News & Commentary

The ACLU of Kansas brought attention to a bill that proposes “proposes an old-fashioned literacy test, with a curriculum that includes the very Constitution bills like this one contradict, before individuals can exit probation, fully reenter community, or vote.”

Kansas ACLU policy director Aileen Berquist said runoff elections discouraged voter engagement and were based on discriminatory practices that began in the Jim Crow era to disenfranchise Black voters.

The past two years have been the deadliest for transgender people in recent history, in large part due to the rapidly increasing number of legislative attacks against trans peoples’ rights and the resurgence of demeaning and harmful anti-trans rhetoric in our communities. Kansas is no exception.

“This is an extremely harmful and antagonistic bill that would ban medically necessary, safe, and evidence-based medical care, and lead to negative mental and physical health outcomes for both cisgender and transgender Kansans,” said ACLU legal fellow D.C. Hiegert.

“We would hope that legislators listen to what voters had to say with their overwhelming vote on the August ballot initiative,” said Aileen Berquist, policy director at the ACLU of Kansas.

Organization wants to eliminate fees for children and legalize medical marijuana

Nickolaus Hernandez, city manager in Dodge City, said in a statement that the lawsuit does not give a complete picture of the city’s method of at-large commission elections and municipal activities “as it relates to several other cities of the same size and structure across Kansas.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas executive director Micah Kubic said the [St. Mary's city] commission had "toed the line of authoritarian censorship."

This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina congressional gerrymandering case. The Moore case hinges on a fringe, extreme legal proposition known as the “independent state legislature theory.”