Month: October 2023

The police chief who led a highly criticized raid of a small Kansas newspaper has been suspended, the mayor confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press.

Marion Mayor Dave Mayfield in a text said he suspended Chief Gideon Cody on Thursday. He declined to discuss his decision further and did not say whether Cody was still being paid.

Voice messages and emails from the AP seeking comment from Cody’s lawyers were not immediately returned Saturday.

The Aug. 11 searches of the Marion County Record’s office and the homes of its publisher and a City Council member have been sharply criticized, putting Marion at the center of a debate over the press protections offered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Cody’s suspension is a reversal for the mayor, who previously said he would wait for results from a state police investigation before taking action.

Vice Mayor Ruth Herbel, whose home was also raided Aug. 11, praised Cody’s suspension as “the best thing that can happen to Marion right now” as the central Kansas town of about 1,900 people struggles to move forward under the national spotlight.

“We can’t duck our heads until it goes away, because it’s not going to go away until we do something about it,” Herbel said.

Cody has said little publicly since the raids other than posting a defense of them on the police department’s Facebook page. In court documents he filed to get the search warrants, he argued that he had probable cause to believe the newspaper and Herbel, whose home was also raided, had violated state laws against identity theft or computer crimes.

The raids came after a local restaurant owner accused the newspaper of illegally accessing information about her. A spokesperson for the agency that maintains those records has said the newspaper’s online search that a reporter did was likely legal even though the reporter needed personal information about the restaurant owner that a tipster provided to look up her driving record.

The newspaper’s publisher, Eric Meyer, has said the identity theft allegations simply provided a convenient excuse for the search after his reporters had been digging for background information on Cody, who was appointed this summer.

Legal experts believe the raid on the newspaper violated a federal privacy law or a state law shielding journalists from having to identify sources or turn over unpublished material to law enforcement.

Video of the raid on the home of publisher Eric Meyer shows how distraught his 98-year-old mother became as officers searched through their belongings. Meyer said he believes that stress contributed to the death of his mother, Joan Meyer, a day later.

Another reporter last month filed a federal lawsuit against the police chief over the raid. 
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The Food and Drug Administration on Friday laid out a proposal to begin regulating laboratory medical tests, a multibillion-dollar industry that the agency says poses a growing risk to patients because of potentially inaccurate results.

The proposed rule would end decades of regulatory ambiguity and formally bring thousands of tests performed in large laboratories under FDA oversight. FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said the change will help ensure tests used to diagnose cancer, heart disease and many other conditions are safe, accurate and reliable.

“A growing number of clinical diagnostic tests are being offered as laboratory-developed tests without assurance that they work,” Califf said in a statement. He added that the agency has long worried that many tests offered by laboratories are not as accurate or reliable as those that undergo FDA review.

Here’s a look at the history and background of the testing issue:

What are laboratory-developed tests?

Most Americans are familiar with medical tests like those used to screen for COVID-19, strep throat and other health conditions. Those tests are developed by a handful of large manufacturers that undergo FDA review before selling their test kits to hospitals, doctors offices or pharmacies.

The tests targeted by the FDA’s latest action are developed and used by high-tech laboratories, including those at academic medical centers and companies such as Quest Diagnostics. They include tests for complex diseases like cancer, as well as simpler conditions like high cholesterol and sexually transmitted infections.

Over time, laboratory-developed tests have grown into a multibillion-dollar nationwide business, with labs processing thousands of blood, urine and other samples per week from hospitals and clinics. Others advertise directly to consumers — including some claiming to measure the risk of developing ailments like Alzheimer’s and autism.

Laboratory-developed tests have long skirted FDA oversight, though the agency has maintained that it has the authority to step in. The debate over regulating the space stretches back to the 1990s, with several government advisory groups recommending greater FDA oversight.

Why does the FDA want to regulate them now?

Many lab-developed tests are staples of medical care, used to make important decisions about pregnancy, nutrition and many other health issues.

FDA officials have long voiced concerns about the accuracy of some tests, pointing to patients who have received inaccurate results for heart disease, Lyme disease, cancer and other conditions. Inaccurate tests can lead to patients getting an incorrect diagnosis, skipping treatments or receiving unnecessary medication or surgery.

More than a decade ago, the agency drafted tougher guidelines for the industry, but they were never finalized.

The tests attracted new scrutiny with the downfall of Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was sentenced to prison last year for misleading investors about the potential of her company’s blood testing technology.

What do test makers say?

The laboratory industry has long argued that FDA regulation would stifle their ability to quickly innovate and develop new tests. They also say that additional federal regulation is unnecessary because it would duplicate existing requirements.

Under a quirk of federal law, testing laboratories are overseen by the same agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, the government health plans for seniors, the disabled and the poor. Inspectors evaluate the general conditions and procedures at labs, but not specific tests or the claims used to market them.

