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FAIRFAX, Va. , Nov. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- GovCIO Media & Research , a leading federal technology media company, opened the Flywheel Award nominations for the 2025 Defense IT Summit. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there's one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas. That's because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory. The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn't been enforced since 2018. Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn't touch it. “Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t work out so well.” Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his thinking, the state was like a store owner who fears getting robbed and installs locks. But in 2014, after the birth of his now 11-year-old son inspired him to be “a little more responsible” and follow politics, he didn’t have an acceptable copy of his birth certificate to get registered to vote in Kansas. “The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state over the law. “You caught a bunch of people who didn’t do anything wrong.” Kansas' experience appeared to receive little if any attention outside the state as Republicans elsewhere pursued proof-of-citizenship requirements this year. Arizona enacted a requirement this year, applying it to voting for state and local elections but not for Congress or president. The Republican-led U.S. House passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the summer and plans to bring back similar legislation after the GOP won control of the Senate in November. In Ohio, the Republican secretary of state revised the form that poll workers use for voter eligibility challenges to require those not born in the U.S. to show naturalization papers to cast a regular ballot. A federal judge declined to block the practice days before the election. Also, sizable majorities of voters in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and the presidential swing states of North Carolina and Wisconsin were inspired to amend their state constitutions' provisions on voting even though the changes were only symbolic. Provisions that previously declared that all U.S. citizens could vote now say that only U.S. citizens can vote — a meaningless distinction with no practical effect on who is eligible. To be clear, voters already must attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and noncitizens can face fines, prison and deportation if they lie and are caught. “There is nothing unconstitutional about ensuring that only American citizens can vote in American elections,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, of Texas, the leading sponsor of the congressional proposal, said in an email statement to The Associated Press. After Kansas residents challenged their state's law, both a federal judge and federal appeals court concluded that it violated a law limiting states to collecting only the minimum information needed to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. That's an issue Congress could resolve. The courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of an actual problem, Kansas couldn't justify a law that kept hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for every noncitizen who was improperly registered. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 noncitizens had registered to vote from 1999 through 2012 — an average of just three a year. In 2013, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who had built a national reputation advocating tough immigration laws, described the possibility of voting by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly backs the idea, arguing that federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost certainly got it wrong.” Kobach also said a key issue in the legal challenge — people being unable to fix problems with their registrations within a 90-day window — has probably been solved. “The technological challenge of how quickly can you verify someone’s citizenship is getting easier,” Kobach said. “As time goes on, it will get even easier.” The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Kansas case in 2020. But in August, it split 5-4 in allowing Arizona to continue enforcing its law for voting in state and local elections while a legal challenge goes forward. Seeing the possibility of a different Supreme Court decision in the future, U.S. Rep.-elect Derek Schmidt says states and Congress should pursue proof-of-citizenship requirements. Schmidt was the Kansas attorney general when his state's law was challenged. "If the same matter arose now and was litigated, the facts would be different," he said in an interview. But voting rights advocates dismiss the idea that a legal challenge would turn out differently. Mark Johnson, one of the attorneys who fought the Kansas law, said opponents now have a template for a successful court fight. “We know the people we can call," Johnson said. “We know that we’ve got the expert witnesses. We know how to try things like this.” He predicted "a flurry — a landslide — of litigation against this.” Initially, the Kansas requirement's impacts seemed to fall most heavily on politically unaffiliated and young voters. As of fall 2013, 57% of the voters blocked from registering were unaffiliated and 40% were under 30. But Fish was in his mid-30s, and six of the nine residents who sued over the Kansas law were 35 or older. Three even produced citizenship documents and still didn’t get registered, according to court documents. “There wasn’t a single one of us that was actually an illegal or had misinterpreted or misrepresented any information or had done anything wrong,” Fish said. He was supposed to produce his birth certificate when he sought to register in 2014 while renewing his Kansas driver's license at an office in a strip mall in Lawrence. A clerk wouldn't accept the copy Fish had of his birth certificate. He still doesn't know where to find the original, having been born on an Air Force base in Illinois that closed in the 1990s. Several of the people joining Fish in the lawsuit were veterans, all born in the U.S., and Fish said he was stunned that they could be prevented from registering. Liz Azore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said millions of Americans haven't traveled outside the U.S. and don't have passports that might act as proof of citizenship, or don't have ready access to their birth certificates. She and other voting rights advocates are skeptical that there are administrative fixes that will make a proof-of-citizenship law run more smoothly today than it did in Kansas a decade ago. “It’s going to cover a lot of people from all walks of life,” Avore said. “It’s going to be disenfranchising large swaths of the country.”

