Louisiana State Court Denies Injunction to Restore $300-Per-Week Unemployment Benefit

Despite a marked lack of success for efforts in Congress and through the courts to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) completely, or substantially interrupt its implementation, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 (H.R. 1314) has quietly repealed the ACA’s potentially problematic automatic enrollment requirement for health plans. As originally enacted and set forth in ACA Section 1511, the automatic enrollment requirement was incorporated into the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and obligated employers subject to the FLSA with 200 or more employees to amend their group health plans to automatically enroll new full-time employees and to continue enrollment for current employees. The intended effective date for this requirement was not specified in the ACA, and the U.S. Department of Labor deferred its application pending issuance of clarifying regulations.

The H-1B “cap season” has become an annual event for U.S. employers seeking work authorization for highly skilled foreign professionals. Working months in advance, employers and their attorneys prepare and submit H-1B petitions starting on the first business day in April. These petitions are added to a pool of applications and may be selected for an H-1B visa. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) controls the allocation of H-1B visas and accepts petitions until it has received an amount sufficient to reach the statutory limit of 65,000 visas available for new hires—and 20,000 additional visas for foreign professionals who graduated with a master’s or doctoral degree from a U.S. university.

Alaska has joined a growing number of states addressing the thorny issue of the size and density of religious gatherings during the COVID-19 health crisis. Like other states, Alaska has attempted to balance the constitutional rights of free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly with legitimate public health concerns warranting the practice of social distancing.