I'm Laura Rogers with Kentucky Edition, joined by NPR's Ryland Barton.

And I know you've been following very closely, of course, that assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, now the current Republican presidential nominee.

And Kentucky Congressman James Comer says he wants to see an investigation launched into how the Secret Service handled that situation.

Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, I think the country is really waiting to learn more about exactly what happened in this.

I mean, one part of it is this security issue, how local police and the Secret Service, what were they doing with security?

Were there any oversights that allowed that person to get on top of that roof and shoot at the president and towards the crowd?

There's a lot of questions around that, even who that person was in the first place.

But Congressman Palmer's request here is to the Secret Service here and their role in protecting the president and whether or not all the steps were taken here.

This is a special called meeting.

It's going to take place on Monday.

And I think there's going to be a lot of attention into what is said there, because we don't know everything just yet.

This is really been universally condemned by politicians and people across the country.

This assassination attempt.

It's a really terrifying and and disgusting thing for somebody.

You know, if this is in fact, a political assassination attempt to really be using the most extreme form of violence to try and send a political message here.

There was a little bit of a heartening moment of people coming together to denounce that.

But, you know, I think this we are in a political and an election year still waiting to see how this kind of rolls out right now.

Yes, lawmakers on both sides, like you said, denouncing political violence of any kind.

And President Biden also wanting a thorough investigation into what happened there in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Let's also talk about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, because we saw if you if people were watching Kentucky Edition last night, it's all Jim Lafleur's report on that meeting that took place yesterday.

This was legislation that didn't pass this past session.

However, it is still a topic of conversation at colleges and universities in Kentucky.

What did we learn from that meeting yesterday?

The bill that was proposed in the Kentucky legislature is one that was really similar to the ones that have been proposed in a lot of other states.

Some other ones they passed.

So in, say, in Texas and Florida, there's an immediate ban on D-I programs in those states.

And we've seen those those programs hollowed out.

People fired those programs eliminated from public universities, said something a lot of conservative leaders in the Kentucky legislature want to make happen.

And we've seen it in other states as well.

In Ohio, the attorney general there, you know, he kind of issued an opinion saying that the that race based scholarships do not do not follow the Supreme Court's recent ruling against affirmative action programs.

And so Ohio is in the process right now of making sure and reviewing all of their scholarships and making sure that they are not tied to race in any way.

During this committee hearing this week, we saw, you know, Republican lawmakers coming out against, say, blacks, student groups saying that there shouldn't be you know, there shouldn't be extremist groups that are exclusive just to black students and saying that public colleges are unfairly creating space for those and that there aren't there there aren't white student groups.

So that's really where the discussion has kind of ended up in the Kentucky legislature at this moment.

Granted, it it didn't pass during this year's session.

I'm interested to see it, to see if this discussion is still going on when January rolls around, because we will be past that election by that time.

And, you know, I may make a bet that the reason that a lot of these discussions are happening are because we're in such a highly charged political environment with a presidential election at the top of the ticket.

So, yeah, we'll see if that conversation emerges again, as you say, when we head into the legislative session of 2025.

Something else to dive into here.

Speaking of legislation, we have more than 200 new laws that are now in effect in Kentucky.

Governor Andy Beshear is questioning really whether the funding is there for his administration to implement those laws.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah, so a lot of those laws went into effect on Monday, on July 15th.

Earlier this year, the governor sent this letter to state lawmakers and this is according to reporting from Kentucky Public Radio's Sylvia Goodman, saying that there are about 20 bills that don't have enough funding attached to them for his administration to actually implement them.

So really interesting little battle of the different branches of government here where the legislature passes bills, expects the administration to be able to implement them.

But the administration says that their hands are tied if there isn't funding attached to them.

So these bills there, there's a real range of them.

And lawmakers said that they were surprised that they were on them, but they total to being about $141 million that the state that that Bashir's administration said that they didn't have enough money to implement.

One of them involved the creating a public statewide reporting system for people to make reports related to child abuse.

So, I mean, this is a bipartisan measure that, you know, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle were able to get behind.

But the administration says that the $43 million price tag for that is what they're estimating just wasn't there, didn't come along with the state budget.

The Republican House speaker, David Osburn, has accused the governor of playing politics with this, saying that he's flirting too much with national politics and the liberal elite and not paying attention enough to implementing these policies passed by the legislature.

But again, the governor's just saying the money's not there for it and that the lawmakers need to work more closely with the administration when they pass bills like this.

Brian, thank you so much.

We appreciate your perspective today.

Really important things going on in the world right now.

And thanks for your time.

Thanks, Laura.