News & Brews November 18, 2024
Get News & Brews in your inbox each day: Subscribe here!
Casey sides with counties violating Pa. court order
So much for ‘protecting democracy’. As Democrats in multiple Pa. counties have voted to defy the Pa. Supreme Court’s order that undated mail-in ballots not be counted, Democrat Sen. Bob Casey is siding with the counties in their disdain for the rule of law. The Inquirer reports that Republicans note that “Pennsylvania’s election law clearly states … [dates are] required for a ballot to be considered valid.” (Fact check: True.) And twice the Pa. Supreme Court ordered that this law be followed this election. But Casey “came to the defense of four county election boards that defied the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.”
Route 309 ‘tells the story’ of Trump’s Pa. win
For an explanation of Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania, just look at Route 309, which “begins around the northeast’s Wyoming Valley, continues through Luzerne County then past the Blue Mountain ridge and onward to the Lehigh Valley, where it passes Pennsylvania Dutch communities and enters suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County before terminating at the state’s biggest city,” writes Charles McElwee in The City Journal. For decades, the highway “ran through reliable Democratic territory…. Since 2016, however, these same cities and towns have flipped red, leading to realigned counties like a Republican-majority Luzerne.”
Pa. schools fail to tell parents about school choice funds
Pa. public schools that fall in the bottom 15% on math and reading scores are classified as “low-achieving.” Students in these schools are automatically eligible to apply for scholarship funds to leave and attend better private schools. What’s more, the low-achieving schools are supposed to inform parents of this status. But apparently, “many schools are failing in their duty to inform parents of the school’s low-achieving status, or are making it difficult for them to find out.” The Commonwealth Foundation’s Rachel Langan explains, “We’re finding schools aren’t doing this [notifying parents], so parents don’t even know that their child is eligible for … [a scholarship]. They don’t know what it is, they don’t know how to get it, and the school districts that are letting parents know, it’s buried three levels down in their website.”
In Nippon-U.S. Steel deal, the battle continues
The Post-Gazette reports that 16 years ago when a foreign “oligarch now in prison” purchased U.S. factories using stolen money, the “little-known but powerful federal panel created to screen such deals for national security risks raised no alarms.” But “when Japan’s Nippon Steel moved to buy the U.S. Steel Corp. this year, the panel stepped in and delayed the deal.” Per legal experts, “The two cases … provide an example of how power and politics can play critical roles in deciding which foreign investments in the U.S. are blocked and which ones succeed.”
Shapiro is silent on illegal ballot counting
Well, this is kind of telling. Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who never met a limelight he didn’t love, has been deafeningly silent on the votes by Democrat county commissioners to defy the Pa. Supreme Court order and count undated mail-in ballots in the Casey-McCormick race. Bueller? Bueller?