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A ‘Go Fund me' account to help make up the college tuition difference for Dreamers?

A ‘Go Fund me' account to help make up the college tuition difference for Dreamers?

Yahoo29-01-2025

Naples Republican Kathleen Passidomo answers reporters' questions following her installment as Florida Senate president on Nov. 22, 2022. (Photo by Michael Moline/Florida Phoenix)
Will philanthropic lawmakers try to help pay Dreamers' tuition?
The Florida Legislature passed an anti-immigration crackdown Tuesday night that would repeal a waiver allowing undocumented students pay in-state tuition rates for state colleges and universities, but one lawmaker is seizing on a colleague's comment that philanthropy could help.
During debate on the bill in the Senate, Naples-area Republican Kathleen Passidomo said that while she was supporting the bill, she had heard from other lawmakers that they would also support it if it didn't repeal the in-state tuition waiver.
So, she said, she offered a challenge: Support the bill and then privately help Dreamers — brought to this country without documentation as children — with their tuition payments.
'I'm going to vote for this bill wholeheartedly, and then I'm going to go and I'm going to find a charity that I can write a check to,' Passidomo said.
'And then I'm going to find a kid who's going to lose their tuition, and I'm going to pay for it. And that's how we do it, through philanthropy. We don't need to have taxpayer dollars pay for these kids. They shouldn't, because they're here illegally, and they are taking places of other kids. So that's my challenge to you all, who said, if we didn't have this provision, you'd vote for the bill. Vote for the bill and then join me and other philanthropic people, and let's sponsor some kids to finish their education.'
Orlando area House Democrat Anna Eskamani said she heard that comment loud and clear and would like to start a 'mutual aid fund' of some sort to encourage others to help pay for the difference.
​​During the 2023-2024 academic year, more than 6,500 Florida students without documentation who received an out-of-state fee waiver paid $26.7 million for their postsecondary tuition. Without the fee waiver, they would have had to pay an additional $40 million, according to the Florida Policy Institute.
'If this is going to be the reality, we have thousands of students who are no longer going to be able to afford their tuition because of people in this chamber,' Eskamani said. 'Let's start a nonprofit. … If this bill ultimately passes in some shape or form, I'm really worried about these kids, and we need to help them.'
Although Gov. Ron DeSantis has savaged the bill passed by GOP lawmakers as being 'weak' and says he will veto it, he has insisted that repealing in-state tuition for undocumented students is a priority. It was one of the proposals he suggested the Legislature approve leading into this week's special session.
Passidomo was one of 21 Republicans in the state Senate to support the Legislature's bill, which passed 21-16 in that chamber. Six other Republicans rejected it. In the House, the measure passed 82-30.
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A big fight but an early night
A big fight but an early night

