New Texas laws underway

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Starting Sept. 1, residents of Texas have a slew of recent legal guidelines they want to concentrate on. A whole bunch of payments had been accepted in the course of the 2023 legislative session masking subjects from schooling fairness and inclusion workplaces to new highway measures. Legislators additionally decided learn how to spend the $321.3 billion state finances — utilizing it to pay for infrastructure, broadband and tax cuts.

Right here’s a have a look at among the extra notable legal guidelines:

Medicaid

HB 12 expands Medicaid protection to 12 months after childbirth for low-income Texans. Whereas the legislation technically took impact in June, its future hinges on federal approval, which has but to be granted.

Faculties

SB 17 bans range, fairness and inclusion workplaces in addition to diversity-related coaching or applications provided by increased schooling facilities within the state.

Voting

SB 1599 requires election officers to inform voters if there are errors of their mail-in ballots or poll purposes and to allow them to know learn how to submit appropriate kinds by way of mail, on-line or in individual.

HB 357 adjustments the data voters want to supply to make use of the state’s on-line monitoring software to maintain observe of their mail-in poll.

LGBTQ

SB 12 will criminalize performers and companies that host sexually specific exhibits carried out in entrance of youngsters. Lawmakers selected to take away language from the invoice that aimed it straight at drag performers however left in language concerning equipment that “exaggerate male or feminine sexual traits.”

SB 15 bars transgender school athletes from competing on a sports activities staff that doesn’t align with the intercourse they had been assigned at start. The legislation particularly applies to video games that occur between faculties and never intramural sports activities.

Highway legal guidelines

Home Invoice 1885 got here from a 2021 pileup of 133 autos brought on by poor visibility and slippery circumstances. It will permit Texas Division of Transportation engineers to quickly modify freeway or highway velocity limits primarily based on climate circumstances or highway development with out permission from the state’s transportation commissioners.

Faculties

SB 17 bans range, fairness and inclusion workplaces in addition to diversity-related coaching or applications provided by increased schooling facilities within the state.

Abortion

SB 24 funds a community of disaster being pregnant facilities — a few of them religiously affiliated — all through Texas as a part of the state’s Alternate options to Abortion program.

Native authorities

HB 2126, signed in June, retains cities and counties from creating native ordinances that transcend what already exists in state legislation.

HB 17 will cease elected prosecutors who don’t need to pursue sure instances.

Web

HB 9 goals to broaden web availability, telecommunications companies and 911 companies to rural Texans by allocating $1.5 billion to an infrastructure fund.

Medicine

HB 6 permits prosecutors to pursue homicide fees towards Texans who’ve offered somebody a deadly dose of fentanyl by classifying the overdose as “poisoning.”