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We like the sound of an Obama Day.

Democratic lawmakers in Illinois hope to honorformer President Barack Obama by making his birthday, Aug 4,a state holiday.

Illinois, which was the first state in the country to adopt Martin Luther King Jr. Day in1973, could once again spark a nationwide trend.If passed, the bill would create the states first new holiday in nearly 40 years.

According to ABC7Chicago,three bills have been introduced including two bills in the House proposed by Democratic Reps. Andre Thapedi and Sonya Harper. Both of their bills would make his date of birth a legal holiday, which would shut down state government office while schools and businesses would have the option to close.

Although two of the bills are identical, Harper said that they should be combined in the committee review process or else just one will move forward.

Democratic Senator Jacqueline Collins, whose interest is to make the holiday commemorative, introduced the third bill. Essentially, this means that the government, schools and businesses would not be closed and would simply serve as an honorable recognition of the nations 44th President.

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Now that Obama is out of the Oval Office, which he departed with one of thehighest approval ratings of any U.S.President with 60 percent, Thapedi says the bill has a better chance at moving forward.

This bill is even stronger this year now that Obama is no longer in the White House, Thapedi said.

Last year, there were some concerns, honoring a sitting president. Now that hes no longer a sitting President, its even more appropriate, he continued.

Those against the legislation, which has included Republican Governor Bruce Raumer, argue that the holiday would cost the state $3.2 million in salary for workers to enjoy a paid day off.

He also added that there was a concern for loss of productivity for the state and that theres potential to "lose $16 million from state workers having a paid, non-working holiday."

As Republicans continue to pushback many policies from the former administration, Thapedi is hopeful that we dont descend to what we see at the federal level.

As a Democrat, I have no problem honoring President Lincoln. There should be reciprocity between parties, Obama belongs to Illinois, and Illinois belongs to all people, Republicans and Democrats, he said.

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Illinois Lawmakers Consider Making Obama's Birthday A Holiday - Essence.com

The Trump administration has issued new guidance outlining which restrooms transgender students can use, effectively lifting previous guidelines put in place by the Obama administration. USA TODAY NETWORK

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center on Feb. 23, 2017, in National Harbor, Md.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on Thursday called the transgender bathroom guidelines from the Obama administration "an overreach," a day after the Trump administration rescinded thoserules.

"This issue was a very huge example of the Obama administration's overreach, a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach," DeVos said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. These matters should be handled at a "personal and local level."

DeVos'words came less than a day after the Department of Justice and the Department of Education issued a joint statement aboutthe decision "to withdraw and rescind" guidelines issued last year by the Obama administration requiring that schools allow transgender students to use restrooms matching their chosen gender rather than their birth gender.

The announcement has drawn anger from LGBTQ rights groups. It also comes before the Supreme Court hears the case of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia high school student seeking a nationwide bathroom standard for transgender students. The court will likely hear Grimm's case next month.

On Thursday at CPAC, DeVos kept her comments limited to the overreach statement, pointing to a statement she released on Wednesday night.

"We have a responsibility to protect every student in America and ensure that they have the freedom to learn and thrive in a safe and trusted environment," she said in the statement. "This is not a federal mandate, but a moral obligation no individual, school, district or state can abdicate."

According to TheNew York Times, DeVos had at first resisted rescinding the rules because of the potential harm such actions would cause for transgender students. This put her at odds with Attorney General Jeff Session, the Timesreported, and President Trump told DeVos to end her opposition earlier this week.

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Betsy DeVos calls Obama's transgender bathroom rules an 'overreach' - USA TODAY

The New York firm that helped shape the recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture will lead the exhibition design for the Obama Presidential Center's museum on Chicago's South Side, the Obama Foundation announced Tuesday.

Ralph Appelbaum Associates will head a team of several firms and individuals with expertise in media, lighting and acoustics, including several Chicago-based collaborators, according to the nonprofit that is developing the library and museum in historic Jackson Park.

The local team members will include the firms Civic Projects and Normal, and the artists and educators Amanda Williams, Andres Hernandez and Norman Teague.

Almost half of the exhibition design work for the OPC will be performed by minority- and women-owned businesses, the foundation said.

