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Protesters of President Donald Trump gather in an intersection outside the Humphrey School of Affairs on the campus of the University of Minnesota on Nov. 10, 2016 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced legislation aimed at curbing large protests , sparking heated debates as high-profile demonstrations greeted President Donald Trump 's arrival in the White House .

Sponsors and supporters of the bills defend them as a way to prevent riots and protect public safety, while critics call them a threat to First Amendment rights.

That tug-of-war played out in Arizona this week, as Republican leaders on Monday declared a controversial bill dead after criticism that it undermined the Constitutional right to assembly. The bill would have expanded the definition of racketeering to include rioting and allowed protest organizers to be charged for demonstrations that escalated into riots.

"At the end of the day, I think the people need to know we are not about limiting people's rights," House Speaker J.D. Mesnard, a Republican, said in an interview with The Arizona Republic on Monday. The Republican-sponsored proposal had passed the state Senate last week. Arizona state Sen. Sonny Borrelli, who sponsored the bill, told the Republic that his goal had been to prevent property damage caused by riots.

Across the country, bills introduced in at least 18 states this year have sought to criminalize some acts of protest and increase penalties for unlawful demonstrations, targeting protests that turn into riots, as well as those that block highways and require extra policing, according to an analysis by the Washington Post . Most of these measures are either still under consideration or have been voted down. These are some of the key issues they address:

Blocking public roadways Several states including Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and Washington have all considered bills that would increase the penalties for obstructing traffic and blocking highways.

A proposed state law in Tennessee would provide civil immunity to drivers who injure protesters who are blocking traffic on a public road "if the driver was exercising due care." Last month, a similar bill failed in North Dakota, where activists camped for months and, at times, marched on highways to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline .

Costs of policing Minnesota lawmakers are still considering a bill that would allow government agencies to sue protesters for the cost of policing unlawful demonstrations.

Protests in the state turned violent last year over the police killing of Philando Castile during a traffic stop. The incident garnered national attention after Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, livestreamed the aftermath of the shooting.

Protests-turned-riots As in Arizona, a few proposed state laws have targeted protests that turn violent.

In Oregon where an anti-Trump protest in November was declared a riot a proposed law would require community colleges and public universities to expel any student convicted of rioting. The bill is currently in committee.

A Virginia bill proposed an increased penalty for protesters who remain at a riot after being warned to leave. It was defeated in the state Senate earlier this year.

And in North Dakota, four measures inspired by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were signed into law last week, increasing the penalties for trespassing and rioting and making it a misdemeanor to wear a mask while committing a crime.

Major protest movements in the U.S. have often been met with legislative responses at the state level, said Stanford professor Doug McAdam, author of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America . He drew comparisons between current proposals and legislation in the 1950s and 1960s that sought to curtail participation in the civil rights movement.

"Were really living in a period of escalating political action on both sides, deepening divisions," McAdam said. "Talk of proposing such legislation or even the passage of such bills is not likely to put the genie back in the bottle."

T.V. Reed, an English professor at Washington State University and author of The Art of Protest , said the scope and severity of recent bills differentiate them from earlier legislation.

"In 40 years of studying protest, I have seen nothing like these proposals," Reed said in an email to TIME. "These kinds of laws would be un-American."

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Here's How Republicans Want to Crack Down on Large Protests - TIME

A major beneficiary of cutting edge conservative social policy thinking.

Reuters/Carlo Allegri

If Republicans get their the way, the future of the American welfare state might start to look a lot like your retirement account. As in your 401kthat lovely, tax-advantaged savings vehicle that you always feel vaguely guilty for not diverting enough money into each year.

Jordan Weissmann is Slates senior business and economics correspondent.

Consider the matter of health care. The GOP's various factions still fiercely disagree about how to repeal and replace Obamacare. But they do share a unanimous desire to greatly expand the use of health savings accounts, which let people put away, invest, and spend money to cover their medical costs tax free.

Donald (or Ivanka) Trump's child care proposal also leans heavily on private savings by creating a new tax-free dependent care savings account. It would work a lot like an HSA, except families would be able to use it on things like day care, after-school expenses, or even college tuition, and the government would match some deposits from low-income families.

Of course, Americans already have an alpha-numeric soup of private savings accounts to sort through. There are 529 college plans. There are Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) for medical expenses, which everybody already confuses with HSAs. Aside from 401Ks, there are IRAs and Roth IRAs to consider. It's as if the entire conservative hivemind is made up of people who get amped about selecting the right retirement target-date fund.

