The Tenth

The Supreme Court opened its new term on Monday with a case that started in Colorado. In 2018, Boulder County and the City of Boulder sued Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil under Colorado law over local costs they tie to climate change. The Colorado Supreme Court let the suit go forward; now eight justices, with Justice Alito recused, will decide whether they can hear it now and whether federal law shu...

California lawmakers sent Governor Newsom two bills about the wait Los Angeles fire survivors face on their insurance claims, and not one lawmaker voted no on final passage. Senate Bill 877 would have spelled out that the claim documents insurers must hand over within 15 days include every valuation and loss calculation, preliminary or final. Senate Bill 878 would have put a 30-day clock, with int...

Before dawn, two strangers at a teenager’s bedroom door, hired to drive the kid to a residential treatment program, sometimes in handcuffs or a hood. On Tuesday, a Michigan Senate committee sent a bill to the full Senate that would ban the restraints and the middle-of-the-night pickup. Two days later, the U.S. Senate rejected the Iran war powers resolution the House passed in July, 49–50. In the s...

The House of Representatives cast its last votes before the November election on Wednesday evening. At 6:28 it sent a Russia sanctions bill to the President's desk, 262-159. Twenty-five minutes later it passed a data-center electricity bill 417-3. The next day's votes were cancelled, and the chamber emptied one day early into a seven-week recess. This week's episode is about what those two lopside...

If a California child opens a companion chatbot now, the product starts with persistent memory off, push notifications off, one hour per sitting and two hours a day. Those are the defaults Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law on September 10 as SB1119 — known in the statute itself as Adam's Law, for Adam Raine, whose parents sued OpenAI after his death. It was one of thirteen child online safety...

In March 2025 the South Carolina House passed the Public Expression Protection Act 112-0 — an anti-SLAPP bill that would have let people sued for speaking at a county council meeting get the case thrown out early. Seventeen months later the same bill number came back from the Senate with the free-speech text gone and roughly $350 million in local projects in its place. Governor Henry McMaster sign...

On April 13, 2021, in Byrnes Mill, Missouri, a drunk driver killed Lacey Newton, Cordell Williams, and their four-month-old son. Two of their children survived — Bentley, now nine, and Mason, now seven. Their grandmother, Cecilia Williams of Bonne Terre, is raising them, and she spent five years pushing for the law named for them. Bentley and Mason's Law took effect Friday, August 28: a Missouri c...

Most legislatures have gone home. This week the law moved in exactly two places — a governor's desk in Raleigh and a Senate floor in Sacramento racing an August 31 adjournment. On Monday, August 17, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein vetoed two bills on the same day: House Bill 377, which would let the state's chief justice suspend a trial judge without pay during a misconduct investigation, and House...

You were approved. Sometime in the spring a doctor said you needed a course of treatment, your insurer reviewed it, and the answer came back yes. Then, partway through — same condition, same prescription, same doctor — an envelope arrives saying it has to be reviewed again. Congress was in August recess and most legislatures went home months ago, so this was a week when deadlines and calendar date...

On Tuesday, Kansas voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the state's judicial nominating commission and elected Supreme Court justices directly — 375,347 to 236,764, about 61 percent to 39, out of 612,111 ballots. The measure had reached the ballot by clearing both chambers of the Kansas legislature at exactly the two-thirds minimum and not one vote more. The day bef...

A man in his seventies stands at a machine in a gas station just off a state highway, feeding it hundred-dollar bills while a voice on the phone calls itself a fraud investigator. Machines like that one were used in scams that took more than $389 million from Americans last year — and where investigators knew the victim's age, people 60 and older accounted for 86% of the money lost. As of August 1...

On Thursday, July 23, the House voted 214-208 to pull American forces out of hostilities with Iran — four Republicans crossing over. The same day, the Senate voted 47-49 against its own version. Both chambers were answering the same question, and the split had less to do with the answer than with the paperwork: the House passed a concurrent resolution, which never reaches the President and carries...

