For a hundred and sixty-five years, Rhode Island's law books have quietly carried the state's 1861 ratification of the Corwin Amendment—a proposed amendment that would have made slavery permanent and beyond the reach of Congress.

This week, a bill to repeal that ratification finally got its hearing. It set the tone for the whole week: state legislatures down in the fine print, the clauses and surcharges and exclusions most people never read until one of them lands on them.

In the same seven days, Louisiana sent a ban on debit-card surcharges to Governor Jeff Landry's desk (Senate Bill 254, passed 36-0 in the Senate and 83-14 in the House), Illinois cleared the Menopause Equity and Care Act with 61 sponsors and moved a bill barring copays and prior authorization for seizure-detection devices, and California advanced the Digital Financial Asset Banking Act—a post-FTX rulebook for banks holding crypto—through three committee votes (9-0, 15-0, 15-0). New Jersey took up provisional licensing for foreign-trained doctors and a stalkerware crime; Pennsylvania weighed an Ebony Alert and a 3,000-megawatt grid-storage mandate; Ohio introduced the Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act to put voucher schools under public-school accountability rules.

Follow every bill at amendment.app.

The Tenth is produced with AI-generated hosts working from human-edited, fact-checked briefings; every bill, vote, and quote is real and sourced.

Bills in this episode:

• Louisiana debit-card surcharge ban (SB254)
• New Jersey used-car “as-is” sale curbs (A1310)
• Rhode Island school-lunch payment-fee ban (S2635)
• New York chip-enabled SNAP checkout mandate (A8197)
• One Fair Price Act (S3387)
• Illinois Menopause Equity and Care Act (HB5284)
• Illinois seizure-detection device coverage (SB2762)
• New Jersey provisional licensure for international medical graduates (A3398)
• New York youth-targeted vape product ban (A2102)
• New Jersey stalkerware / AirTag tracking crime (A4542)
• Pennsylvania Ebony Alert system (HB434)
• Illinois in-home child grooming reporting (HB4534)
• Oklahoma high-speed police-pursuit alert (HB1155)
• California Digital Financial Asset Banking Act (AB2285)
• Pennsylvania grid-scale battery storage mandate (HB2380)
• Rhode Island Corwin Amendment ratification repeal (H7579)
• Ohio Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act (SB443)
• North Carolina life-at-fertilization constitutional amendment (HB1232)