(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump picked an attorney in the Tennessee attorney general’s office for a spot on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Whitney Hermandorfer is currently the director of the Strategic Litigation Unit in the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office. If confirmed by the Senate, she will fill a judicial vacancy left by Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch, who announced in January she was taking senior status. The court is based in Cincinnati and hears cases from Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky and Michigan.

“The atate of Tennessee has trusted Whitney Hermandorfer over and over with complex cases of national significance. She has never let us down,” said Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti on Friday. “Her leadership of Tennessee’s Strategic Litigation Unit sets a high bar of excellence at every level of the federal judiciary, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Kentucky Attorney General Russel Coleman said Hermandorfer has been an advocate.

“As neighbors to the north, our office has been grateful for Whitney’s partnership as we uphold our laws and the Constitution. Whitney was one of the brilliant advocates behind our lawsuit to protect women’s sports, and her ability to see around legal corners led to key victories all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Coleman said in a statement.

Tennessee’s U.S. senators praised Trump’s nomination.

“She is a rising star in Tennessee, and she will be a fair-minded jurist who will apply our nation’s laws as they are written and defend the Constitution,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said.

“Few can boast equal credentials, having clerked for Justices Alito and Barrett, as well as then-Judge Kavanaugh. Whitney graduated top of her law school class at the George Washington University Law School,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.

(The Center Square) – Georgians could have a $2,680 tax increase if Congress lets the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire by the end of the year, according to a study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

The main issue facing Peach Stare businesses is a policy on full expensing, the authors of the report said.

“Georgia does not adopt full expensing business investments,” the report said. “State policymakers could adopt 100% full expensing regardless of whether federal full expensing is renewed.”

Florida has the highest possible tax burden among Georgia’s surrounding states at $3,650. Alabama is the lowest at $2,192.

Business groups are advocating for the tax cuts. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Greater North Fulton Chamber held a roundtable discussion on the tax cuts last week with U.S. Rep. Richard McCormick, R-Ga.

“Extending the pro-growth tax provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is critical to ensuring continued economic prosperity for Greater North Fulton,” said Kali Boatright, president and CEO of the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce, in a statement after the event. “Without action, this would prohibit job creation, investment, and growth.”

Groups are lobbying Georgia’s Democratic U.S. Senate delegation to support an extension. Sen. Jon Ossoff has indicated he will not support the tax cuts. Americans for Prosperity held a rally outside of his Atlanta office on April 15.

But there are also concerns about how the tax cuts could affect the federal deficit.

A letter sent to U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., from the Congressional Budget Office shows the tax cuts could add $37 trillion over the next 30 years, according to previous reporting by The Center Square.

(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump signed an executive order terminating government funding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. 

As NPR and PBS have become “woke,” according to the administration, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, through which the outlets receive taxpayer funding, must abide by principles of impartiality, Trump directed the corporation and all agencies in the executive branch to stop funding the organizations to “the maximum extent allowed by law.”

Americans have many more news options today than in 1967, when the corporation was founded, and if tax dollars are going to go toward public broadcasting, it should be totally nonpartisan, according to the executive order.

“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the order reads. “No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”

The administration described the outlets as “entities that receive tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’” and listed “examples of the trash that has passed for ‘news’” at the organizations in communications it sent out Friday morning.

NPR said the Declaration of Independence contained “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” in 2021, a year before it replaced its typical Independence Day reading of the founding document with a conversation about equality, according to the administration. The administration also criticized the outlets for promoting “gender-affirming care,” featuring drag queens in children’s programs and certain views on race and “white privilege.”

The executive order will likely be challenged in court, as many of Trump’s executive orders have been so far, for breaches of executive authority.

The president has signed over 140 executive orders thus far in his second term.