Politico

time33 minutes ago

  • Politico

A big fight but an early night

Presented by Sports Betting Alliance Line? What line? In the end, the primary wasn't close. The lack of a county line for both parties for the first time since 1981 contributed to the crowded field, but it didn't change the result. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, four-term former Navy congresswoman and former Navy helicopter pilot, easily prevailed over five other Democrats for the party's nomination for governor. The AP called the race for Sherrill less than 40 minutes after polls closed. Jack Ciattarelli, a former three-term Assemblymember making his third run for governor, will for a second time be the Republican nominee, easily defeating his four Republican opponents and likely winning every county. The AP made an even quicker call for him, less than 20 minutes after polls closed. This is supposed to be a competitive election in November, but given that many of us thought the Democratic contest waa nail-biter, who really knows? Sherrill and Ciattarelli both have deep resumes and plenty of merits as candidates, so I'm not trying to discount that, but both also had the backing of most of their parties' establishments. And those machines —especially Democrats — showed that they're still formidable without the visual advantage that they bestowed on their chosen candidates for decades. Take Hudson, which Sherrill convincingly carried with the county Democrats' support despite Fulop being the long-serving mayor of its largest city. (Hudson's picture is a bit more complicated in the two non-Brian Stack Assembly districts, where nail-biter races were too close to call late last night.) Read my story about the election here. Some more observations: Steve Sweeney won his native Gloucester County, but as of last night he, Mikie Sherrill and Sean Spiller were virtually tied in Camden County. You could tell it was over for Sweeney as soon as polls closed, when Camden County's mail-in ballots showed Sherrill, Spiller and Sweeney with almost identical totals. This suggests, to me at least, that that the Camden County Democratic machine was more concerned with shoring up its Assembly candidates against Steve Fulop-backed primary challenges than putting a lot of effort into Sweeney's long-shot campaign. Deep-red Ocean County was supposed to be Bill Spadea's base. It's prime listening area for his radio show and county GOP Chair George Gilmore not only backed Spadea but was on the payroll of one of his super PACs. Yet Ciattarelli won Ocean County easily, and by pretty much the same margin he won Monmouth County, where the GOP establishment was behind him. My guess is the unusual Vaad endorsement for Ciattarelli played a significant role in this. But the Vaad, which endorsed Josh Gottheimer in the Democratic primary, didn't overcome Mikie Sherrill there. She won it easily. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Gottheimer was in third place in Ocean. I'll have to wait to see more detailed numbers from Montclair, the hometown of NJEA President and Democratic candidate Sean Spiller. But the early results I saw last night were terrible for Spiller, whose tumultuous four years as mayor (he decided not to seek reelection) doesn't appear to have endeared him to the town's voters. Early numbers showed him competing with Sweeney for last place in many, perhaps most, of the town's voting districts. The NJEA put at least $40 million into backing Spiller, and, last I checked, he was in fifth place statewide. Is Monmouth County regretting its decision to close down its polling institute? Pollster Patrick Murray's poll last month held up well. And this one's not exactly a shocker, but openly criticizing President Trump isn't a winning message in a Republican primary. State Sen. Jon Bramnick came in a distant third place. 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What to look for in Zeldin's power plant rule repeal
What to look for in Zeldin's power plant rule repeal

