With state governments now in charge of doling out federal block grants, some mayors complain that governors and state legislatures are deaf to the needs of cities, and are hesitant to direct funds towards urban programmes.
Do you agree or disagree with converting the Medicaid program from the current system in which states and the federal government share oversight and funding responsibilities to a system of federal block grants to state governments, who would then decide how to allocate the grant funds to Medicaid recipients?
Yet mitigating the risk of default is the fact that Ecuador's ability to service its debt has improved in recent months, as high energy prices, increased taxation of the oil sector and the state's take-over of Block 15 previously run by a US company, Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), are boosting the fiscal surplus and foreign reserves.
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Rep. Henry Waxman in a letter yesterday urged Sec. of State Hillary Clinton to block permits for the cross-border pipeline.
The case argued Monday dates to 2003, when a Kentucky couple argued taxation of out-of-state bonds allowed the state to block interstate commerce.
The simplest way for the federal government to restrain Medicaid would be to end the current system of matching state spending and replace this with block grants, which would give the states an incentive to focus on cost-control.
And so my commitment to the people on this block, the people in this community, and the people of this state is that that same spirit will carry over all the way through until our work is done.
Under Supreme Court precedent, a state doesn't have the power to block the enforcement of federal law inside its borders, said Joseph Thai, a constitutional law professor at the University of Oklahoma who served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Byron White.
Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham both said today that they want to have Watergate-style hearings on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and said that if you nominate Susan Rice to be Secretary of State, they will do everything in their power to block her nomination.
By contrast, Mr Gore would expand the State Children's Health Insurance Programme, a set of block grants made to states by the federal government to insure poor children, to reach 1m families living just above the poverty line.
Vermont is the only state in the nation that has the ability to block the relicensing of a nuclear plant, a condition it insisted on when the plant changed hands in 2002, and the state's legislature may do just that during its January session.
On Thursday, the New York state Court of Appeals denied the city's final attempt to block the emails' release.
What most concerns Netanyahu these days is that the US will fail to block a Palestinian bid to have the Security Council recognize a Palestinian state in all of Judea and Samaria and in large swathes of Jerusalem even if the Palestinians refuse to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
Since the pipeline will cross America's borders, the authority to approve or block it rests with the State Department, which says it will rule by the end of the year.
Kerr also pointed out that there's a conflict of interest when the executive branch, which oversees law enforcement in the state, is in a position to block laws that would limit the powers of law enforcement.
The EU summit in Barcelona last month ended with an agreement on a major liberalisation of energy markets - a deal which France had threatened to block to protect its giant state electricity monopoly, Electricite de France.
The NAACP's New York state branch and a network of Hispanic groups have joined a legal effort to block the first-of-its-kind restriction, igniting questions Wednesday about the groups' ties to the beverage industry.
Unfortunately, it would take a constitutional amendment, according to Connaughton, one that would never pass the requisite number of states because those state legislatures can be influenced by lobbyists and campaign contributions to block it.
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All county tax offices in the Tarheel State are now required to be linked to the state Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) so that t he DMV could block registration renewals on vehicles with delinquent taxes.
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Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a similar bill that would grant both state insurance regulators and the federal Department of Health and Human Services the authority to block rate increases.
Washington State was next on the list, but the Supreme Court has weighed in to block the release of the names for now.
According to the New York Times, the State Department enlisted the help of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in urging members of Congress not to block the aid.
The trouble is that neither would be guaranteed to win even their own state, let alone the South, and the last vice-president to deliver a regional block of votes was Lyndon Johnson, in 1960.
Hours after ECOWAS' announcement, the U.S. Department of State announced that it was imposing sanctions on travel to the United States on those people "who block Mali's return to civilian rule and a democratically elected government" and on their immediate relatives.
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