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Blunt: People will want to know why did the House take all this time on impeachment (AUDIO)

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The Senate may have a trial of the president right after the first of the year, according to Missouri’s Roy Blunt. But he does not expect it to result in the removal of President Donald Trump.

Missourinet spoke with Sen. Blunt Friday after the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve impeachment articles against the president.

Blunt has said that he will be an impartial juror if the Senate has put Trump on trial. We asked him if that holds true now that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News he has made up his mind: “I’m coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can.”

Blunt said, “I do think we’re closer and closer to the point where the Senate can reach conclusions. The House is done. There are two articles of impeachment that are about as boiled down as they can possibly be to not very much. The bribery thing they talked about appeared to go away, the obstruction charge is something we’ll deal with.”

Missourinet: “Like McConnell, have you made up your mind?”

Blunt: “The likelihood that 20 Republicans would join every Democrat is pretty slim, and we’ll see. As I predicted for some time, a partisan determination to impeach by the House will almost certainly lead to a largely partisan vote in the Senate which means you would not have the votes you need to get this done.”

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW (3:15)

Blunt says the Senate, in the next few days, will decide on a trial date for after the first of the year.

 

Missouri Rep. Smith: Senators running for president are not impartial jurors

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If the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump reaches the U.S. Senate, Missouri Congressman Jason Smith asks that some senators step back from voting.

Eighth District Republican Jason Smith filed a resolution to require senators who are running for office to recuse themselves.

“To be an impartial juror, that means you cannot have your mind made up; you have to listen to the facts. And I can tell out right now there are five members of the United States Senate who are all presidential candidates who have stood on national TV saying that they would vote right now to impeach the President of the United States. Those aren’t impartial jurors,” he told Missourinet.

Smith has introduced House Resolution 774, which would compel the U.S. Senate to amend its Rules of Procedure and Practice When Sitting on Impeachment Trials.

Congressman Smith has also written a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, calling for the change. More than two dozen members of Congress have signed the letter.

He says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “not giving the president his due process and fairness.”

“When you look at the Constitution, the Vice-President of the United States has to recuse himself from presiding over the Senate because of the conflict of interest. He’s next in line for president if the impeachment happens. Well, every senator has to take an oath of office during the impeachment process that they will be impartial jurors, basically. To be an impartial juror, that means you can’t have your mind made up; you have to listen to the facts.”

Smith calls the impeachment hearings “a sham” and says Speaker Pelosi is “abusing her power.”

“The first impeachment vote we had in the House happened in December of 2017. That was a year and a half before the Ukraine telephone call that everyone has seen the transcript of. Nancy Pelosi is only doing what her left-wing squad in the House of Representatives has pushed her that far.”

President Trump says the impeachment effort is bogus and has declined to participate in the current phase of House impeachment hearings.  He has refused to cooperate or allow cabinet witnesses or documents to be released.

Judge: Missouri Auditor can protect the indentity of whistleblower in Greene County complaint

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In a challenge to whistleblower protection in Missouri, a Cole County circuit judge ruled against the Greene County Sheriffs office, in favor of State Auditor Nicole Galloway.

This comes from a 2017 case of whistleblower complaints about the use of public resources in Greene County in connection with a tax ballot issue.

In answer to a records request,  the auditor did not share documents that would reveal whistleblower identities. Sheriff James Arnott sued.

The brief decision upholds the state whistleblower law that says, “Individuals who make a report under this section may choose to remain anonymous until the individual affirmatively consents to having the individual’s identity disclosed.”

In her response to the court’s ruling, Galloway stated, “Without the information provided by whistleblowers and the legal safeguards that shield those individuals, the audit of Greene County may not have happened.”

 

Missouri’s commercial hemp program underway, applications available Dec. 16

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Missouri’s new commercially regulated hemp program is moving forward, with sample applications available here.