E&E News

time38 minutes ago

  • E&E News

What to look for in Zeldin's power plant rule repeal

EPA will move Wednesday to repeal Biden-era power sector rules for carbon and hazardous emissions. The two repeal proposals are the Trump EPA's most important regulatory actions to date. They will not only set the stage for rolling back key Clean Air Act rules, but also provide a glimpse of the Trump administration's broader anti-climate and anti-regulatory strategy. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will unveil the proposals at the agency's Washington headquarters Wednesday afternoon during an event attended by several Republican lawmakers. Advertisement The proposals target two regulations central to the Biden administration's climate agenda: one that sets carbon pollution limits at fossil fuel power plants, and another that ramps up controls on harmful pollution like mercury. It's unclear whether the agency will release the full draft regulations and regulatory documents Wednesday — or wait until the drafts are published in the Federal Register. But here's what to know and watch in the days ahead. The basics EPA has said it plans to repeal both the carbon and mercury rules by the end of this year, and the proposals cleared White House review Friday. The draft climate rule repeal would jettison standards for new gas- and existing coal-fired power that were based on carbon capture and storage. EPA is not expected to immediately propose a replacement rule, but hasn't ruled out doing so in the future. The two proposals traveled to the White House for review in near-record time — just over 100 days after President Donald Trump's inauguration. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs completed its review in a mere 35 days, or about half the time usually allotted for review of complex EPA rulemakings. The Trump administration has been tight-lipped about its strategy for doing away with the power plant carbon rule. EPA did not respond to calls for comment on this story. Possible legal arguments The agency will need to use the draft repeal to lay out its legal case for abandoning the 2024 carbon rule. That case could be twofold — a more conventional attack on the Biden administration's reliance on carbon capture as a benchmark technology, and a broader contention that power plant carbon shouldn't be regulated at all. Jeff Holmstead, who served as EPA air chief during the George W. Bush administration, said in a recent interview that EPA would be on firm legal ground to argue that carbon capture and storage doesn't align with the Clean Air Act's directive to base performance standards on controls that are 'adequately demonstrated.' 'I think that was a big stretch, and I don't think it would have been upheld in court,' he said. But EPA has signaled it plans to use the repeal to take a broader swipe at its own authority to regulate carbon — or at least carbon from power plants. To do that, it appears poised to argue that the U.S. power sector doesn't contribute 'significantly' to pollution and thus doesn't meet the Clean Air Act threshold for regulatory action. It's a gambit that, if successful, could make it harder for subsequent administrations to regulate power plant carbon. But lawyers say EPA has an uphill battle. Power is the country's second-highest-emitting sector after transportation. EPA argued during the first Trump administration that the power sector meets the Clean Air Act threshold. And the D.C. Circuit ruled in West Virginia vs. EPA — the same case that struck down the Obama-era Clean Power Plan — that power sector emissions were significant enough to merit regulation. 'The U.S. power sector, if it were a country, would be the sixth-biggest country emitter in the world,' said Jason Schwartz, legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity. 'By any reasonable interpretation of the legal language, this is clearly a significant contribution. If this isn't, then nothing is and what's the point of the Clean Air Act in the first place?' Schwartz and his colleague Peter Howard recently released an analysis that estimated that a year of U.S. power sector emissions causes $370 billion in global damages and $56 billion in U.S. public health impacts, as well as contributes to 5,300 future U.S. deaths. Cost-benefit analysis One question that may be answered Wednesday is how EPA will weigh the costs and benefits of rolling back the rule. That will only be answered when — or if — the agency releases supporting documents for the repeal proposal. The breakneck pace of EPA's regulatory rollback means that the agency likely hasn't had time to construct an analytical framework on things like the health and mortality consequences of increased smog and soot stemming from the repeals, or changes it expects to see in power sector investments. That means the agency will either have to rely on outdated metrics from the first Trump administration or on the Biden-era projections it claims vastly inflate regulatory benefits and obscure costs. 'I have no idea what we're going to see tomorrow,' said Julie McNamara, associate policy director for climate at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a Tuesday interview. 'The power sector is in total flux. Will they be including increased demand from data centers? Will they be including increased costs of gas from all the ramp up of [liquefied natural gas] and gas generation? What do they assume for coal would have happened under the Biden-era regulations? 'That could be very telling for the narrative they tried to set around the future of this nation's power sector,' she said. 'It is quite unlikely to line up with reality.' Numerous experts outside the federal government have analyzed the effect of the Biden carbon rules on both the grid and emissions — and the possible impact of removing them. John Bistline, an energy systems analyst with Electric Power Research Institute, published a model-based study in the journal Science earlier this year. It found that the power plant carbon rule would make a significant dent in power sector emissions in later decades with or without increased power demand, and would reduce uncertainty around how much coal-fired power remained on the grid. The climate question One open question is how — or whether — EPA will try to monetize damages from climate change. The Trump White House has told agencies to avoid using a metric for the social cost of greenhouse gases that reflects climate damage stemming from agency policies. But with a regulatory action that hinges so directly on carbon emissions, experts said EPA could find it hard to defend the rollback if it hasn't shown it has grappled with the climate impacts of its decision to rescind the rule. 'If they didn't do any analysis, what is their explanation?' said Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She noted that the Administrative Procedure Act requires agencies to provide a reasoned explanation for changes to existing policy. 'It all goes back to just classic administrative law,' Hankins said. 'Are they explaining why they've changed their mind since the Biden administration? Are they using the best available science? Are they adequately considering all aspects of the problem?' Schwartz said EPA might not release any regulatory analysis at all, if it believes it can repeal the Biden rule based solely on a legal argument that power plant carbon shouldn't be regulated under the Clean Air Act. But he said that could increase the chances that the rule would be thrown out in court. 'I think that would be a mistake,' he said. This story also appears in Energywire.

