Republican Donors Are Spending Gobs of Money to Flip the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to This Post)

Being our semi-regular, weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as you know, the real governmentin’ gets done and where the pumps don’t work cause the vandals took the handles.

We begin in Tennessee, where 16 people were killed when a military explosives plant exploded. The investigation is, as they say, ongoing. From CNN:

The early-morning Friday explosion at Accurate Energetic Systems, a manufacturing plant for military and demolition explosives, was a “devastating blast,” Davis said, noting responders were able to secure the site by late morning. The detonation—which was so large that it registered as a 1.6 magnitude earthquake, according to data from U.S. Geological Survey—left charred debris and mangled vehicles across the area.

Workplace safety activists have their questions as well. From Insurance Journal:

National COSH’s Martinez said the risky nature of the facility’s work underscores the need for robust safety measures and enforcement. “Explosives manufacturing is inherently dangerous—yet every single one of these deaths was preventable if proper oversight, safety measures, and accountability were in place. No one should die for a paycheck,” she said.

Meanwhile, up in Alaska, the state got clobbered by a typhoon because the ice doesn’t form as early and the permafrost is pretty much gone, thanks to those clever Chinese climate hoaxsters. Some second-day stories are sadly predictable. This is one of those. From CNN:

There is a gaping hole in weather balloon coverage in western Alaska—a critical shortage bedeviling U.S. forecasts and the National Weather Service since layoffs hit the agency as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s push to shrink the federal government back in February. Weather balloons, which are typically launched twice a day, provide crucial information on wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity and other measurements. Balloon data is fed directly into the sophisticated computer models used to predict the weather. However, there were few, if any, balloons to take measurements of what the weather was doing as the remains of Typhoon Halong approached Alaska late last week.

You can almost hear Big Balls and his pack of vandals giggling over cutting this program: “Balloons, dude? That much for balloons? We can get all we need down at Party Planner. I know the manager there.”

However...

Such data could have helped the models more accurately predict the storm’s path and intensity, as initial model projections had the forecasts suggesting the worst conditions would strike farther to the south and west than they did. Models like the NWS’s Global Forecast System (GFS) consistently showed a stronger storm to the northwest of where it eventually struck. The communities that ended up seeing the worst storm surge flooding were not in the original forecasts.

While NWS forecasters in Alaska issued many warnings for the area that ended up bearing the brunt of the storm, they did so without the aid of accurate model projections made days in advance. The balloons in this region are well-known to the NWS and might also affect forecasts in the lower 48 states.

Time for a cameo appearance by the late Joseph Heller.

How big of a difference the missing balloon data made, though, may never be known. The best way to determine that would be to run computer models with weather balloon data fed into them and without it, in what is known as a data denial experiment—impossible to do without the data itself. “I don’t know how we could ever know what impact not having all of these (balloons) in the days leading up to Halong had,” Thoman said. “You can’t do data denial experiments if there’s no data to deny, right?”

Or, conversely...

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

We move along now to Pennsylvania, where there is an upcoming retention election that could decide the fate of the Democratic majority on the state supreme court. (Have I mentioned lately what a terrible idea an elected judiciary is?) Unfortunately, the campaign has become kind of a German opera. Bolts makes a noble attempt at understanding what in the hell goes on in Pennsylvania.

Still, the stakes next month are high: Three Democratic justices—Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht—are up for retention, meaning voters will decide, in a simple yes-or-no vote, whether or not to keep them on the bench. Republicans are mounting an unusual effort to oust them and deprive Democrats of the court majority they’ve enjoyed for the last decade.

Whether that effort succeeds depends on the right’s ability to shake up a firm status quo—only one state judge has ever lost a retention election in Pennsylvania—by motivating people like those walking the fair in Ephrata. Bolts interviewed more than a dozen voters there, mostly Republicans. Only two of them were even vaguely aware of these supreme court elections, and neither knew the justices’ names or party affiliations. Several said they weren’t planning to vote at all in this off-year election.

Enter the kludge.

Because these three judges are up for retention, they have no opponents. Pennsylvania voters will see the justices’ names on the ballot and face a choice for each: retain or fire. The state lists no partisan markers on retention ballots, even though justices are initially elected in partisan races.

Presented with such a choice, voters tend to overwhelmingly favor retention, treating it as the default option, which puts a heavy burden on the opposition. It’s been 20 years since any Pennsylvania state judge has even come within 22 percentage points of defeat.

And even if the justices are ousted in November, Republicans wouldn’t just take over the seats. The 2–2 tie that would result could become a prolonged stalemate that keeps the seats vacant through the fall of 2027, the next cycle with judicial elections.

That’s because any replacements for ousted justices would need to be nominated by the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and then approved by a supermajority in the Republican-controlled state Senate. The last time a vacancy arose, when a justice died in September of 2022, the seat just remained empty until voters chose a replacement in the November 2023 election; several Pennsylvania politicos told Bolts they expect the same thing would happen now.

Got it?

With no 2005-esque air of scandal, and with these justices having little name ID around the state, many Pennsylvanians are grasping for how to approach a campaign that has no recent parallel. The justices themselves are having to adapt to a challenge neither they nor their peers in this state have had to face for decades: how to run a political campaign while insisting that you’re not a politician and in the absence of any opposing candidate.

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate an elected judiciary?

We move along to Montana, where the state’s environmental regulators have finally found an EPA it can work with on water quality. This may not be an altogether good thing. From Montana Free Press:

In his letter to DEQ, Region Eight Administrator Cyrus Western wrote that the standards “meet requirements to protect designated uses” under the Clean Water Act, the 53-year-old law U.S. Congress passed to clean up polluted rivers and lakes. Western noted that DEQ used narrative standards, which are based on subjective criteria such as color, odor and the presence of undesirable aquatic life, as recently as 2014. He argued that the Clean Water Act does not require states to adopt numeric, or numbers-based, nutrient criteria and concluded that the EPA’s authorization of narrative standards will “support Montana in its work to implement the Clean Water Act and protect state waters.”

First of all, the guy’s name is Cyrus Western? Really? Proud graduate of the Zane Grey Institute of Technology, no doubt. Second, I am naturally wary of any scientific standards that are “based on subjective criteria.” I prefer “numeric” or “numbers-based” data to “Sure smells like phosphorus today, mother.”

Conservation groups generally favor stricter, more protective standards while mining companies, fossil fuel refineries and other industrial operations with wastewater discharge permits generally favor looser regulations.

Silly numbers. Can’t trust ’em.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Ovos moles Taster Friedman of the Algarve brings us a tale of the crazy that lingers on the plains. From The Oklahoman:

State Rep. Ellen Pogemiller, D-Oklahoma City, filed a formal complaint with the commission on Monday, September 29, saying Walters’ hiring as chief executive officer of the Teacher Freedom Alliance—which he announced during an appearance on Fox News last Wednesday—raises ethics concerns. “This development strongly suggests that his prior actions were motivated by personal financial or professional gain, further underscoring the need for investigation,” Pogemiller wrote in her complaint, which was addressed to Lee Anne Bruce Boone, the Ethics Commission’s executive director.

Oklahoma politics may never be rid of brother Walters, but the possibility that a lot of his performative Jesus love might have been his ticket into the wonderful world of wing-nut welfare is even more delicious.