August 10,  Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced that confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, will begin September 4 as Senate Republicans aim to have him confirmed by October, ahead of the midterm elections. Reproductive rights, civil rights and LGBT rights organizations have strongly opposed Kavanagh’s nomination based on his conservative, anti-choice record.

Reproductive rights advocates have widely expressed concern that Kavanaugh’s appointment will provide the right-leaning Court a decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion a constitutionally protected right. Most Democrats have publicly opposed his nomination, particularly since Kavanaugh’s work history records are still under review. A breakdown of the confirmation process is available here.

August 22, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduced the Maternal Care Access and Reducing Emergencies (CARE) Act, a bill that would allocate spending to address racial bias in health care settings that makes Black women in the U.S. three to four times more likely than white women to die immediately before or after child birth.

The bill would create two new grant programs that would give $5 million for bias training at medical schools and health programs, specifically focusing on obstetrics and gynecology, and $25 million for states to incentivize health care providers to reduce mortality rates and racial disparities. The bill would also require the National Academy of Medicine to recommend ways for medical schools to test for implicit bias in the exams taken by students.

In February, Texas led several other conservative states in filing a lawsuit arguing that, since  Republicans in Congress successfully repealed the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual mandate which required everyone to have insurance or pay a penalty in their 2017 tax bill, the mandate and the entire law are unconstitutional and should be repealed.

Instead of defending the ACA, the current law, the Department of Justice (DOJ) backed the states in the lawsuit and is arguing that that the mandate and ACA protections that prohibited insurers from charging higher rates and denying coverage for people with preexisting conditions should be repealed. Oral argument for the case are set to begin September 10. 

If the administration’s arguments are successful, insurers will again be able to deny coverage based on people’s health status.

August 14, consumer protection groups filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and senior officials responsible for approving and implementing the AR Works Amendment, an amendment to Arkansas’s section 1115 Medicaid waiver, which imposed work requirements on Medicaid recipients in the state.

This lawsuit comes six weeks after a federal court judge ruled that Kentucky could not require Medicaid recipients to work or lose their coverage. Several other states began applying for section 1115 waivers to implement work requirements last year.

Because the waivers are intended to give states more flexibility to experiment with ways to improve Medicaid coverage, the central issue at the heart of the Kentucky and Arkansas lawsuits is whether work requirements are a misuse of the waiver, since they do not improve coverage and instead restrict it.

Indiana is currently the only other state with approval for Medicaid work requirements. Several other states’ applications are pending.

August 17, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced an amendment to H.R. 6157, the Senate appropriations bill for Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, that would prohibit any federal funds from going to clinics that also provide abortions.

Currently, a provision called the Hyde Amendment already prevents federal funds from going toward abortion services. Paul’s proposed amendment however, would go further and cut funding that clinics offering abortions rely on to provide STI testing, cancer screenings, birth control and wellness exams to low-income individuals who would otherwise be unable to access care.

In late July, House Democrats introduced a new bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). First enacted in 1994, VAWA aims to address sexual assault, stalking, dating violence and domestic violence by providing grants to organizations and law enforcement programs that work with survivors and on prevention.

The new bill goes further by expanding housing protections for survivors and creating a Violence Against Women director position within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Most prominently, the new bill also provides grants for alternative justice, veering away from a traditional criminal justice response. VAWA is set to expire on September 30.

July 25, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced the No Money Bail Act of 2018 in the Senate, with the House companion bill being introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA). The aim of the bill is to end the use of cash bail in federal criminal proceedings and to provide grants to states that also want to shift away from the use of money bail.

Low-income people and people of color are disproportionately impacted by cash bail, and are often jailed for long periods of time simply because of inability to pay, extending separation from employment, school, community and family. For people living with HIV, being detained without the ability to make bail can cause a disruption in critical care and treatment.

August 3, Judge John Bates, a federal judge in Washington D.C., ordered that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program be fully restored after ruling that the administration did not adequately justify ending the program back in September 2017. This is the third federal court to find that the administration improperly ended DACA, putting thousands of immigrant youth at risk of being deported.

