MOScout Daily Update: How Judges Draw Maps - Kunce as Outsider - Schmitt Border Trip - COVID Recedes - Ameren Bit-Coining and more...
How Judges Draw
A potential judicial commission looms over the current commissions’ efforts to draw state legislative maps.
If either of the two commissions is unable to muster the votes to pass a redistricting map, then a commission of “six members appointed from among the judges of the appellate courts of the state of Missouri by the state supreme court” will step in to finish their job.
There’s some optimism that the Senate Commission will be able to achieve a consensus map. However, most observers think the House Commission’s work is doomerd.
Still for all parties involved, the impulse to stonewall or make a deal is weighed against the unknown of what map judges would give them.
That’s why this piece by the mighty Jason Rosenbaum is so valuable. See it here. He has a recollection from one of the judges involved in the last map-drawing about their experience. They were operating under similar directive as judges would this year. That is, “districts shall be composed of contiguous territory as compact as may be.”
Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that the criteria of compactness inevitably generates maps with fewer Democratic districts than you would expect from the overall statewide vote totals. Democrats are clustered in urban areas. Compactness = overwhelming 80% Dem urban districts, but fewer of them. Republicans, meanwhile, can enjoy more (equally safe) 60% Republican districts across rural Missourah.
Note, that in the memo (see an excerpt below) the judge doesn’t think there’s any politics involved in their drawing. And there likely wasn’t any politics injected into it; the politics was already baked into the map via the compactness criteria.
· From Judge James E. Welsh’s memo: We wanted districts as compact and contiguous as possible while complying with federal voting rights laws. The only way we thought we could balance these requirements was to start with a clean map, then first address the urban areas of St. Louis and Kansas City and move out through the collar counties into the more rural areas. Many iterations were drawn and redrawn in this attempt. Sometimes the slightest change resulted in unintended consequences. It was trial and error, repeat and retry, until the final result was acceptable to all of us. I do not believe any political considerations played any part in the drawing of the maps.
Schmitt’s Border Trip Confusion
Post-Dispatch reports on confusion over Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s recent trip to “the border” to hold a press conference announcing a lawsuit against the Biden Administration
Was it a campaign event paid for his campaign, or official business paid for by taxpayers? Both.
“Schmitt’s expenses will be paid by his campaign while the state will cover the spokesman’s travel expenses.”
COVID Continues to Ease
The number continue to improve on COVID in Missouri. This morning, according to the DHSS dashboard, 269 Missourians are in ICUs because COVID, and 1,038 Missourians are hospitalized with the virus overall. That’s the best ICU number we’ve seen in a while, and with the current trend hospitalizations could fall below 1,000 sometime this week – a major milestone.
· Springfield News Leader reports that “CoxHealth has shut down its largest COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit… The 51-patient unit was opened for the first time in July of 2020 after Cox South Hospital converted storage space in the West Tower into an open ward-style room to treat the influx of COVID-19 patients.”
Outsider Kunce
Democratic US Senate candidate Lucas Kunce is charting an outsider populist message which has been effectively in the viral world of Twitter, but has alienated him from the establishment Missouri Democrats.
The latest: a tweet from Kunce declaring that “China's @SmithfieldFoods bought off politicians in BOTH parties so they could launch a corporate takeover of our farmland. And now Big Ag has shut down 90% of Missouri hog producers. Every single person I met at this year's state fair agreed: We need to break up Big Ag!...”
· One stalwart Democrat isn’t amused at the “both parties” dart: I’ll just ride or die w Sifton. He’s fought for what I care about, personally and professionally. Neither will win but I’m not hitching my star to this trash bag…
DAR on Parson’s “Politics at its Worst”
It questionable whether Uniting Missouri PAC’s latest web video is help to Governor Mike Parson. It purports to support his decision to prosecute a reporter for alerting the state to a serious web security lapse. But the governor’s position is so incomprehensible, it might be better to let the story die instead of throw another log on the fire.
So far, zero elected Republicans are on the record supporting the governor’s decision. Even the rural newspapers – usually reliably red – aren’t with him on the “kill the messenger” game.
· Daily American Republic editorial: This week in Missouri our governor wants to prosecute a reporter for revealing a defect in the state’s management of personal information… Countries like Russia and China regularly lay charges against those individuals who try to hold leaders accountable for misdeeds and poor policy… We have spoken several times with Parson in the past and praise his efforts to support infrastructure improvements and workforce development across the state. We know he has been instrumental in efforts that have benefited Butler County, including grant funding that is supporting the expansion of Highway 67 south as a future interstate route. But Parson’s decision this week to call for the prosecution of the individual who reported on the data breach is politics at its worst. Parson’s actions are more like something we would expect to hear about in a country that values freedoms less than we do in the United States…
Ameren Bitcoinging!
In an interesting twist, Ameren is mining for bitcoins! Read the Post-Dispatch article here.
· Ameren built the data center to guzzle energy from the electric grid and help its power plants avoid ramping their production down and back up again, which wastes energy and stresses the plants. But the company needed something for the computers to work on. So Ameren devised a task for the servers: “Mine” for Bitcoin, the polarizing digital currency now on a Wall Street tear.
· The work is novel. Experts are unaware of other regulated U.S. utilities mining cryptocurrencies. Ameren said the company believes it is “one of, if not the first in the country” to perform the activity.
· The company initially sought to include $8,000 of the data center energy costs in a recent round of price adjustments for customers. Ameren backed off, but the [Missouri Office of Public Counsel] said that it aims to ensure that the company’s exploratory look at cryptocurrencies is not backed by ratepayer money.
Birthdays
Happy birthdays to Shantel Dooling, and Redditt Hudson.