But building a welfare state around these sorts of accounts would also have some profound consequences. To list just a few, it would leave lower-income working families to fend for themselves while gratuitously funneling money to the financial services industry and eroding our tax base.

Let's start with who benefits from these things. Savings accounts aren't particularly useful unless you have money to save, which is why tax-preferenced vehicles tend to be most helpful for relatively wealthier households. According to the left-wing Economic Policy Institute, the median family aged 32 to 61 had just $5,000 in a retirement account as of 2013; at the 90th percentile, families had $274,000. College savings accounts have offered grossly unequal benefits as well: Among Americans on the bottom half of the income distribution, only 0.3 percent of families had a 529 in 2013, and the average balance was just $3,800, according to the Federal Reserve. Among the highest earning 5 percent of families, 16 percent had an account, and the average balance was $152,000. HSAs have also tended to work out best for high-income employees, as Ron Liebman wrote at the New York Times last week.

As these accounts multiply, they also create competing priorities. Do you save for retirement in a 401k, or put money into a 529 for your child's education? Do you add to your HSA, just in case illness strikes, or put cash in your Ivankacare child savings account? If you're wealthy enough, it might not be a questionjust max out your contributions to one account, then start adding to another. But if your family takes home $45,000 a year, you have to choose among these concenrs.

Some people might snark that making those sorts of decisions is just what it means to be an adult. But in the end, all of us are just guessing when it comes to our future financial needs, and life tends to make a mockery of our carefully laid planseven when they're crafted with the sage advice of a high-priced financial adviser. Asking people to look at a crystal ball and pick between health care and college savings is sort of inherently absurd.

That brings us to another classic problem associated with these accounts: They shift the risk of something going wrong from society onto the individual. Conservatives, who love to preach the gospel of personal responsibility, may see this as a feature, rather than a bug. But there's not much you can personally do if the stock market crashes after you retire, or the year your child heads to college.

These failures might be acceptable if private savings accounts delivered on their policy promises. But they don't. The rise of 401ks hasn't made us into a nation of attentive savers; instead, we're heading for a retirement crisis as just 32 percent of Americans are putting money into workplace retirement accounts. Health savings accounts are supposed to bring market forces to bear on medicine, by encouraging people to shop around before paying out of pocket for basic services and doctors' visits, while relying on high deductible insurance plans for truly catastrophic events. But that doesn't seem to happen. Instead, recent research has shown that employees who use an HSA and high-deductible coverage combo just skip care altogether to avoid spending money.

So who does win out from the proliferation of private accounts? Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab, for one. A major selling point of these tax-free vehicles is that families can invest the money in them in stocks or bonds and let the returns compound. Of course, that means more cash pouring into the pockets of mutual fund managers and financial advisers who stand ready to help poor, befuddled families figure out how to sort out and prioritize their jumble of accounts. Conveniently, the Trump administration appears to be ready to gut the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule, which required retirement advisers to act in their clients' own best financial interests, rather than direct them into products that earn the advisers higher commissions.

One might almost say that Republicans are trying to rewrite the social contract in such a way as to maximize the profits of the financial services industry.

Emphasizing private accounts could also set the stage for major changes to the tax code. Many conservatives would love nothing more than to end taxes on capital gains. But doing so is hard, since cutting taxes on wealthy stock and bond investors isn't politically popular, and because it would cost the government a lot of money. Shifting more stocks and bonds into tax-advantaged savings accounts would remove them from the tax base, reducing the government's revenue capital gains, and making it cheaper to finally kill off taxes on investments altogether one day down the line. To be clear, I have no idea whether any conservatives have actually gamed this process out that far, but it seems like an obvious long-term strategy. You whittle down the tax until it's small enough to drown it in a reconciliation bill.

Tax-preferenced savings accounts haven't always been a conservative pet project. In the past, they've been a fondly regarded object of bipartisan consensus, the sort of thing that Bill Clinton used to champion. But at a moment, it seems to be the GOP carrying the torch forward, since the idea fits more neatly into an ideology where individuals should all bear their own risks, and high earners should pay the least amount in taxes. Unless you happen to be a mutual fund manager, it's a pretty ugly vision of the future. After all, a welfare state that doesn't help people who have trouble saving or pick them up when disaster strikes isn't a welfare state at all.

