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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul seeks expanded involuntary commitment laws over violent crimes on subway

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul seeks expanded involuntary commitment laws over violent crimes on subway

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is looking to expand the state’s involuntary commitment laws to allow hospitals to force more people with mental health problems into treatment. This comes in response to a series of violent crimes in the New York City subway system. Hochul said Friday she wants to introduce legislation during the coming legislative session to amend mental health care laws to address the recent surge of violent crimes on the subway. “Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious untreated mental illness, the result of a failure to get treatment to people who are living on the streets and are disconnected from our mental health care system,” the governor said. HOCHUL’S CHRISTMASTIME BOAST OF SAFER SUBWAY CAME AMID STRING OF ALARMING VIOLENT ATTACKS “We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing to do is to get our fellow New Yorkers the help they need,” she continued. Mental health experts say that most people with mental illness are not violent and are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to carry out a violent crime. The governor did not provide details on what her legislation would change. “Currently, hospitals are able to commit individuals whose mental illness puts themselves or others at risk of serious harm, and this legislation will expand that definition to ensure more people receive the care they need,” she said. Hochul also said she would introduce another bill to improve the process in which courts can order people to undergo assisted outpatient treatments for mental illness and make it easier for people to voluntarily sign up for those treatments. The governor said she is “deeply grateful” to law enforcement who every day “fight to keep our subways safe.” But she said “we can’t fully address this problem without changes to state law.” “Public safety is my top priority and I will do everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe,” she said. State law currently allows police to compel people to be taken to hospitals for evaluation if they appear to be suffering from mental illness and their behavior presents a risk of physical harm to themselves or others. Psychiatrists must then determine if the patients need to be involuntarily hospitalized. New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman said requiring more people to be placed into involuntary commitment “doesn’t make us safer, it distracts us from addressing the roots of our problems, and it threatens New Yorkers’ rights and liberties.” Hochul’s statement comes after a series of violent crimes in New York City’s subways, including an incident on New Year’s Eve when a man shoved another man onto subway tracks ahead of an incoming train, on Christmas Eve when a man slashed two people with a knife in Manhattan’s Grand Central subway station and on Dec. 22 when a suspect lit a sleeping woman on fire and burned her to death. NYC MAN CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER AFTER ALLEGEDLY SHOVING COMMUTER IN PATH OF SUBWAY The medical histories of the suspects in those three incidents were not immediately clear, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has said the man accused of the knife attack in Grand Central had a history of mental illness and the father of the suspect who shoved a man onto the tracks told The New York Times that he had become concerned about his son’s mental health in the weeks prior to the incident. Adams has spent the past few years urging the state Legislature to expand mental health care laws and has previously supported a policy that would allow hospitals to involuntarily commit a person who is unable to meet their own basic needs for food, clothing, shelter or medical care. “Denying a person life-saving psychiatric care because their mental illness prevents them from recognizing their desperate need for it is an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibility,” the mayor said in a statement after Hochul’s announcement. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders hits out at H-1B visa program for replacing American jobs with ‘indentured servants’

Bernie Sanders hits out at H-1B visa program for replacing American jobs with ‘indentured servants’

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is taking aim at the controversial H-1B visa program, arguing that it replaces “good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad” — just as the program is at the center of a debate within the Republican Party. “The main function of the H-1B visa program and other guest worker initiatives is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad,” Sanders wrote on X. “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.” The self-described democratic socialist has a history of opposing the program, which allows U.S. companies to hire foreign workers for specialty occupations. It is predominantly used by the tech industry, but has faced criticism mainly from the right that it brings in cheap labor from abroad to replace American workers. TRUMP SAYS HE’S NOT CHANGED HIS MIND ON H-1B VISAS AS DEBATE RAGES WITHIN MAGA COALITION The program recently became part of an intra-Republican debate when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have been tapped by Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, argued for the importance of foreign workers for tech companies. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk said on X. That reopened a rift between those on the right over the program and whether it is being used to attract the best talent or being used by companies to bring in cheaper labor, primarily from India, who are tied to their job by the visa. Sanders cited statistics to show that in 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations using the program laid off over 85,000 American workers, while hiring over 34,000 H-1B workers, and that 33% of new IT jobs are filled by foreign national guest workers. He also pointed to layoffs at Tesla, one of Musk’s companies. ERIC SCHMITT BLASTS ‘ABUSE’ OF H-1B VISA PROGRAM, SAYS AMERICANS ‘SHOULDN’T TRAIN THEIR FOREIGN REPLACEMENTS’ “If this program is really supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers?” he said. “Can we really not find English teachers in America?” Sanders conceded that there may be labor shortages that could be filled by H-1B workers, but he called for substantially increased guest worker fees in order to pay for opportunities for Americans, as well as other reforms, including increased minimum wages and the ability to easily move jobs. “Bottom line. It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker,” he said. TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MOVES TO CHANGE H-1B GUEST WORKER PROGRAM TO PRIORITIZE HIGHER-WAGE APPLICANTS Sanders said that the “economic elite and political establishments” promised in the 1990s that a loss of blue-collar jobs due to free trade agreements would be offset by more white-collar IT jobs. “Well, that turned out to be a Big Lie. Not only have corporations exported millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, they are now importing hundreds of thousands of low-paid guest workers from abroad to fill the white-collar technology jobs that are available,” he said. Sanders comments come days after President-elect Trump, who had railed against H-1B abuse during the 2016 campaign, said that he has always supported the program.  “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he told the New York Post.