RAA, which was not made available to comment, also worked on the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

RAA's exhibit design for the national African-American museum, which opened in September, blends monumentality and minutiae. Dramatic subterranean galleries showcase massive artifacts a prison watch tower, a slave cabin, a train car in an almost cathedral like setting.

Leading into and out of these open spaces, the galleries are stuffed with the narrative, in word and object, of a people's history.

Overall, the design aims to be a metaphor: The history traces a path from the bottom of the structure upward, with the top floors becoming more celebratory, showcasing vibrant looks at the arts, sport and other culture.

The Obama museum team's Civic Projects specializes in bringing community participation to the design process, most recently working with the Bronzeville Retail Initiative and the development of the Englewood Exchange, envisioned as an incubator for food industry start-ups.

Normal has done design work for a number of local institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Theaster Gates Studio.

Williams, who grew up on the South Side, is a visual artist and architect, creator of the Color(ed) Theory series. Hernandez, an artist and educator, is working on a number local projects with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

Teague is a designer and educator who examines the complexities and history of communities.

The selections were based on the firms' and individuals' track records on civic projects and "their collective mission to develop interactive, state-of-the art, and dynamic spaces that help visitors connect history to action," David Simas, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, said in a written statement. "We are confident this team will contribute to our building a presidential center that is more than just a library or museum, but that will be an innovative center that inspires communities and individuals to take on our biggest challenges."

kbergen@chicagotribune.com

@kathy_bergen

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Firm that shaped national African-American museum hired for Obama museum - Chicago Tribune

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Did you know this? Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped in his life, convictions and outlook on the world by reading and writing as Barack Obama.

Frankly, I did not know President Obama was so wedded to books and the printed word as to be compared to Abraham Lincoln, author of the Gettysburg Address, magisterial Second Inaugural, and devotee of Shakespeare.

To be honest, I did not think that Mr. Obama by the wildest leap of imagination could be compared even to Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., or U.S. Grant, the author of until now the finest presidential autobiography of all time. That is, if Mark Twain is to be believed. Twain compared Grants memoirs to Caesars Commentaries.

Yet Michiko Kakutani, the literary critic of the famed Times of New York, has delivered up the above testimonial. Moreover, others who have had the pleasure of reading Mr. Obamas earlier writing have been equally lavish in their praise of his literary saga.

I had known him to deliver passable speeches from a teleprompter, ad lib tolerably well on contemporary life, and to watch sports on television. But to be shaped by books as Lincoln was? As these other presidents were? Michiko, baby, what have you been smoking? What has Barack been smoking?

I know that in Mr. Obamas January interview with Michiko, he mentioned a dozen or so authors and books that had caught his fancy, but so far as I know that is about the only time he ever mentioned them.

Though, of course, there is a very good reason for his artsy name-dropping. He wants to hook a big, fat literary contract from a big, fat lazy publisher of books that are bought but rarely read. Do I hear talk of a $30 million contract?

In this endeavor he has already had help from the likes of Jonathan Raban, Joe Klein and Britains Guardian. All have read or claim to have read Dreams from My Father, Mr. Obamas 1995 best-selling memoir. Supposedly after immersing himself in Dreams, Mr. Raban called Mr. Obama the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.

Mr. Klein called Dreams the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. And the Guardians reviewer esteemed the book the fifth-best nonfiction book of all time yes, of all time.

Unfortunately, others have also read Dreams along with the pathetic drivel that came from Mr. Obamas pen before Dreams. One, The New York Times best-selling author Christopher Andersen, wrote in his 2009 book that Mr. Obama, a hopelessly blocked writer facing a contract deadline, realized that he had taken on more than he could deliver.

So he turned to his Chicago neighbor, Bill Ayers, who was a proven writer, to finish what became Dreams. Bill has remained relatively reticent about his work, but then he shares Mr. Obamas politics. As for Mr. Andersen, he has sources that he has never divulged. Maybe he will when the former president snags his $30 million.

An even more interesting critic is Jack Cashill, a scholar and literary critic. He actually read Mr. Obamas literary outpouring that came before Dreams. Possibly, this is what excited Michiko Kakutani, though Mr. Obamas outpouring was limited. It consists of but two essays. In all those years just two essays.

