years to gain can be reversed, that all it takes is a conservative shift in government to send us back to a time before legal gay marriage. What would happen if gay marriage were overturned? Thankfully, Democrats in 2022 passed the Respect For Marriage Act, which says that same-sex and interracial marriages must be recognized by the federal government and every state, even if Obergefell were to fall. However, the loss of the 2015 Supreme Court ruling would affect future generations of LGBTQ+ people looking to get married. If the Obergefell ruling were overturned tomorrow, same-sex marriage would become illegal in 32 states that have constitutional and/or legislative bans on marriage equality. This would affect more than half of the LGBTQ+ people in the United States. Per a May 2025 Gallup poll, 68% of Americans say same-sex marriages should be legally recognized. While this is a safe majority of people, support is down from a high of 71% in 2023 – signaling a potential shift in the acceptability of gay marriage nationwide. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. I'm also not one to believe that public support will sway the justices from hearing a case. After all, abortion rights were also widely popular, but that didn't stop the court from sending legality back to the states. Gay marriage is not going to disappear tomorrow. This does mean, however, that gay people are once again being reminded that their rights are dependent on a handful of people and the opinions of politicians and can easily be stripped away. We've already witnessed how the trans community has lost rights in a matter of months. The more we talk about gay marriage as if it's something that could be questioned legally, the more the public will begin to question whether Obergefell was a mistake. Even if it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will take up this review, the fact that an appeal was even introduced is bringing anxiety to the LGBTQ+ community – and it should be taken seriously. Follow USA TODAY columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter: @sara__pequeno You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.
Boston Globe
9 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Same-sex marriage is no threat to religious liberty
This is the ridiculous accusation being made by Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk. In 2015, she was briefly jailed for contempt of court after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples as required by law. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up She is asking the Supreme Court, with a more staunchly conservative bench than the one that codified same-sex marriage, to rule that federally recognized unions between two men or two women threaten 'her sincerely held religious beliefs on marriage,' according to her lawyers. Advertisement Davis's challenge to Obergefell stems from her appeal of a $100,000 jury verdict plus $260,000 for attorney fees that she was ordered to pay to the gay couple to whom she denied a marriage license. The nine justices have not yet decided whether to review Davis's appeal. Davis is being represented by the Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal group that specializes in religious liberty cases. In 2018, the group won a 7-2 Supreme Court decision that ruled in favor of a Advertisement In a statement, Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel's founder and chairman, said the Davis case 'underscores why the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn the wrongly decided Obergefell v. Hodges opinion because it threatens the religious liberty of Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.' Davis herself has entered that sacred union four times with three men. For last year's 20th anniversary of the Goodridge decision that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas ticked off a list of other After Roe was outlawed, 'I remember thinking 'Oh my God, is it possible that all of the rights and privileges that we've won as a community, whether it's women's or LGBTQ rights, will be washed away in the same lifetime in which we won them?'' Julie Goodridge, one of the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, told me. There's Advertisement But we're also witnessing the most tumultuous era in modern politics, when things we once believed impossible have now become as commonplace as they are alarming. The end of Roe proved that our civil rights are not sacrosanct. Opponents of reproductive rights chipped away at abortion access for decades until the political climate was primed to erase what had been considered settled law for nearly 50 years. So far, Trump hasn't mentioned Davis's appeal. That could change if the Supreme Court adds her case to its upcoming docket, but perhaps this White House may already be quietly tipping its hand. In 2022, Joe Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires all states to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. But on the official White House website, instead of remarks from Biden officials about protecting same-sex marriage, there's now only a Here's hoping that a year from now, my friends, and every LGBTQ couple, will still have weddings and anniversaries to celebrate. Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
The Hill
a day ago
- The Hill
Obamacare faces a subsidy cliff — don't bail it out without reform