Official applications will be available Dec. 16 and the Missouri Department of Agriculture will begin taking applications Jan. 2. Interested producers must complete a written application, create parcel maps and complete a fingerprint criminal history background check within 30 days of submitting their application.  It costs $750 to apply and that fee helps fund the state’s program.

Department spokesperson Sami Jo Freeman says Missouri will be operating under an extension of the 2014 Farm Bill rules, allowing farmers to get seed in the ground in 2020 with no restrictions to acreage or number of permits. Once approved, a producer can grow industrial hemp in Missouri for three years. Freeman recommends that producers stay flexible under state protection as the federal government decides its final requirements and makes further changes. Interested and approved growers can give input to the USDA about the regulation process. The full federal rule text is available from USDA’s website here and is open for public comment Nov. 1 – Dec. 30, 2019.

She says the 2020 crop will yield important information for the Missouri Department of Agriculture.

“We’re going to be able to determine producers’ interests, we’re going to be able to collect data. It’s going to allow producers the opportunity to figure out how hemp grows best in Missouri because it’s been 70 years since we’ve had a successful hemp crop,” Freeman told Missourinet.

She also urges growers to find the processors and establish their costumers before they plant.  Markets are opening nationwide from textile-replacing fibers to CBD oil.  For example, Levi’s is aggressively exploring hemp as a substitute or supplement to cotton.

“As a regulated crop, it is different than corn and soybeans,” Freeman says, “and we have to phase it back in. Whenever you see new opportunities like this our producers in rural Missouri are going to take advantage of that and whenever our rural communities thrive, our urban communities thrive as well.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kyle Hill, KWIX, contributed to this report.

Winter storm creates air travel delays across Midwest (live links)

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Midwest travelers this Thanksgiving holiday suffered delays and cancellations because of a winter storm passing through Saturday and Sunday.

Chicago’ O’Hare was one of the airports hit hard by delays. The winter conditions of snow and wind created a domino effect and well over 11 thousand delays nationally. Check here for current counts.

American Airlines says alerts of possible delays could impact 2.7 million of its customers through Tuesday.

The northeastern U.S. is next to feel the brunt of Winter Storm Ezekiel, which will impact at least 30 states.

Bipartisan efforts: Clay and Blunt celebrate NGA groundbreaking (AUDIO)

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Construction is officially underway on a new national geo-intelligence facility in north St. Louis. The $1.7 billion project, known as N2W relocates the National Geospatial-Intelligence agency from west of downtown St. Louis.

Missouri First District Congressman Lacy Clay welcomed the crowd of national, state and local dignitaries at the Nov. 11 groundbreaking:

“Welcome to a historic day at the corner of Jefferson and Cass!” he exclaimed, alluding to a blighted area of town that will be the hub of this headquarters.

In this speech, Clay thanked “his good friend Sen. Roy Blunt…thank you so much for your friendship and your leadership.”

Clay told what he calls “the amazing story of how St. Louis won the competition for the new NGA West headquarters, which will be the largest single federal government investment in St. Louis history.”

Listen to Lacy Clay speech (8:17)

Sen. Blunt also spoke of working closely with city leaders and former Mayor Francis Slay  as he enthusiastically listed the immediate economic benefits to an area that was, according to a local ward leader, “going more and more downhill.”

Listen to Blunt’s speech (6:27)

Blunt says he can envision the area 10 years from now, as support businesses move in and retail grows to meet the demands of thousands of employees and visitors.

“This is a good day to capture in your mind where we are today and where I fully believe we’ll be then. It’s a great day for the intelligence, defense, the geospatial, the overhead architecture defense of the country but its a great day for St. Louis, a great day for jobs, it’s a great day for this community,” he said at the groundbreaking.

