News & Brews April 2, 2025
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Liberal wins Wisconsin Supreme Court race
Liberal Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel in a highly watched contest for Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday. Crawford’s victory in a race that broke spending records means the court will retain a liberal majority as Democrats hope to use it to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts to hand Democrats two more U.S. House seats. With Wisconsin now in the rearview mirror, eyes turn to Pennsylvania, where three of our liberal state Supreme Court justices will face retention votes this November to determine if they remain on the bench for another decade.
Pa. Dems are mad; Fetterman’s old foe is listening
It’s no secret that the pro-Hamas, ‘let’s open the border’ wing of the Democrat party isn’t too keen on Sen. Fetterman these days. After all, he not only dared to speak with Trump (perish the thought!), but he fiercely supports Israel’s right to defend itself and continually pushes for the release of Israeli hostages from terrorists’ hands. Reasonable actions, but not to unreasonable progressives. Super ironically, one person who seems to be capitalizing on progressives’ angst with Fetterman is his one-time U.S. Senate primary opponent Conor Lamb, the Independent reports. You’ll recall that Lamb was considered the more moderate of the two, but now he’s aligning with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in opposing Fetterman. Is it a full moon or something? It remains to be seen whether Lamb will make another run for office.
‘Shapiro admin stopped tracking why older adults die during abuse, neglect investigations’
Prior to Gov. Shapiro’s taking office, Pennsylvania had implemented a process of tracking the deaths of older adults who die while part of active abuse or neglect investigations. Spotlight PA reports, “The goal was to strengthen the safety net for vulnerable older adults. If the main cause indicated the older adult may have died under suspicious circumstances, state aging employees would then review that person’s protective services case file to see if something went awry with the investigation.” But the Shapiro admin put an end to the process, raising alarm among some for the well-being of older adults and also raising questions as to Shapiro’s secrecy surrounding suspicious deaths.
Climate lawsuits on shaky legal ground?
The Center Square reports that a 2011 Supreme Court case may place climate change lawsuits that have been filed across the country—including in Bucks County—”on tenuous legal ground.” Bucks “has filed a lawsuit against the largest and most recognizable oil companies in the U.S., demanding huge payouts for their alleged role in causing climate change.” But in the 2011 case, the High Court “ruled unanimously against environmental groups making essentially the same argument in … a case where a handful of states sued some major energy companies, saying they are a ‘public nuisance’ because of greenhouse gas emissions.” Radical environmentalists, however, argue they still have a case at the state and local level, as the Supreme Court ruling “specifically refers to federal common law.” We’ll see.
‘Rural Pennsylvanians deserve school choice, too’
School choice efforts often focus on urban centers, where thousands of children are trapped by union-backed politicians in schools that fail to teach them and sometimes even put their physical safety at risk. But as the Commonwealth Foundation’s Emily D’Vertola highlights, “the state’s troubled education system isn’t only a big-city problem; rural families also struggle to find the right schools.” In fact, of the more than 200,000 Pennsylvania students “trapped in the state’s lowest-performing public schools,” approximately 4,400 “live in the rural areas. Most of these students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Many families can’t move to a ZIP Code with better public schools or pay tuition at a private school.” The solution is school choice, which “refocuses resources toward kids, not systems.”