SUMMARY: The Louisiana Fiscal Review Committee has recommended placing Bogalusa under a fiscal administrator due to ongoing financial distress, marking the second such appointment in six years. The situation worsened after Mayor Tyrin Truong’s election, who has faced legal issues including drug trafficking allegations. A July audit revealed the city failed to comply with a previous three-year fiscal stability plan, with budget preparation delays and accounting errors costing millions. The city owes over $1 million to the IRS and nearly $300,000 to the state. Troubled relations within the city council further complicate the financial recovery efforts.

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Doctors seek conscience protections to provide abortion care in new federal lawsuit

by Sofia Resnick, Louisiana Illuminator
February 7, 2025

About three months into conceiving their second child last fall, the young South Carolina couple was given an earth-shattering prognosis. And two grim choices.

Based on multiple genetic tests and an ultrasound that indicated the baby was not growing normally, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist suspected triploidy, a deadly genetic disorder in which chromosomes are tripled rather than doubled. The couple could wait for their daughter to die in utero or within minutes or hours of being born. Or they could terminate.

But because of a nascent law in South Carolina — which bans pregnancy termination if cardiac activity is detectable on an ultrasound — the couple now had to prove their baby’s condition was fatal in order to qualify for an abortion under the state’s limited exceptions.

The mom, who asked to withhold her name to protect her family’s privacy, said cardiac activity was still audible but the pregnancy was so underdeveloped, the medical team could not extract a sample from the placenta. And when they began debating whether to pull down her uterus, the mom said she and her husband decided to leave the state. Their doctor connected them with a hospital in Virginia, where abortion is legal.

“I feel discouraged from ever trying to do this again,” said the mom, who told States Newsroom that she and her husband wanted the abortion so she could start grieving her lost child and ensure her own health. “I love being a mom. I want kids. I have a beautiful child. But if something like this ever happens to me again, it’s not going to be better, but it could be a lot worse in this new political climate.”

For some OB-GYNs in South Carolina, denying care to pregnant patients has become a devastating new part of their job. In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit with national implications, a group of OB-GYNs is asking a federal court to overturn the state’s abortion ban on the basis that it does not allow “physicians to provide abortion care mandated by their religious beliefs.”

“Most people go into medicine to provide care and feel very strongly about that, particularly in the field that they have expertise. But as human beings, we also have a conscience and religious beliefs that sustain and nurture what we do in our professional realm,” said Dr. Natalie Dawn Bingham, an OB-GYN who practices in Columbia and who serves as an elder at First Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg.

She is the lead plaintiff among five doctors who say the state abortion law’s exceptions violate the First Amendment’s due process clause for being too vague and violate the free exercise clause. Passed in 2023, the state’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” law effectively bans abortion around six weeks’ gestation, before many women first learn they are pregnant. (In a separate state lawsuit, Planned Parenthood argues the law should actually allow abortions through the ninth week.)

Like similar legislation enacted in Florida, Georgia and Iowa, South Carolina’s law has exceptions for fatal fetal illnesses and if the pregnant person is in danger of death or an “irreversible physical impairment.”

Bingham, who has been practicing in the state since 2005, said these exceptions are poorly defined and difficult to qualify for, sparking debates about whether a fetus destined to die within hours or days of birth still constitutes as having a fatal condition, or whether a maternal diagnosis of cancer or severe hypertension would qualify as a medical emergency. She said the state has turned what were previously medical questions into legal ones, the possible consequences of which include losing one’s medical license, a $10,000 fine, and two years in prison.

To comply with the law, doctors have to report abortions provided under the exceptions and maintain related records for seven years, and they have to provide detailed medical documentation that supports the diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly. According to the lawsuit, some of the hospitals where plaintiffs work require consensus from multiple physicians, and many worry their judgment could be later second-guessed by prosecutors or medical board members.

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“How can you say that you could access these exceptions based on reasonable medical judgment when you already are not respecting the medical judgment of the people making these decisions?” said Bingham, who like the other OB-GYN plaintiffs in the case works with high-risk patients. “Down the line, at any point in time, some arbitrary prosecutor could call that into question, who doesn’t have any medical training.”

In cases of rape or incest, abortion is legal up to 12 weeks’ gestation. The law requires that a doctor tell the patient that a police report must be filed within 24 hours of the abortion. “In a rare instance in which a rape survivor was willing to report the rape to law enforcement, the police insisted on coming to her home to complete the report,” the complaint reads. “The experience was so degrading that the patient permanently left South Carolina.”

The lawsuit also notes that the 12-week limit further precludes rape and incest survivors from accessing abortion under these exemptions because many survivors are children or teenagers and often don’t discover they are pregnant until later. From the law’s effective date in August 2023 through December 2023, fewer than five abortions were provided under the rape or incest exception, according to state health data.

Bingham said the only pediatric and adolescent OB-GYN moved to Virginia over legal issues.