 

The City of St. Louis officially transferred the 97 acres of land for the new NGA campus to the U.S. Air Force in December 2018, displacing residents. There have been dissenters, but city and neighborhood leaders welcome the facility as an economic boost to a blighted area. (photo Ashley Byrd)

NGA sign and site in background

 

Missouri discovers about 7,000 untested and partially-tested rape kits since 1980

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The state attorney general’s office has completed its count of rape kits that have sat in labs and on shelves, untested for decades. View full report (66 pages)

With the help of a federal grant, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt appointed a task force that has worked since February, led by Judge M. Keithley Williams. The survey was divided into six geographic regions, with the larger, more rural regions being completed first.

The inventory resulted in 6,987 sexual assault kits. 6,157 of those kits were untested. Of the untested kits, 4,438 were reported, meaning they had a police report to go along with them, and 1,719 were unreported, without an accompanying police report. Additionally, 830 of the kits discovered were previously partially tested.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance provided a $2.8 million dollar grant, with the initial $700,000 going toward the inventory. The remaining will be used for testing, but it will not pay for all of the outstanding kits to be tested.

 

“The initial testing of 1250 kits gets us much further down the road with the existing grant dollars we have now, but ultimately to test all the kits we want to test, there will be additional dollars sought,” Schmitt told Missourinet.

It takes about a thousand dollars to test each rape kit.

Details about counties and statewide stats: https://ago.mo.gov/home/safe-kits/.

Schmitt says the state will now create a way to store and track the kits from now on.

“There really hasn’t been a way for victims or law enforcement to track where these kits are ultimately at. So the purpose of the tracking system is to get an infrastructure set up so that we are not reinventing the wheel every five or ten years, that we have something that people can rely on and as those kits move through the process and ultimately get tested, people can track it,” he said.

Schmitt will meet with advisors tomorrow/Thursday to begin plans for the tracking system.

 

 

Missouri House Speaker, Majority Leader say Hyperloop should happen

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Missouri leaders in education and politics held press conferences Monday in St Louis, Kansas City and Columbia — to tout the state’s proposed route for a high-speed tube transit system.

The Missouri Hyperloop would take travelers or cargo from Kansas City to St. Louis in 30 minutes.

Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden from Columbia says would this be the biggest transportation project for the state in 100 years.

“When you do have an opportunity like this and you bring every aspect of public and private and research institutions, in and out of state who recognize what we’re doing and the importance of it, it’d probably the coolest thing I’ll be a part of during my time in the Legislature,” he told Missourinet.

A specially-appointed task force studied the opportunities and benefits for the state to partner with private company Virgin Hyperloop to build the test track. Missouri is competing with Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina for the Virgin Hyperloop project in the U.S.

State House Speaker Elijah Haahr, a Republican from Springfield, is all-in on this project. He says Missouri has been first to meet all project deadlines.

“Once a certification track is built, 12 miles or however long it might be, the first full-length track will be built off of that. So, getting the first certification track means getting the full track. If we build a route in Missouri that goes St. Louis to Kansas City, then we can go west to Denver an hour, we can go up to Chicago, we can go north to Minneapolis or south to Atlanta. Being first matters significantly,” Haahr said.

The University of Missouri System research is key to this project, with partnerships with a dozen research universities in the Midwest, including Washington University and the University of Wisconsin.

Haahr will have to convince fellow lawmakers to spend on this when there was a fight over transportation funding this past year. The test track could cost up to $300 million to $500 million with the goal of building a test track site in one to two years. Haahr says he believes private funding is there.

“This project we believe will eventually pay for itself many times over again. There is a lot of private funds which can be leveraged, both from Virgin, who have a lot of investors but also in Missouri. A lot of people here recognize the value in transportation, the value in moving freight and people are willing to make a significant commitment to do that.

Obviously there’ll be some state and local funding component, but at this point, without having seen the RFP, we don’t know what that will look like,” Haahr said.

Virgin Hyperloop is expected to issue a request for proposals by the end of the year.

Haahr says in the coming session lawmakers will need to refine laws about public-private partnerships and review transportation easement regulations and laws.