Speaker Johnson faces year of tight votes and acrimony: ‘A lot of expectations’

Speaker Johnson faces year of tight votes and acrimony: ‘A lot of expectations’

While the high-stakes fight to lead the House of Representatives is over, Speaker Mike Johnson’s politically perilous year is just beginning. Winning the speaker’s gavel was no easy feat considering Johnson, R-La., had no Democratic support and could only lose one fellow Republican, thanks to the House GOP’s razor-thin majority. All House Republicans except for Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted for Johnson on Friday afternoon. Two GOP lawmakers who had initially voted for someone other than Johnson, Reps. Keith Self, R-Texas, and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., were eventually persuaded to switch their votes after speaking with Johnson and President-elect Trump. Johnson will have to navigate a similarly slim margin over the next few months as he helps carry out what President-elect Donald Trump promised would be a very active first 100 days of his new administration. REPUBLICANS GIVE DETAILS FROM CLOSED-DOOR MEETINGS WITH DOGE’S MUSK, RAMASWAMY “There’s a lot of expectations and potential pitfalls,” Marc Short, who served as director of legislative affairs during the first Trump administration, told Fox News Digital in an interview late last month.  Just the first half of 2025 alone is expected to see at least three separate fiscal fights. Johnson, meanwhile, is set to lose two House Republicans – Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida. Both members are joining the Trump administration at the end of this month. It will reduce his House GOP majority to just 217 seats, compared to 215 for Democrats, which means Republicans will need to vote in lock-step to pass any bills on a party-line vote.  Special elections to replace Waltz and retired Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., are set for April. An election to replace Stefanik has not yet been set. Meanwhile, Republicans are gunning to pass two massive conservative policy and spending overhauls via a process called “reconciliation,” which lowers the threshold for passage in the Senate from 60 votes to a simple majority for certain budgetary issues. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to use reconciliation to pass significant fiscal policy changes that the other side normally opposes, meaning it takes extraordinary levels of intra-party cooperation in both the House and Senate. “There’s huge expectations on budget reconciliation, and that’s really hard, even when you’ve got wide margins. To think you’re going to do it twice in a year with those margins, I think is an enormously high expectation that seems to be unreasonable,” Short told Fox News Digital. “And add onto that another funding bill in three months, plus a debt ceiling fight.” Along with reconciliation bills – which are unlikely to get much, if any, Democratic support – Republicans will also have to grapple with the government funding deadline they just punted to March 14. DANIEL PENNY TO BE TAPPED FOR CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL BY HOUSE GOP LAWMAKER House and Senate lawmakers passed a short-term extension of fiscal year (FY) 2024’s government funding levels in December to give negotiators more time to hash out the rest of FY 2025. Congress will risk plunging the government into a partial shutdown if the House and Senate does not pass another funding extension or set new priorities for the remainder of FY 2025 by then. The next government funding deadline will come at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. That’s not all Johnson will have to focus on during those months, however. A bipartisan agreement struck in 2023 suspended the U.S. debt limit through January 2025 – after which the Treasury Department will be forced to take “extraordinary measures” to avoid a national credit default. The debt limit refers to how much debt the U.S. government can accrue while making expenditures it has already committed to. As of Christmas Eve, the national debt — which measures what the U.S. owes its creditors — fell to $36,161,621,015,445.57, according to the latest numbers published by the Treasury Department.  Raising the debt limit is also traditionally a fraught political battle, with both Republicans and Democrats seeking any possible leverage to attach their own policy goals to the negotiations. A recent model produced by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) projects the Treasury’s “extraordinary measures” will carry the U.S. through mid-June or earlier, giving Congress potentially six months to act.