This week in The American Spectator, Mr. Cashill has demonstrated that the two essays are littered with risible grammatical errors, awkward sentence structure, inappropriate word choice, a weakness for cliches, and an Obama trademark continued failure to get verbs and nouns to agree.

For instance, in his 1988 essay Mr. Obama writes, The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs . Mr. Obama means was.

Now we are expected to believe that a few years later, Mr. Obama was capable of writing what Mr. Cashill calls a graceful and sophisticated memoir, namely, Dreams from My Father.

Well, after a mere eight-and-a-half months in the White House he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In Mr. Obamas world anything is possible.

Mr. Cashills point, and Mr. Andersens, and mine, is that Dreams was, almost certainly, not written exclusively by Mr. Obama.

For a publisher to claim that it was is to commit fraud. To claim that Mr. Obama alone is going to write a book on the order of U.S. Grants memoirs is a fraud and a horselaugh.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is author of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc.

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Grammar and Obama do not agree - Washington Times

The Trump administration is working to undo an Obama-era directive that allows students to use school restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, the White House said Tuesday.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer did not go into specifics on the new set of guidelines being prepared by the Justice Department, but said Trump has long held that such matters should be left to the states -- not the federal government -- to decide.

I think that all you have to do is look at what the president's view has been for a long time, that this is not something the federal government should be involved in, this is a states' rights issue," Spicer said.

The Washington Post obtained a draft of the letter to the nations schools, which is planned to be released Wednesday.

The White House plans to say that they are rolling back the directive allowing transgender students access to restrooms and allowing them to participate in school athletics according to their gender identity and not their gender at birth.

The letter also states that the directive has given rise to significant litigation and administrators, parents and students struggled to understand and implement the Obama administrations guidance.

The White House will insist that schools must protect all students and the undoing of the directive does not diminish the protections" available to all students.

Trump was a vocal critic about the Obama administrations guidance during the 2016 campaign.

Trump said in a phoneinterview on Fox & Friends in May 2016that the directive was becoming a massive story despite it only affecting a tiny, tiny percentage of the population.

"It's a new issue and right now, I just don't have an opinion. Id like to see the states make that decision," Trump said at the time.

Trump was also outspoken about North Carolina passing a law on bathroom use by transgender people.

"I love North Carolina, and they have a law, and it's a law that, you know, unfortunately is causing them some problems," Trump toldFox News Sean Hannityin an April 2016 interview. "And I fully understand that they want to go through, but they are losing business, and they are having people come out against."

"I think that local communities and states should make the decision," he went on to say. "And I feel very strongly about that. The federal government should not be involved."

Fifteen states have explicit protections for transgender students, and many individual school districts have adopted policies that recognize students on the basis of their gender identity, said Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign.

Only one state-- North Carolina-- has enacted a law restricting students' bathroom access to their sex at birth. Other states are considering following suit.

Vanita Gupta, who was head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under Obama, blasted the Trump administration's attempt to alter the guidelines.

"To cloak this in federalism ignores the vital and historic role that federal law plays in ensuring that all children, (including LGBT students) are able to attend school free from discrimination," Gupta said in a statement.

Even without Obama's guidelines, federal law called Title IX would still prohibit discrimination against students based on their gender or sexual orientation, the National Center for Transgender Equality said. Rescinding those directives would put children in harm's way, the group said.

"Such clear action directed at children would be a brazen and shameless attack on hundreds of thousands of young Americans who must already defend themselves against schoolyard bullies, but are ill-equipped to fight bullies on the floors of their state legislatures and in the White House," NCTE said in a statement.

But Ryan Anderson, a senior research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said students, parents and teachers should work out "win-win" solutions at the local level, such as equipping schools with single-occupancy restrooms or locker rooms or allowing students to access the faculty lounge.

"We can find a way in which the privacy and safety of transgender students is respected while also respecting the privacy and safety of all other students," Anderson said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Ryan Gaydos is a news editor for Fox News. Follow him on Twitter@Gaydosland.

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Trump administration working on new transgender bathroom directive - Fox News