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A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in a few short months, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok's petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company's challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment. “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court's opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, though its unclear whether the court will take up the case. “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue," TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” Hughes said. Unless stopped, he argued the statute “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.” Though the case is squarely in the court system, its also possible the two companies might be thrown some sort of a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he is now against such action . The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a years-long saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China. The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits , that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect — a concern mirrored by the European Union on Friday as it scrutinizes the video-sharing app’s role in the Romanian elections. TikTok, which sued the government over the law in May, has long denied it could be used by Beijing to spy on or manipulate Americans. Its attorneys have accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S. They have also argued the law is predicated on future risks, which the Department of Justice has emphasized pointing in part to unspecified action it claims the two companies have taken in the past due to demands from the Chinese government. Friday’s ruling came after the appeals court panel, composed of two Republican and one Democrat appointed judges, heard oral arguments in September. In the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, the panel appeared to grapple with how TikTok’s foreign ownership affects its rights under the Constitution and how far the government could go to curtail potential influence from abroad on a foreign-owned platform. On Friday, all three of them denied TikTok’s petition. In the court's ruling, Ginsburg, a Republican appointee, rejected TikTok's main legal arguments against the law, including that the statute was an unlawful bill of attainder or a taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment. He also said the law did not violate the First Amendment because the government is not looking to "suppress content or require a certain mix of content” on TikTok. “Content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing,” Ginsburg wrote, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China. Judge Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge on the court, issued a concurring opinion. TikTok’s lawsuit was consolidated with a second legal challenge brought by several content creators - for which the company is covering legal costs - as well as a third one filed on behalf of conservative creators who work with a nonprofit called BASED Politics Inc. Other organizations, including the Knight First Amendment Institute, had also filed amicus briefs supporting TikTok. “This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans’ access to information, ideas, and media from abroad,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the organization. “We hope that the appeals court’s ruling won’t be the last word.” Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers who had pushed for the legislation celebrated the court's ruling. "I am optimistic that President Trump will facilitate an American takeover of TikTok to allow its continued use in the United States and I look forward to welcoming the app in America under new ownership,” said Republican Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, chairman of the House Select Committee on China. Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who co-authored the law, said “it's time for ByteDance to accept” the law. To assuage concerns about the company’s owners, TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data. The company has also argued the government’s broader concerns could have been resolved in a draft agreement it provided the Biden administration more than two years ago during talks between the two sides. It has blamed the government for walking away from further negotiations on the agreement, which the Justice Department argues is insufficient. Attorneys for the two companies have claimed it’s impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically. They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm - the platform’s secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan - would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content. Still, some investors, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire Frank McCourt, have expressed interest in purchasing the platform. Both men said earlier this year that they were launching a consortium to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business. This week, a spokesperson for McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative, which aims to protect online privacy, said unnamed participants in their bid have made informal commitments of more than $20 billion in capital.

