Rep. Josh Gottheimer is leading the effort in the House to modernize how a President is elected. Gottheimer, with Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), recently introduced the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act as well as the Presidential Transition Improvement Act to reform and modernize the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The bicameral legislation is being sponsored in the Senate by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). “With this bipartisan, bicameral legislation, both sides of the aisle are coming together to protect our great democracy, preserve the integrity of our elections, and prevent any attempts to undermine them. Our nation’s future depends on it and the time to act is now,” said Gottheimer. North-JerseyNews.com
New videos show allies of Donald Trump and contractors who were working on his behalf handling sensitive voting equipment in a rural Georgia county weeks after the 2020 election. The footage, which was made public as part of long-running litigation over Georgia’s voting system, raises new questions about efforts by Trump affiliates in a number of swing states to gain access to and copy sensitive election software, with the help of friendly local election administrators. One such incident took place on Jan. 7 of last year, the day after supporters of Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, when a small team traveled to rural Coffee County, GA. The New York Times
A White House lawyer in the Trump Administration warned Donald Trump last year that the former President could face legal liability if he did not return government materials he had taken with him when he left office, three people familiar with the matter said. The lawyer, Eric Herschmann, sought to impress upon Trump the seriousness of the issue and the potential for investigations and legal exposure if he did not return the documents, particularly any classified material. The account of the conversation is the latest evidence that Trump had been informed of the legal perils of holding onto material that is now at the heart of a Justice Department criminal investigation into his handling of the documents and the possibility that he or his aides engaged in obstruction. The New York Times
President Joe Biden firmly stated that the pandemic is over during an interview with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes Sept. 18, echoing those comments of the World Health Organization last week. Pelley noted the large crowd at the Detroit Auto Show and asked “is the pandemic over?” “The pandemic is over,” the President responded. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it… but the pandemic is over.” The declaration comes as New Jersey on Sept. 19 reported another 351 confirmed COVID-19 cases and four confirmed deaths. There were 807 patients with confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases reported at the state’s 70 of 71 hospitals. Of those hospitalized, 104 were in intensive care and 36 on ventilators. The rate of transmission was 1.04 and the positivity rate for tests conducted Sept. 14 was 11.5%. North-JerseyNews.com
Workers are returning to U.S. offices at the highest rate since the pandemic forced most workplaces to temporarily close. Office use on average was 47.5% of early 2020 levels for workers in the office over the five business days from Sept. 8 to Sept. 14 in the 10 major metro areas monitored by Kastle Systems. The company, which tracks security swipes into buildings, said that was the highest percentage since late-March 2020. Midweek days were especially strong, with office use for Tuesday and Wednesday last week at about 55% of the prepandemic workforce. The Wall Street Journal
Decades of underinvestment in public health information systems has crippled efforts to understand the pandemic, stranding crucial data in incompatible data systems so outmoded that information often must be repeatedly typed in by hand. The data failure, a salient lesson of a pandemic that has killed more than one million Americans, will be expensive and time-consuming to fix. Federal experts say the nation’s comparatively low vaccination rate is clearly a major factor in why the United States has recorded the highest COVID death rate among large, wealthy nations. But they are certain that the lack of comprehensive, timely data has exacted a heavy toll as well. The New York Times
Cooper University Hospital in Camden will undergo a $2 billion expansion that could take a decade to complete and will increase the number of people the facility will be able to treat. The project’s announcement Sept. 19, which brought together Gov. Phil Murphy and Chris Christie, was touted as the largest investment in the history of Camden. Three buildings will be added to the hospital of 9,000 employees, which officials said will help meet the current and future demand at the facility. The first building will be used for clinical care and education, while a later stage of the project will add more than 100 private rooms for patients. NJ.com
Rep. Josh Gottheimer fiercely advocated for the right to abortion in Hackensack Sept. 19, calling the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade “extreme” and “devastating.” “We’re taking this fight standing up, not sitting down,” Gottheimer said. “Until we [codify Roe], far-right extremists will continue to take away women’s rights to choose, even in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. I’m calling on the Senate to act, like we have in New Jersey, to protect a woman’s right to choose.” New Jersey Globe
School districts that refuse to implement New Jersey’s new sex education standards can be disciplined, the state warned after pushback from a small number of school boards and county governments. Using the most direct language in months, the state Department of Education said districts that don’t implement the changes to the sex and health education portion of the state’s learning standards will be subject to “disciplinary action.” Additionally, the state specified that parents who do not want their children to participate in these classes must write a letter to the principal explaining that the lessons contradict their personal values and beliefs. The Daily Record