An emerging legal strategy

During his recent confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. agreed when asked by U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, if he supported conscience protections for anti-abortion health professionals.

“Forcing somebody to participate in a medical procedure as a provider that they believe is murder does not make any sense to me,” Kennedy replied.

Despite implications to the contrary, there are several federal laws that allow providers to opt out of abortion, including the Weldon Amendment, named after Dave Weldon, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In recent years, anti-abortion groups have successfully used religious freedom laws as arguments against having to provide or refer for contraception. In 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., that the birth control coverage mandate in the Affordable Care Act violated the religious rights of for-profit corporate owners.

In 2020’s Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania decision, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s regulations allowing employers with religious or moral objections to opt out of providing contraceptive coverage to employees.

Filed last month, Bingham v. Wilson is one of the first federal cases to look at doctors’ religious and conscience rights from an abortion-rights perspective.

At a conference of OB-GYNs about 18 months ago, Bingham said she and other physicians began discussing their legal options.

“If there is a right to refuse care, there certainly seems to be the corollary where we have a right to provide care, particularly based on our conscience, and then the tenets of each of our own religions, and based on years of training and dedication,” Bingham said, noting that South Carolina has a conscience law that allows health providers to refuse care.

Her co-plaintiffs include complex family planning specialist and Incarnation Lutheran Church member Dr. Patricia Seal, complex family planning specialist Dr. Jessica Tarleton of Christian and Jewish faith, OB-GYN Dr. Katee Wyant, and an anonymous complex family planning specialist known as Jane Doe. They are represented by the Lawyering Project and the Law Office of Bill Nettles.

“For these five physicians it’s almost every day that they are setting aside their most cherished beliefs,” said Rupali Sharma, founder of and senior counsel at the Lawyering Project. “Their faith commands them to place others before themselves, and so when they don’t provide abortion care to someone who could now suffer long-term debilitating physical or mental health consequences, they feel like they’re putting their license, their families, their freedom from imprisonment above that patient, and that too was something that these physicians just cannot abide by.”

In the lawsuit, plaintiffs ask for the law to be overturned or at least clarified to require law enforcement to defer to a woman’s doctor in the cases excepted under the law. They argue the law discriminates by allowing for some secular exceptions but not religious ones.

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“South Carolina’s Abortion Ban is neither religiously neutral nor generally applicable,” the complaint reads. “It allows people to terminate potential life for a wide variety of secular purposes. These allowances undermine South Carolina’s purported interest in criminalizing the termination of potential life as much as abortion care compelled by Plaintiffs’ deeply held beliefs would.”

Sharma said that before the 2022 Dobbs decision, the Lawyering Project argued that an Indiana restriction requiring abortion clinics to bury or cremate the remains from all abortions and miscarriages violated the free exercise clause. They successfully blocked the law until 2023, when the injunction was suspended.

Since then, religious progressives have challenged abortion bans in Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky using arguments that their faith compels them to obtain abortions in certain circumstances. The lawsuits in Florida and Kentucky were dismissed for lack of standing while litigation continues in Indiana.

Abortion-law expert Mary Ziegler said that unlike these state lawsuits, the South Carolina doctors might have a better claim of standing because they can cite direct harm, as they’re prohibited from providing care their religion would mandate. But she said that while legal scholarship has grown around the secular versus religious exceptions argument, the legal theory has rarely been tested in court. The University of California Davis law professor noted that in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision plaintiffs were granted relief even though they weren’t directly administering care.

“It wasn’t like the employer in Hobby Lobby was giving people birth control. There were lots of other steps along the way, whereas in this case the physicians are arguing that they are … not intervening when they feel religiously obligated to,” Ziegler said.

In some of these abortion-rights religious freedom cases, the challenged states have cast doubt on plaintiffs’ sincere religious beliefs.

Sharma says to doubt the religious and conscientious beliefs of her clients is not to understand their jobs.

“It’s about when you see suffering and you’re empowered to stop it, you stop it, right?” Sharma said. “And the idea that these things wouldn’t be central to most faiths, is kind of astounding to me. Of course, abortion and religion are interlinked, because abortion for many people and religion for many people is about you mattering and your life mattering and your family mattering, and being able to preserve those things and protect those things.”

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.

U.S. Senate confirms Russ Vought, a Project 2025 author, to manage the nation’s budget

by Jennifer Shutt, Louisiana Illuminator
February 6, 2025

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate voted Thursday to confirm Russ Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, giving support to one of the architects of Project 2025 and someone who hopes to erode Congress’ control over government spending.

Vought, who worked as OMB director during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, was confirmed on a 53-47 party-line vote that followed Democrats keeping the chamber in session overnight to highlight their opposition.

Objections to Vought centered around his goal to give the president more authority over federal spending decisions, which Democrats said is a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution. 