The controversy over the 2010 Affordable Care Act dominated Barack Obama's presidency. The implementation of ObamaCare caused health insurance premiums to soar and nearly collapsed the market entirely. The Biden administration responded by flooding the system with expanded federal subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of 2025. To stop premiums for older workers with pre-existing conditions from suddenly leaping by $10,000, Republicans will need to extend part of this additional funding. But in return, they should insist on reforms to allow healthy Americans to purchase better value insurance with their own money. The Affordable Care Act required health insurers to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions at the same price as enrollees who signed up before they got sick. As a result, premiums more than doubled, millions of healthy enrollees dropped coverage and many insurers abandoned the market. The Affordable Care Act kept the individual health insurance market from falling apart completely by providing subsidies to low-income enrollees. But individuals earning more than $62,600 in 2025 would have faced full premiums without any assistance. Those unsubsidized enrollees felt the full pain of the Affordable Care Act's premium hikes. The legislation allows insurers to charge older enrollees up to three times what they do the youngest, and so unsubsidized premiums for near-retirees can be huge. This year, the benchmark unsubsidized premium for a 61-year-old individual in Washington, D.C., is $15,402 per year. Rather than fix ObamaCare's structure, the newly-elected Democratic Congress in 2021 threw money at the problem with the American Rescue Plan Act. By expanding eligibility for subsidies to higher earners, the act reduced the cost of health insurance for a 61-year-old earning $70,000 from $15,402 to $5,950 — with federal taxpayers covering the difference. That legislation also expanded the generosity of subsidies for lower earners. Those earning $22,000, who would have contributed $756 to the cost of insurance under the original Affordable Care Act, would get it entirely paid for by the federal government. This approach has been hugely expensive. In May 2022, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that subsidies for the Affordable Care Act would cost $67 billion in 2024. Last June, following a renewal of the American Rescue Plan Act's increased subsidies, the Congressional Budget Office's revised cost estimate for 2024 surged to $129 billion. A recent Paragon Institute report found that this leap in cost owed much to a surge in enrollment among those who received coverage free of charge. Paragon estimated that such enrollees accounted for nearly half of new enrollment, and that 5 million people may have misreported their income to claim free coverage, costing taxpayers an additional $20 billion. Insurers eagerly welcomed the influx of new healthy enrollees, who had not deemed it worth purchasing insurance from the individual market until the federal government paid the entire price. Such newcomers proved enormously lucrative, as they used less medical care than existing enrollees but generated the same revenue. Democrats, who received twice as much in campaign contributions as Republicans from Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2024, eagerly boasted about reducing the number of uninsured Americans, with little concern for the cost. The expiry of the American Rescue Plan Act subsidies is now looming again, set to expire at the end of 2025. It will be up to a Republican president and Republican-led Congress to find a way forward. Fiscal conservatives have little appetite to pay for renewing all the expanded ObamaCare subsidies. But nor will they feel comfortable letting the American Rescue Plan Act's enhanced subsidies expire entirely, as this would result in a $10,000-per-year premium hike on thousands of middle-income near-retirees. Congress should focus on targeted support by eliminating the cap on eligibility for the Affordable Care Act's original subsidies, which limit premiums at 9.5 percent of income, to avoid a sudden benefit cliff for those with incomes just above $62,600. But they should also let other expansions of subsidies expire. In return, Republicans should insist that Americans be allowed to obtain discounted premiums if they purchase insurance before they get sick. In 2017, President Trump allowed Americans to do this by purchasing short-term insurance. However, in 2024, the Biden administration limited the duration of these plans to four months. This came following pressure from big insurers, who claimed that allowing the expansion of such plans would prevent them from cross-subsidizing enrollees with pre-existing conditions by overcharging those who signed up while healthy. In reality, the restriction of these affordable plans has served mostly to inflate insurers' profits. Healthy enrollees remain able to purchase short-term plans afresh every few months; it is only those who subsequently become sick who are deprived of coverage. Regulatory protections for the long-term coverage of enrollees in non-ObamaCare plans should be strengthened; not weakened. Furthermore, with the extension of the American Rescue Plan Act's premium cap, federal subsidies taxpayers directly subsidize most enrollees. It is therefore unnecessary to also prohibit healthy enrollees from obtaining insurance plans which offer long-term coverage at good value for their money.