More than 1,600 book titles across 32 states were banned from public schools during the 2021-2022 school year, with the bulk of the ban requests coming from a handful of right-wing groups pushing for censorship of books that feature LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color. The states with the most incidents of banning are Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, according to an updated report released Sept. 19 by PEN America. Overall, there were 2,532 incidents of banning across the United States. The new report found that 50 groups at the state, national and local level, with as many as 300 chapters, “have played a role in at least half of the book bans enacted across the country during the 2021–22 school year.” Of those groups, 73% were formed in 2021, according to the report. New Jersey Monitor
New Jersey teachers in the state’s School Employees’ Health Benefits Program will pay over 15% more for health coverage in 2023, similar though slightly less than the increase being imposed on municipal and county workers. Teachers didn’t avoid the big hike like state workers did, who agreed to increase copays for seeing specialists by $15 and going to urgent care by $30 as part of a deal shrinking their premium increase to 3% from over 18%, but they did enact resolutions through the benefits commission ordering the state Treasury Department to produce information and hire a vendor for future action. NJ1015.com
New Jersey’s minimum wage will go up by $1.13 to $14.13 per hour for most employees, effective Jan. 1, 2023. The increases were set by Gov. Phil Murphy in February 2019, as part of a plan that raises minimum pay to $15 per hour by 2024 for most employees. Under the law, the minimum wage increases by $1 per hour or more when there are significant increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), as happened this year. News12 New Jersey
New Jersey business executives are seeing difficult economic times now and in the immediate future as seven in 10 believe the U.S. economy has entered a recession. The survey by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce found that 68% of its members believe the U.S. economy has entered a recession and 71% believe it will last longer than a year. Even among the business executives that do not believe the nation’s economy is in a recession, about half of them (51%) said they expect a recession will begin within the next 24 months. ROI-NJ.com
Three Iranian Nationals were recently charged with conspiring and organizing a scheme to hack into multiple computer networks within the United States, including a Morris County accounting firm and a Union County city. According to U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger, the trio and their conspirators targeted an accounting firm located in Morris County in February 2022. They allegedly hacked into the firm’s computer network system by targeting susceptible software and gaining unauthorized and illegal access to the firm’s server and stole data. The trio previously targeted a municipality within Union County in February 2021. The men allegedly hacked into the township’s network by using a remote hacking device which utilized known vulnerabilities within the network, thus gaining control of the entire computer system. North-JerseyNews.com
A county sheriff in Texas announced on Sept. 19 that he had opened a criminal investigation into flights that took 48 migrants from a shelter in San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard last week. A migrant appears to have been paid to recruit other Venezuelan migrants, who have been crossing the southwest border in greater numbers, from the area around a migrant resource center in San Antonio, “lured under false pretenses” with promises of work and a better life. The New York Times
Migrants from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are driving the continued record pace of illegal migration at the Southern border, with more than three times as many migrants from those countries arrested so far this year as at the same point in 2021. Border Patrol agents made about 181,000 arrests of migrants crossing the southern border illegally in August, putting the total this year just shy of two million with a month still to go in the government’s 2022 fiscal year. Separately, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes the Border Patrol, took 22,473 people into custody at legal border crossings. Combined, CBP has recorded nearly 2.2 million encounters along the southwest border since October. The Wall Street Journal
State Sen. Bob Smith (D-17) will offer legislation tweaking the state’s single-use plastic bag ban, amending the bill to give grocery delivery services more options to reduce the glut of recyclable bags customers are given with each order. “I don’t expect to get a pushback from any sensible company. The reason for that is the public is in favor, they’re fully supportive, of getting single-use plastic out of the environment. We’ve only had this little hiccup with the delivery services providing plastic bags endlessly,” said Smith, who would prefer a partial return to paper bags, requiring companies to take back reusable bags, or have the delivery services use the boxes that the goods were delivered in. NJ Spotlight News
Paramus has opened an investigation into Borough Administrator Hector Olmo after a councilwoman said town employees may have been asked to fix his personal car during work hours. The allegations were raised by Councilwoman MariaElena Bellinger during the Sept. 6 council meeting, when she claimed the repairs were done in the borough garage and questioned the legality of such work. Olmo responded to Bellinger’s inquiry during the meeting, saying the work was “not on borough time” and that he believed it was a “practice that has been done in the past.” The Record
Representatives from private bus companies who spoke at the MTA’s six recent public hearings are supportive of congestion pricing but don’t think they should be subject to the tolls. Only two out of seven tolling scenarios presented by the MTA last month exempt all buses, and a third scenario exempts only transit buses, like those operated by the MTA and NJ Transit, and buses contracted out by a public agency. New Jersey Herald
And finally…Newark Liberty International Airport reported more than 1 in 3 flights arrived or departed were delayed, the worst in the nation in the first half of the year. NJ.com
Manchin is a Democrat, James