“Congress makes laws and appropriates funds, not the president,” New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan said. “At stake is not a legal technicality, at stake is our very notion of self-government, a notion that Mr. Vought appears to disdain.”

Hassan, a Democrat, referenced the Trump administration halting congressionally approved funding for grant and loan programs in late January as one example of OMB overreaching.

“The grant money was never the president’s to cut, freeze, or restore — it doesn’t belong to him or to Mr. Vought, it belongs to the American people,” Hassan said. 

She also pointed to the Government Accountability Office finding OMB “violated” a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act when it withheld $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine during the first Trump administration.

“It was five years ago this week that this body debated President Trump’s attempt to illegally impound funds that were intended for Ukraine,” Hassan said, referring to the first of two impeachments. “An impoundment attempt that was supported and directed by Mr. Vought.”

Obscure office with big clout

The Office of Management and Budget, also called the White House budget office, is responsible for submitting the president’s annual budget request to Congress, but it also has sweeping authority over federal regulations and federal agencies.

Acting OMB Director Matthew J. Vaeth caused considerable confusion in late January when he released a two-page memo calling for a halt to trillions in federal funding for grant and loan programs spread across departments and agencies.

The memo, which was later rescinded, led to two separate lawsuits and two federal judges issuing temporary restraining orders blocking the Trump administration from implementing the proposed funding freeze.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Wednesday that Vought is qualified to become OMB director, in part, because he has already been OMB director.

“There’s no question that he will be able to hit the ground running,” Thune said. “As director of OMB, Mr. Vought will have the chance to address two key economic issues — cutting burdensome government regulations and addressing excessive spending.”

Thune said the United States is on a “dangerous spending track” and that the government should find “ways to reign in our spending and to target government waste.”

“And I’m confident that Mr. Vought will help lead that charge,” Thune said.

Rapid confirmation for Trump nominees

Vought’s confirmation marked the 13th of Trump’s nominees to receive Senate confirmation in the three weeks that he’s been in the Oval Office.

“That’s roughly twice as fast as nominees were confirmed at the start of the two previous administrations,” Thune said. “The Senate will take up additional nominees next week and will maintain an aggressive pace to get the president’s full team in place as soon as possible.”

Senate-confirmed nominees include, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Interior Secretary Douglas Burgum, Energy Secretary Christopher Wright, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Eric Turner.

‘Impoundment’ struggle

Vought has spent the past four years leading the Center for Renewing America, a think tank he launched following his tenure in the first Trump administration.

The organization has published repeatedly about the 1974 Impoundment Control Act and impoundment authority, arguing the president should be able to block funding Congress has approved.

The U.S. Constitution gives the legislative branch the so-called power of the purse, putting the authority over how federal dollars are spent in the hands of lawmakers.

Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act more than 50 years ago, after then-president Richard Nixon halted billions in funding the body had approved.

The law gives the president two ways to request that Congress rescind funding it already appropriated — sending a rescission request via a special message, which allows the president to hold onto the money for 45 days, or through a deferral sent through a special message.

“The President, OMB, or a department or agency head or employee may defer budget authority to provide for contingencies, effect savings, or as specifically provided by law,” according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. “No officer or employee of the United States may defer budget authority for any other purpose.”

During his confirmation hearing in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Vought testified he believes the president holds the ability to impound funding approved by Congress. Vought has also said repeatedly he believes the 1974 law is unconstitutional.

“The president has run on the issue of impoundment and has reminded the country that 200 years of presidents have used this authority,” Vought said during the hearing. “And we’ll be developing our approach to this issue and strategy once his administration is in office.”

Democrats have sounded alarm bells over the president potentially holding impoundment authority, saying it would make it extremely difficult for lawmakers to negotiate bipartisan agreement on the dozen annual government funding bills.

The president simply ignoring parts of a spending agreement would lead to even more distrust and gridlock within Congress, Democrats say.

Project 2025

Vought also wrote part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a 922-page document outlining the conservative organization’s goals for a second Trump administration.

In a 26-page chapter on the executive office of the president, Vought wrote the OMB director “must ensure the appointment of a General Counsel who is respected yet creative and fearless in his or her ability to challenge legal precedents that serve to protect the status quo.”

Vought wrote that Trump “should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government.”

“Anything short of that would constitute abject failure,” Vought contended.

Vought also wrote about the management aspect of OMB’s portfolio, pressing for political appointees to have more authority and influence than career staff.

“It is vital that the Director and his political staff, not the careerists, drive these offices in pursuit of the President’s actual priorities and not let them set their own agenda based on the wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in and outside of government,” Vought wrote. “Many Directors do not properly prioritize the management portfolio, leaving it to the Deputy for Management, but such neglect creates purposeless bureaucracy that impedes a President’s agenda—an ‘M Train to Nowhere.’”

Last updated 6:37 p.m., Feb. 6, 2025

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.