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J.D. Vance's new home with wife Usha includes a swimming pool that Biden 'loved' to use for skinny dipping Vice presidents live at the Naval Observatory, two miles from White House Residence includes six bedrooms, a wrap-around porch and heated pool By EMILY GOODIN, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT Published: 15:56, 23 November 2024 | Updated: 16:01, 23 November 2024 e-mail View comments J.D. Vance , wife Usha and their three children are packing up to live in their new residence - a 9,000 square foot home on the 80-acre Naval Observatory with a tree swing and a swimming pool. A swimming pool Joe Biden is obsessed with. And loved to use for skinny dipping when he lived there. Joe and Jill Biden resided at One Naval Observatory for eight years when he was vice president under Barack Obama . And, even as president, he still talks about the place, including its private, heated swimming pool. 'You're on 80 acres, overlooking the rest of the city, and you can walk out, there's a swimming pool, you can walk off the porch in the summer and jump in the pool and go into work,' Biden said at a CNN town hall during the first year of his presidency. 'You can ride a bicycle around and never leave the property. You can work out, but the White House is very different,' he noted. And Biden reportedly jumped into that pool naked, Secret Service agents told author Ron Kessler for his 2014 book about the agency. 'Agents say that, whether at the vice president's residence or at his home in Delaware , Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,' Kessler wrote in his book, The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents . 'Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,' he noted. J.D. and Usha Vance (above) will move in the Vice President's residence in January The vice president's house - known as One Naval Observatory, has a private, heated pool The White House also has a swimming pool but it's behind the Oval Office patio, which means it would be almost impossible for Biden to skinny dip without baring all before the West Wing staff. Biden even told his successor Mike Pence and his family to enjoy the vice presidential swimming pool, calling it one of his favorite perks. Read More Who is JD Vance's wife, Usha? Meet the woman behind Donald Trump's vice presidential pick Karen and Mike Pence used it often as part of their exercise routine. 'It's great,' Karen Pence told Washington Life magazine in 2017 when she was second lady. 'That's the thing that Joe Biden said to us as he got into the limo and left the Capitol on inauguration day — he said, 'you're gonna love the pool.' Biden, as vice president, said his favorite vice president was Dan Quayle, who installed the pool at the residence. 'No can say a negative thing about Dan Quayle,' he told reporters in 2010, adding Quayle 'built that pool.' 'He's my favorite vice president,' said Biden. 'And my granddaughters love it.' Biden even dubbed it 'the Dan Quayle swimming pool.' Naomi, Finnegan and Maisey - the daughters of Hunter Biden - lived with their parents in Washington D.C. when Joe Biden was president. They frequently visited their grandparents at the Naval Observatory. Joe BIden, as a vice president, would host pool parties where he used a super soaker The 9,000 square foot vice presidential residence has six bedrooms Biden, as vice president, bragged about his living conditions: 'I voted all those years for public housing. I didn't know it was gonna be this good.' The vice presidential residence is technically public property. It sits on the United States Naval Observatory, a Navy base that is one of the oldest scientific research areas in the country. It remains the country's leading facility for astronomical and timing data and is a center for navigational information. Only two miles from the White House, Vance will have a short commute, particularly since he'll be traveling in a motorcade. There's also plenty of room for him, his three children Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel and the family dog Atlas. The Queen Anne style house is 9,150 square feet with 33 rooms, seven wood-burning fireplaces, a library and solarium. It has six bedrooms and a wrap around porch. There's also sweeping grounds with plenty of room for Atlas to run and the children to play. And it's completely private. Unlike the White House, there are no public tours of the vice pesidential residence although the public can sign up for tours of the observatory itself to see the giant telescope and scientific library. The home was built in 1893 for the Naval Observatory's superintendent. The three-story house cost approximately $20,000 to build. It began housing its chief of naval operations in 1923 and became the vice presidential residence in the 1970s. Vice President Walter Mondale, who served under President Jimmy Carter, became the first vice president to live there full-time. J.D. Vance and Usha with Evan, Vivek, and Mirabel Dick Cheney, as vice president, dressed up his labrador retrievers Jackson (left as Darth Vader) and Dave (right as Superman) for Halloween Al Gore, as vice president, and wife Tipper held big Halloween events where they would dress in costume - above the couple in 1998 dressed as mummies Many vice presidents have hosted receptions there as part of their official duties. The Pences and the Bidens each hosted parties for military families. The Bidens held summer barbeques for supporters and press that would feature Joe Biden running around with a super soaker. Al and Tipper Gore were famous for their Halloween events, which Dick and Lynne Cheney continued. The vice presidents and spouses who lived there have add their personal touches. Joe Biden surprised Jill with a tree swing for Valentine's Day in 2010. The commemorative plaque on the tree reads 'Joe loves Jill. Valentine's Day 2010.' Karen Pence installed a bee hive. Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, added a white mezuzah - a small scroll of Hebrew text from the Torah in a decorative case - on the right side of the doorway of their residence. The Vance family will move into the residence on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025. Politics Mike Pence JD Vance Joe Biden Share or comment on this article: J.D. Vance's new home with wife Usha includes a swimming pool that Biden 'loved' to use for skinny dipping e-mail Add comment

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