Lawmakers in Congress drafted a bill last year — backed by FDA officials — that would have given the FDA explicit authority to regulate high-risk tests. But the measure failed to pass the House or the Senate amid opposition by testing industry lobbyists.

What is the FDA proposing?

Under the new proposal, FDA would gradually phase in tighter regulation of lab tests over five years. The agency is considering exempting some existing tests from review but is seeking public input on its approach. At the end of the process, most new tests would be subject to FDA standards and regulatory review before launching.
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The Supreme Court is returning to a new term to take up some familiar topics — guns and abortion — while concerns about ethics swirl around the justices.

The year also will have a heavy focus on social media and how free speech protections apply online. A big unknown is whether the court will be asked to weigh in on any aspect of the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump and others or efforts in some states to keep the Republican off the 2024 presidential ballot because of his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Lower profile but vitally important, several cases in the term that begins Monday ask the justices to constrict the power of regulatory agencies.

“I can’t remember a term where the court was poised to say so much about the power of federal administrative agencies,” said Jeffrey Wall, who served as the deputy solicitor general in the Trump administration.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

One of those cases, to be argued Tuesday, threatens the ability of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to function. Unlike most agencies, the bureau is not dependent on annual appropriations from Congress, but instead gets its funding directly from the Federal Reserve. The idea when the agency was created following the recession in 2007-08 was to shield it from politics.

But the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down the funding mechanism. The ruling would cause “profound disruption by calling into question virtually every action the CFPB has taken” since its creation, the Biden administration said in a court filing.

Gun availability

The same federal appeals court also produced the ruling that struck down a federal law that aims to keep guns away from people facing domestic violence restraining orders from having firearms.

The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said its decision was compelled by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling expanding gun rights and directing judges to evaluate restrictions based on history and tradition. Judges also have invalidated other long-standing gun control laws.

The justices will hear the Texas case, in November, in what is their first chance to elaborate on the meaning of that decision in the earlier case, which has come to be known as Bruen.

Abortion

The abortion case likely to be heard by the justices also would be the court’s first word on the topic since it reversed Roe v. Wade’s right to abortion. The new case stems from a ruling, also by the 5th Circuit, to limit the availability of mifepristone, a medication used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.

The administration already won an order from the high court blocking the appellate ruling while the case continues. The justices could decide later in the fall to take up the mifepristone case this term.

Ideological differences

The assortment of cases from the 5th Circuit could offer Chief Justice John Roberts more opportunities to forge alliances in major cases that cross ideological lines. In those cases, the conservative-dominated appeals court, which includes six Trump appointees, took aggressive legal positions, said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Georgetown law school’s Supreme Court Institute.

“The 5th Circuit is ready to adopt the politically most-conservative position on almost any issue, no matter how implausible or how much defiling of precedent it takes,” Gornstein said.

The three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have been together in the majority of some of the biggest cases in the past two years, including on guns, abortion and ending affirmative action in college admissions.

But in some important cases last term, the court split in unusual ways. In the most notable of those, Kavanaugh joined with Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices to rule that Alabama had not done enough to reflect the political power of Black voters in its congressional redistricting.

Roberts and Kavanaugh, this time joined by Barrett, also were in the majority with the liberal justices in a case that rejected a conservative legal effort to cut out state courts from oversight of elections for Congress and president.

Those outcomes have yet to do much to ameliorate the court’s image in the public’s mind. The most recent Gallup Poll, released last week, found Americans’ approval of and trust in the court hovering near record lows.

It is not clear whether those numbers would improve if the court were to adopt a code of conduct.

Questions about ethics

Several justices have publicly recognized the ethics issues, spurred by a series of stories questioning some of their practices. Many of those stories focused on Justice Clarence Thomas and his failure to disclose travel and other financial ties with wealthy conservative donors, including Harlan Crow and the Koch brothers. But Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor also have been under scrutiny.

Behind the scenes, the justices are talking about an ethics code, and Kavanaugh has said he is hopeful the court would soon take “concrete steps.”

Justice Elena Kagan, who backs a high court code of ethics, said in an appearance at the University of Notre Dame that her colleagues are trying to work through their differences.

“There are, you know, totally good-faith disagreements or concerns, if you will. There are some things to be worked out. I hope we can get them worked out,” Kagan said. There’s no timetable for the court to act.

Democratic lawmakers and progressive critics of Alito and Thomas said those justices’ impartiality in some cases is in doubt because of financial ties, joint travel or friendships with people involved in the cases.

Alito has rejected calls to step aside from a tax case, and Thomas, who has been silent in the past about recusals, seems exceedingly unlikely to bow to his critics’ wishes now.
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