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Republicans Are Trying to Build a Welfare State That Sucks for Everyone but Mutual Fund Managers - Slate Magazine (blog)

Congressional Republicans are taking aim at the regulatory process through which some financial institutions become subject to heightened regulation because they are deemed too big to fail.

In a report released on Tuesday, Republican staff members of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee said the current process for identifying systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) was arbitrary and inconsistent and confusing to banks, insurance companies and other financial firms.

The report will be used by committee Republicans, including Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas, as they move to overhaul the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that set up the review process. Hensarling has been a vocal critic of the designation process in the past.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council made up of the heads of the U.S. financial regulatory agencies and run by the Treasury secretary labels some financial companies as systemically important. Those are the ones that face heightened capital requirements from the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

On Thursday, the council is set to review the designation process as it holds its first meeting as part of the Trump administration, with new Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin now overseeing the panel.

A spokesman from the Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The report asserts that the FSOC has ignored its own rules and guidance and has been inconsistent in how it assesses various firms. As a result, some were tested on one set of standards, while others were treated differently, leading to an opaque and confusing process.

The FSOCs most potent power is SIFI designation, which it has used to subject nonbank financial firms such as MetLife and Prudential to stringent Federal Reserve regulations. Large banks such as Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo & Co. also are designated as SIFIs, though not via the same FSOC process.

FSOCs designation power has come under fire in the past, MetLife challenged the government following its designation as a SIFI in 2014. A federal district court ruled in 2016 that the governments designation process did not pass muster. The Treasury Department under then-President Barack Obama had appealed the ruling, which is now pending before an appeals court.

Republican staff on the committee reviewed internal FSOC documents that had not been made public and interviewed several FSOC officials in compiling the report.

(Reporting by Pete Schroeder; editing by Linda Stern and Jonathan Oatis)

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House Republicans' Report Hits 'Too Big to Fail' Designation Process - Insurance Journal

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump's plan to impose sharp cuts to foreign aid and domestic programs is a non-starter in the Republican-led Congress and that's according to top GOP lawmakers.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who once headed the panel responsible for the foreign assistance budget, told reporters that Trump's cuts to foreign aid probably couldn't pass muster on Capitol Hill.

"The diplomatic portion of the federal budget is very important and you get results a lot cheaper frequently than you do on the defense side," McConnell told reporters. "So speaking for myself, I'm not in favor of reducing the (foreign aid) account to that extent."

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Trump's draft budget plan would add $54 billion to the Pentagon's projected budget, financed by taking an equal amount from domestic agencies and departments. Diplomacy and foreign aid would face a 37 percent cut that would be felt across the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Trump said in his Tuesday night joint address to Congress that his budget "calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history .... (and) will also increase funding for our veterans."

Trump's budget was panned by the Senate's top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York.

"The same time he's talking about medical research he's going to slash it," Schumer said on Wednesday. "Education. He talked about the great issue of education. Same thing. His budget is going to slash education to smithereens."

The initial reaction among Republicans signaled that Trump faces a fight with his party over the $1 trillion-plus portion of the federal budget that is passed each year by Congress. That discretionary part of the budget has been squeezed over the past few years, while Republicans controlling Congress have largely ignored the ever-growing tide of automatic-pilot spending on benefit programs like food stamps, student loans, and Medicare.

The proposed cut to the State Department's diplomatic corps and the foreign aid budget are particularly striking, and likely to include security contractors at diplomatic missions abroad after the GOP criticized Democrats for security at the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans died in a 2012 attack.

"What the president wants is to move spending from, say, overseas back in this country," said Trump's budget director, former tea party Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "That's why you'll see fairly significant reductions in his proposals regarding foreign aid."

Such a cut fits into Trump's "America first" worldview, but is alarming to lawmakers who see diplomacy and foreign aid as a small but crucial component of the federal budget, just more than 1 percent.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a primary rival of Trump, delivered an impassioned speech on the Senate floor in defense of foreign aid. Rubio argued that spending on foreign aid is critical to the U.S. economy and national security.

"I promise you it's going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-American and anti-American terrorism if the United States of America was the reason why they are even alive today," said the senator, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Other Trump targets include the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS, and many grant programs for state and local government. Public housing vouchers for the poor are targeted as well, much to the consternation of the pragmatic-minded lawmakers on the House and Senate Appropriations committees, whose programs were significantly curbed by a hard-fought 2011 budget and debt agreement.