Trump-Musk fight reveals fragility of relationship between Silicon Valley and White House
Trump-Musk fight reveals fragility of relationship between Silicon Valley and White House

Yahoo

time38 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Trump-Musk fight reveals fragility of relationship between Silicon Valley and White House

The falling out between President Trump and Elon Musk is just the latest reminder that the relationship between the new White House and the titans of technology has turned out to be complicated. The CEO of Tesla (TSLA) was among several big names from Silicon Valley awarded prime seats for the president's Jan. 20 Capitol inauguration, alongside Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Amazon (AMZN) chair Jeff Bezos, and Google (GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai. In the five months since, the president has either confronted all of their companies in court or applied pressure on those firms with his own words. Musk and Trump made their break official last week in a series of social media posts that featured insults and threats hurled by both men. The other executives and their companies had already been grappling with a tougher-than-expected stance on their industry. Zuckerberg, for example, was not able to convince Trump to stop an antitrust trial against Meta from going forward this spring. The president has since threatened Cook's Apple with 25% duties on overseas-made iPhones and criticized the iPhone maker's ramped-up production in India. Meanwhile, the company is defending against an antitrust lawsuit led by the Justice Department, filed during President Joe Biden's administration. Trump's Justice Department has also pushed ahead with a Biden-era recommendation for a judge to break up Pichai's Google empire. Trump even called Bezos to complain about Amazon after it was reported that the online retail giant was considering displaying the cost of tariffs next to prices on its site. Trump said Bezos "solved the problem very quickly.' Yet Amazon still faces a lawsuit from Trump's Federal Trade Commission that is due to start in February 2027. The FTC, which brought the case during Biden's term in office, told a judge in the spring that it needed to push the original October 2026 trial date due to Amazon's litigation delays. One of the biggest questions facing the tech world as Trump took office was how aggressive Trump's antitrust enforcers would be following four years of a Biden administration marked by legal fights with many of Silicon Valley's biggest names. By sustaining many of these cases and probes against Big Tech, Trump has parted ways with traditional Republican-style enforcement, legal experts say. "This isn't the Bush administration," Trump's FTC chair Andrew Ferguson told a group of American CEOs this spring in Washington, D.C., referring to one of the weakest US antitrust enforcement periods in modern history. Case Western Reserve University School of Law professor Anat Alon-Beck expects the Trump administration will continue to rein in Big Tech, especially given bipartisan support for the idea that Big Tech currently has too much power. There have been some positive developments for the tech firms too. Big Tech has gained the benefit of a relaxed regulatory environment, especially in the industry of artificial intelligence, making fundraising and complying with securities laws easier. In an executive order titled 'Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,' the president rescinded Biden's executive order on AI safety and directed federal agencies to remove regulatory obstacles to US global AI dominance. "So they have to take what they can get from the current administration," Alon-Beck said. One tech giant that does have an early win from Trump is Microsoft. President Trump's antitrust cops ended what had become an uphill government effort to unwind Microsoft's (MSFT) $69 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard that also began during the Biden administration. The decision came when the FTC voluntarily dropped a lawsuit that Biden's FTC boss, Lina Khan, first filed against the tie-up in December 2022. But Microsoft may not emerge unscathed, either. Bloomberg has reported that Trump officials at the FTC are also broadening a probe into Microsoft and its relationship with AI upstart OpenAI ( The probe was first launched by Khan, a key architect of a new movement seeking to expand the legal theories that can give rise to antitrust claims. In June of last year, multiple news organizations reported that the probe also involved a DOJ investigation into chipmaker Nvidia's (NVDA) competitive conduct. The probe was to address concerns over the company's dominance in the market for microprocessors that power AI. The Trump administration has not indicated it has dropped the investigation. And in April, Nvidia said in a regulatory filing that the president had kept in place Biden's export restrictions on the company's H20 AI chips to China. As for Musk, Trump this past weekend said he had no desire to repair the relationship, which he said was over. He warned there would be 'serious consequences' if Musk financed candidates to run against Republicans who voted in favor of the president's domestic policy bill. But on Monday, Trump made some conciliatory comments about Musk and Tesla. "I'd have no problem with it," Trump said at a White House event on Monday when asked if he would be willing to speak with Musk. "I'd imagine he wants to speak with me." He added, "I wish him well, very well actually." The Tesla CEO has also conceded that he regrets some of his social media posts about Trump, saying on Wednesday that they "went too far". Wedbush technology analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note on Monday that he doesn't expect Trump and Musk to fully patch their soured relationship but would not be surprised if it improved in the months ahead. At the end of the day, Ives wrote, "Trump needs Musk to stay close to the Republican party and Musk needs Trump for many reasons," including a federal framework for autonomous vehicles. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data

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