The two aircraft the United States flies into the eyewall of a hurricane were built in the mid-1970s — older than most of the crews aboard — and the entire hurricane-hunter fleet is just three planes. This week, with most statehouses gone for the summer, the busiest rooms in the country were Washington's committee rooms, and that aging fleet was on the agenda. The Senate took up the Hurricane Hunt...

After more than two years — an entire fiscal year with no spending plan at all, the only state in the country in that spot — North Carolina finally passed a full budget this week. Governor Josh Stein signed the $34.4 billion plan on July 7, and it lands where people feel it: an average 8% raise for teachers, with beginning salaries jumping from $41,000 to $48,000, plus $700 million more for Hurric...

July 1st is the day a year of legislation stops being paper and starts governing. This week a wave of new state laws took effect across the country — and in Indiana, one of them meant a household behind on its electric bill could no longer have the power, and the air conditioning, shut off on a day the heat index is forecast to hit 95 degrees. That's House Bill 1002, and it passed with 24 bipartis...

This week the U.S. Senate passed a war powers resolution ordering American forces out of hostilities with Iran, fifty to forty-eight, with four Republicans crossing the aisle. It's the first time such a resolution has cleared the chamber after earlier attempts were voted down. But it's a concurrent resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 86, the kind that passes both chambers without going to the...

This week Hawaii became the first state in the country to bar corporations from spending money to influence elections — a law its own sponsors wrote as a direct challenge to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Governor Josh Green signed it; it takes effect in July 2027, and the state expects a court fight. That set the texture for the whole week: state legislatures building backstops — t...

This week New York became the first state in the country to hit pause on new large data centers — the warehouses of servers powering the AI boom, each drawing electricity by the small city's worth. The legislature passed it by wide margins (Assembly 103-38, Senate 43-17), and wrote in a rule with a direct line to your kitchen table: when a data center needs a costly grid upgrade, the data cent...

By seven votes—215 to 208—the U.S. House voted to order American forces out of the fighting with Iran, the first time a war powers resolution has cleared a chamber in the three months since the conflict began. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to make it happen. It was a week the laboratories of democracy spent drawing the line — the mark that says this far, and no further. In the same seven days...

For a hundred and sixty-five years, Rhode Island's law books have quietly carried the state's 1861 ratification of the Corwin Amendment—a proposed amendment that would have made slavery permanent and beyond the reach of Congress. This week, a bill to repeal that ratification finally got its hearing. It set the tone for the whole week: state legislatures down in the fine print, the clauses and surc...

You know the Sunday shows. Half the hour is a politician dodging the question, the other half, pundits guessing who wins the next election, and none of it ever leaves Washington. The Tenth is the opposite. Same Sunday morning slot, 20 minutes, non-partisan: the bills actually moving through America’s 50 statehouses and Congress, what they do, and what changes for the people who live under them. No...

By four votes—216 to 212—the U.S. House voted to weaken the Clean Air Act for the first time in its 55-year history. The EPA scrapped the first federal limits on four PFAS “forever chemicals,” the Supreme Court narrowed the Voting Rights Act 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais , and Congress again punted on the Section 702 surveillance program. In Washington this week, the work was demolition. In the stat...

Maryland just became the first state in the country to ban surveillance pricing in food retail. House Bill 895 stops grocery stores and delivery apps from using algorithms or personal data to charge different shoppers different prices for the same gallon of milk—House 100-31, Senate 41-1, signed by Governor Wes Moore on April 28. It happened in the same week the Department of Homeland Security qui...

Florida just redrew its congressional map four years ahead of the next census, flipping its delegation from 20-to-8 Republican to a projected 24-to-4—and three lawsuits were filed within hours of the bill's passage. Two days later, the Wall Street Journal reported the White House is pressuring Southern Republican leaders to redraw their maps mid-decade too. Within 48 hours, twenty-five South Carol...

Two floors moved this week. The federal floor came down. The state floors went up. Maryland became the first state in America to ban surveillance pricing—the practice of using your personal data to charge you a different price than the shopper next to you. Governor Wes Moore signed HB 895 with a 100-31 House vote and a 41-1 Senate vote. Washington banned noncompetes statewide after the FTC walked...