"We've reduced our discretionary spending over the last seven or eight years an incredible amount," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J. "Maybe some people don't like those agencies, but it's been pretty difficult for them to meet their mandate."

Top congressional priorities include aid to disadvantaged schools, Pell Grants for low-income college students, medical research, Amtrak subsidies, and water and sewer projects.

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"There are important priorities within the domestic side, on the discretionary side of domestic spending," added Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan.

McConnell noted that it requires Democratic votes in the Senate to pass appropriations bills. That works to the advantage of more pragmatic Republicans.

Many GOP lawmakers would prefer cuts to entitlement programs rather than already-strapped agency operating budgets and that's fine with party conservatives.

"We can no longer expand federal spending without finding savings somewhere," said Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md. "And so, the people who want to protect nondefense discretionary, they're going to have to realize at some point we may have to look at the entitlement programs."

Trump has said he wants to leave Social Security and Medicare alone, though Mulvaney says other entitlement programs are likely to be addressed in Trump's full budget submission in May.

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Trump budget plan draws strong opposition _ from Republicans - Yahoo Finance

Hill Republicans are once again at the mercy of President Donald Trump political whims.

CNN reported Tuesday that Trump wants Republicans and Democrats to work together on an immigration reform bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the US with their families if they paid taxes and had no serious criminal record -- a stance that runs counter to the tough-on-immigrant rhetoric that defined Trump's polarizing campaign and galvanized much of his base.

"The time is right for an immigration bill as long as there is compromise on both sides," Trump told reporters at the White House.

Congressional Republicans were not ready for this.

"I wish they would send me a memo when they're going to do something because some of us are in meetings all day long trying to do our job, and then I come out and get asked 'what's your opinion,'" Arizona Republican Rep. David Schweikert told CNN.

Giving legal status to undocumented immigrants isn't necessarily a deal breaker in the House, but some conservatives argued that talking about legalizing millions before further action is taken on border security is premature.

"The most important thing is secure the border. Until that's done, you cannot even get to the other questions," Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, told CNN. "We have to demonstrate that we're going to actually secure the border so we have to do that first than we can get to all the other questions."

The number three House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, told CNN he hoped Trump would double down on border security, but signaled he wasn't ready to embrace any potential compromise dealing with those undocumented workers in the US now.

"I want to see us secure the border -- that needs to be our top priority on immigration," Scalise said.

There is no doubt that adding immigration reform to an already exhaustive agenda on Capitol Hill that includes repealing Obamacare, enacting tax reform, and passing a major infrastructure bill could be a step too far for a deeply divided legislature, but a senior administration official told CNN that Trump had still hoped it could be accomplished in his first term.

It wasn't that long ago that Republicans and Democrats teamed up to pass an immigration bill out of the Senate, but ultimately it died in the House of Representatives where it never came up for a vote partially because of concerns among House Republicans that giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship was too generous. What the White House is proposing doesn't go that far, but it still could be problematic for a party who just won the House, the Senate and the White House on a tough-on-immigration message.

Some Republicans, including early Trump supporter Rep. Chris Collins, applauded Trump's openness to immigration reform.

Texas Republican Rep. Bill Flores praised the concept, telling CNN, "I am there -- that's where I am, that's where my district is and I've got a fairly conservative district so I'm fine with that."

Flores said he polled constituents at his own town hall recently and they overwhelmingly voted for a plan that would offer some type of legal status.

"President Trump is in a unique position by coming out and advocating something where I think most of the country is that he can silence what I say is the hard left and the hard right on this - not silence, but he can sort of bring a perfectly reasonable solution that's important so I'm glad he's doing it," Flores said.

Behind closed doors, one GOP member said that discussions are already underway among a group of House Republicans to get a bipartisan immigration bill across the finish line.

Members were meeting in hopes that at some point, they could pick up and run with any appetite from the White House to pursue immigration reform. The member, who spoke on the condition of background so they could speak freely about the ongoing discussions, said they had not been in consultation with the White House, but that the news was welcome.

"There's been a lot of work done," the member said, noting that they have reached out to Democrats, but so far the meetings have just been with Republicans. "There's always been the issue from a lot of folks --particularly from the right -- that say 'look, if we had border security we can do more.' There was zero confidence with (President Barack) Obama and I understand why. He didn't want to do border security."

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Trump throws curveball at Republicans with call for immigration deal - Journal Times