Friday News Flyover Dec 22, 2023 - STL Police crash controversy - KS Gov Laura Kelly fights for good and much more

Flyover Friday, December 22, 2023 SOURCES: The Heartland Collective, Wisconsin Examiner, Missouri Independent, River Front Times, Kansas Reflector The saga of a STL bar owner and police crash continueshttps://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/st-louis-police-didnt-do-toxicology-test-after-bar-pm-crash-41488321From article: The St. Louis police officer behind the wheel of the SUV that smashed into Bar:PM in the early hours of Monday morning had no toxicology test done on him in the wake of the incident.At their weekly briefing, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Lieutenant Colonel Renee Kriesmann said that no such test was conducted on the officer because the police only do those tests when there is a "reasonable suspicion" of drug or alcohol use, which police didn't feel was the case following the crash.The fact that police crashed their vehicle into the LGBTQ bar and then arrested one of its co-owners, Chad Morris, made news nationwide and drew condemnation from city leaders. President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green wrote on twitter that the "incident demonstrates the need for greater oversight of law enforcement — citizen oversight in particular."Missouri GOP loses again, in Courthttps://theheartlandcollective.com/2023/12/19/missouri-gop-loses-in-court-again/From Article: This past January, a law went into effect that the degenerate GOP Missouri lawmakers passed into law in 2022. Said (and now overturned, we’ll get to that in a sec) law criminalized sleeping on state-owned land, making that a Class C misdemeanor. Cities, per this ridiculous travesty of a law, could have been penalized by our unelected attorney general if the law wasn’t enforced.Advocates for unhoused people took immediate action, filing suit against the state. In a unanimous decision, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the law. This is a win for the Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, a Springfield homeless shelter, and Public Citizen Litigation Group. Because the bill was passed as an amendment to another piece of legislation, the court found that it violated a constitutional mandate for legislation to have a “single subject and clear purpose.”In the unanimous opinion, Judge Paul C. Wilson wrote: “It takes an extraordinary showing to convince this court to engage in judicial surgery to save a bill infected with the otherwise fatal constitutional disease of multiple subjects…and no effort was made by any party to make such a showing here.”Unlike my producer Adam Sommer, I don’t speak law for a living, but I’m pretty sure that a unanimous court opinion citing “fatal constitutional disease” is…bad. That’s bad, right? President Biden made a stop in Wisconsin recentlyhttps://wisconsinexaminer.com/2023/12/20/bidens-wisconsin-visit-highlights-black-small-business-growth-milwaukee-revitalization-project/From Article: With his visit to Milwaukee, including a talk at the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce as well as a stop at the shop of a Black plumbing contractor, President Joe Biden underscored his administration’s economic focus on the middle class Wednesday.Biden touted the addition of 15 million jobs since he took office after the brief COVID-19 pandemic recession. “We’re doing it by building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.  Not a whole lot trickled down on my dad’s kitchen table with a top-down economy,” he said. “But when you [build from the middle], when you increase the middle class, the poor have a shot and the wealthy still do very well, the middle class does well, and we all do well.”In his remarks to the chamber, Biden highlighted the administration’s $15 billion project to replace lead pipes across the country, including in Milwaukee, part of the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021. Missouri GOP Speaker of the House spent $29,000 tax payer money on furniture, including $5,000 for a custom fridge cabinethttps://missouriindependent.com/2023/12/20/in-a-statehouse-short-on-space-dean-plocher-converted-an-office-into-a-liquor-pantry/From article: For four years, state Rep. Mike Stephens occupied prime real estate on the third floor of the Missouri Capitol.His office in room 306B certainly wasn’t the biggest in the space-starved statehouse, where staff often work out of musty, windowless rooms, and many lawmakers are stacked on top of each other in non-ADA compliant mezzanines. House Speaker Dean Plocher took over that space and converted it into what has been jokingly referred to as his “butler’s pantry,” a makeshift storage room stocked with liquor, beer, wine and soda to complement the supply in his office.The move was part of a $60,000 renovation of Plocher’s office in late 2022 and early 2023, paid for with public funds by the House. Half the costs stemmed from expenses resulting from repairs to walls, baseboards and ceilings in the speaker’s office. The other half, according to records obtained by The Independent through Missouri’s Sunshine Law, went towards new furnishings — to the tune of about $29,000, including $8,600 for a black leather sofa and armchairs, $2,500 for a new walnut table, $2,500 for a refrigerator with an ice maker, $5,000 for a custom cabinet to hold the refrigerator and $385 for two walnut trash can bins. Kansas Gov Kelly Stands Firm On Education and Medicaidhttps://kansasreflector.com/2023/12/21/kelly-not-drawn-to-horse-trade-compromise-on-school-choice-to-win-medicaid-expansion/From article: Top priorities of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican Senate President Ty Masterson collide in January when the Kansas Legislature convenes for the 2024 session.Kelly left no doubt her central objective would be to convince at least 63 representatives and 21 senators — simple majorities of the House and Senate — to vote for passage of a bill expanding eligibility for government health benefits through Medicaid to 150,000 lower-income Kansans.Senate President Ty Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins, the GOP centers of power in the Capitol, are committed to advancing a bill delivering millions in state tax dollars to private schools through scholarships, savings accounts or vouchers. Their numerical challenge is bigger than Kelly’s. They’ll likely need two-thirds majorities — 84 in the House, 27 in the Senate — to override a Kelly veto on private school funding. Finally, reporting in Missouri is highlighting a private group working hard to push private religious schooling and its connections to other “school choice” organizationshttps://missouriindependent.com/2023/07/10/nonprofit-near-kansas-city-seeks-to-become-epicenter-of-the-school-choice-movement/From article: The headquarters of the Herzog Foundation sits on the edge of Smithville, in an 18,000-square-foot stone and glass building on a corner lot across the street from a cornfield on a gravel-lined highway.Few Missouians have likely heard of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation, or the organization’s namesake. But the unassuming locale masks what has been described as the “epicenter of the school-choice movement.”Stan Herzog’s political largesse bankrolled a generation of conservative candidates and causes in Missouri, pouring through a constellation of political action committees and nonprofits. When he died in 2019, he set aside $300 million to start a foundation dedicated to expanding the reach of Christian education.That mission kicked into overdrive in 2021, when Missouri lawmakers created a tax credit to support scholarships to help low-income students and those with disabilities attend private schools. Since then, a subsidiary of the Herzog Foundation has distributed almost half of the scholarships in the state.
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