Lt Governor Mike Kehoe chairs the Missouri project study group says he has been convinced of the value of the hyperloop, despite existing transportation needs.

“I kind of don’t want Missouri to be the stagecoach builder of the 1840’s, when they said ‘We’re going to build a railroad from New York to California’ and the stagecoach builder said, ‘That will never happen, we’re going to keep building stagecoaches.'” Kehoe said to the Columbia gathering. “It doesn’t mean you can’t take care of your existing system, which we intend to do and I know the Speaker and others intend to do that. But you do want to be on the forefront of where we’re going.”

 

U.S. House passes Rep. Wagner bill to help fund rape kit testing, Missouri still counting backlog (VIDEO)

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Missouri Congresswoman Ann Wagner pushed through a bill to reauthorize federal funding for rape kit testing as states struggle with a backlog of samples. The Debbie Smith Act is authorized to provide up to $151 million in funding per year through Fiscal Year 2019. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, Congress appropriated $117 million in 2015.

Wagner Wednesday spoke in the U.S. House about the bill she co-sponsored with New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney.

In Missouri, Attorney General Eric Schmitt created a task force eight months ago to assess the problem, beginning with an inventory of untested kits that remain at law enforcement agencies and hospitals.

“We have one hundred percent compliance from all the hospitals now and we’re getting to that last little bit with law enforcement agencies. So we’re looking to make an announcement very soon about the conclusion of phase one, which then allows us to get, by way of the grant process, to phase two, which is a tracking system for law enforcement and for victims — and ultimately the testing phase,” Schmitt told Missourinet this week.

Missouri’s unemployment rate remains near 3 percent, shows stronger growth that U.S. in some sectors

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Missouri’s employment rate dropped another tenth of a percent between September 2018 and September 2019, adding more than 32,000 jobs in that time.

The sectors that showed improvement were education and health services, construction, retail trade, and leisure and hospitality

Jacqueline Michael-Midkiff, regional economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, says the state’s unemployment rate got this low back in 1999. The state’s numbers have hovered around three percent since March of 2018, reflecting not only growth but because there are too few candidates in the workforce to fill the jobs, according to the U.S. Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey.

“There is less than one worker per job opening, so when we look at the unemployed workers and the job opening that are out there it would be very difficult to fill the job openings that we have right now.”

As Missourinet has reported, the state’s construction industry is in demand, yet so are construction workers.

Michael-Midkiff says Missouri grew faster than the rest of the U.S. in four major industry sectors: manufacturing, retail trade, financial activities and leisure and hospitality.

Since early 2010, the state’s unemployment rate has been steadily falling — as the country recovered from a severe recession. Not all of Missouri’s economic drivers have recovered, says Michael Midkiff. Manufacturing and construction are not at pre-recession levels as well as telecommunications and internet industries.

Data courtesy of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 

 

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2009 8.1 8.5 8.9 9.1 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.6 9.7 9.7 9.7
2010 9.8 9.8 9.7 9.7 9.6 9.5 9.4 9.5 9.5 9.5 9.5 9.4
2011 9.3 9.1 8.9 8.8 8.7 8.6 8.5 8.4 8.2 8.0 7.8 7.6
2012 7.4 7.2 7.1 7.0 7.0 6.9 6.9 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.9 6.9
2013 6.9 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.7 6.6 6.6 6.6 6.6
2014 6.7 6.7 6.6 6.5 6.3 6.2 6.0 5.9 5.8 5.7 5.6 5.6
2015 5.5 5.5 5.5 5.4 5.3 5.1 4.9 4.7 4.6 4.5 4.4 4.4
2016 4.4 4.4 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.7 4.5 4.3
2017 4.2 4.0 3.9 3.8 3.8 3.7 3.7 3.6 3.6 3.6 3.6 3.6
2018 3.5 3.5 3.4 3.3 3.2 3.1 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.1 3.1
2019 3.2 3.2 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.3 3.2 3.1