Judge Bates initially paused the order to restore DACA in April and gave the administration 90 days to explain why it thought DACA was an unlawful program. Judge Bates gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 20 days to appeal; otherwise, DACA would be restored August 23.

However, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) argued that fully restarting DACA would mean a delay in admissions of other immigrants into the U.S. In response, Judge Bates has ordered that DACA renewals be processed but is not requiring USCIS to start processing new DACA applications.

In June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a ruling that essentially prevents survivors of domestic and gang violence from being granted asylum in the U.S. Afterwards, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit challenging Sessions’ ruling on behalf of a group of survivors facing deportation.

August 9, a Washington D.C. federal court judge ordered a halt to their pending deportations. The ruling came after news that DHS had deported a mother and her daughter who had petitioned for asylum–despite DHS’s own assurances that they would not be deported while the case was still being argued in court. Both mother and daughter were later returned to the U.S. after the judge threatened to hold Sessions in contempt of court.

Last year, Trump suggested lowering the annual refugee cap (the number of refugees accepted into the U.S.) from 50,000 per year to 5,000 per year. Ultimately, the administration chose to drop the cap to 45,000, the lowest the cap has been since the program started in 1980. Now, a group of aides, led by notoriously anti-immigrant White House advisor Stephen Miller (who helped implement the Muslim ban and family separation policy), is considering a cap of 15,000 refugees for 2019.

August 22, a federal judge in Tallahassee ruled in favor of Reiyn Keohane, a transgender woman, who was denied hormone treatment and other necessary medical care for her gender dysphoria by the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC). The DOC also refused Keohane’s request to groom and dress like the other incarcerated women at her facility. Her head was forcibly shaved, and her clothes were confiscated.

The ACLU brought a lawsuit on her behalf and the federal court judge found that it was medically necessary for Keohane to socially transition and be allowed to groom and dress by the same standards applied to the other woman in the facility.

August 23, a federal judge in Tallahassee stated that detaining someone because they cannot afford to pay bail is a violation of Florida law. The statement comes in the middle of a pending lawsuit filed against the State of Florida and Leon County and Sheriff Walt McNeil by the ACLU.

The judge has not issued a final ruling on the case yet and has instead asked the ACLU attorney to determine how many people were held in Leon County for inability to pay and could be included in the lawsuit. The ACLU is looking to include as many as 250 impacted people as part of the case.

Mississippi first petitioned to add work requirements to its Medicaid program in November 2017. It already required parents to have extremely low incomes to qualify for Medicaid. The proposed work requirement would have put Medicaid-eligible parents in the position of potentially losing coverage if they made no money but also potentially losing coverage if they made any “non-trivial” amount of money.

In May, Mississippi sent a revised petition, this time offering a few extra months of Medicaid coverage for parents who end up losing coverage after complying with requirements. If the work requirement is approved, it will cause a large segment of the state’s population to lose coverage. The public comment period for the revised petition closed on August 18.

It is likely that the ultimate decision will be influenced by the court case blocking Kentucky’s work requirement petition.

August 7, Missouri voters successfully blocked an anti-union law in their state primary. So-called “right-to-work” laws prevent unions from requiring employees who choose not to join the union but benefit from union-negotiated contracts to pay a reduced “fair share” fee, which helps cover the cost of contract negotiation and enforcement.

When a union engages in collective bargaining with an employer, a win for the union benefits all employees, whether those employees are part of the union or not. The problem with so-called “right-to-work laws” is that when employees can get the benefits of collective bargaining with no requirement to contribute to the union, it reduces union participation, thereby weakening the union’s leverage and ability to negotiate effectively with employers.

Unions have been a target for corporations and conservative elected officials for decades because they increase the power of workers to control their working conditions, improve their pay and benefits, and to support candidates who advocate for workers’ rights.

In early August, Pennsylvania’s Human Rights Commission announced it would recognize the state’s anti-sex discrimination protections to include the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity. This decision comes after Michigan’s Human Rights Commission made a similar decision in May.

While there are no comprehensive statewide nondiscrimination protections in Pennsylvania, individual occurrences of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity can now be heard.