Arise’s David Stout recaps a busier-than-usual first week of the 2025 Alabama legislative session, with updates about our progress on issues like paid parental leave, maternal health care and school breakfast for all. He also discusses some harmful new immigration legislation, as well as our ongoing work to close Alabama’s health coverage gap through Medicaid expansion.

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Hello, I’m David Stout, Alabama Arise’s legislative director. I want to give you a little update about what happened this week. It was an action-packed week, really. For the first time, they wrapped in budget hearings of the department heads into the session. The session began Tuesday, budget hearings were on Wednesday and Thursday, and in between, they had committee meetings and some action on the floor.

The good news is that there’s a lot of discussion about parental leave for educators and state employees, which Arise is fully supporting. There’s also work being done on maternal health care, and we’re working on a program to incentivize our schools to have a breakfast for every student. We’re optimistic. We’re working on that. It’s a budget request, and we hope that our hard work will pay off.

On the bad side, there’s a slew of onerous immigration bills that have been filed. Some are really questionable, and we’ll have to track those. It’s a troublesome time given the attitude on immigration, and so we will have to monitor those as we go through the session.

Next week, we will be working on our Medicaid expansion issue. We know that there’s a lot of negativity coming out of Washington, but we’re not going to give up the fight. We’ve got a large coalition working on it, and we hope to continue our efforts there.

Remember that Arise depends on contributions to keep the good fight going. If you need information, please go to alarise.org. If you’re not a member, go there and please join. Watch for our emails and participate in our action alerts so that we can let our legislators know what we think are the best avenues to make Alabama a better state.

Have a good day.