LEOLA, S.D. – McPherson County commissioners rejected a petition seeking a public vote to determine whether it should be mandatory for the county to hand-count ballots after elections on a vote of 5-0 during their regular commission meeting yesterday.
McPherson County Auditor Lindley Howard said the petition sought to enact an ordinance with multiple stipulations, including the hand-counting of election results and the elimination of machines that tabulate votes.
There were around 30 residents who attended the meeting and the discussion of the petition lasted for over three hours.
The petition also sought to ban ExpressVote machines, which are used by voters who require assistance in filling out their ballots.
The issue with that is the fact that those machines are required to be used under federal law as part of the Help Americans Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002. Voters insert their ballot into the machine and use it to mark their selections. The machine then fills in the appropriate bubbles on the ballot. No vote information is saved on the machine.
STURGIS, S.D. – The debate over a motorcycle race in downtown Sturgis is heading towards a public vote next week and representatives from A.M.A. Pro Racing will be holding community forum for citizens of Sturgis to ask questions about the event.
The race is scheduled for the last day of the rally, August 11th, and the contract between the city and A.M.A. will be on next week’s municipal election ballot after petitions were turned in and accepted to send the matter to a vote.
The community forum will take place from 5-6:00 p.m. Thursday, April 4 at the Commission Meeting Room on the second floor of the Erskine Office Building in Sturgis.
AMA Pro staff have been in Sturgis for the past several days meeting with residents to explain how the event could financially benefit the community.
The race, known officially as the “Spirit of Sturgis TT”, would be featured on national television. The racetrack would run down Main and Sherman streets with safety barriers along the entire track.
On next week’s ballot, a ‘YES’ vote would nullify the host services agreement and a ‘NO’ vote would accept it, allowing the race to take place.
DES MOINES, IA – Pesticide companies could soon be protected from lawsuits about the safety of their products. A bill passed by the Iowa Senate Tuesday would shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits if they’re following EPA warning guidelines.
Democrats say they’re concerned the bill would strip Iowans of protections if they get sick. Republicans say the products are safe, and that the cost of these chemicals are going up due to frivolous lawsuits.
Democratic State Senator Herman Quirmbach of Ames said, “Once upon a time, we were told, ship workers were told, construction workers were told, automobile workers were told that working with asbestos was safe. That label was wrong.”
If signed into law, Iowa would be first in the nation to have such a protection. Democratic State Senator Molly Donahue of Cedar Rapids said, “Every other state people can go ahead and sue these companies, but Iowans, they can’t.”
Senate President Amy Sinclair says Iowans still have means to sue. “It doesn’t prevent anyone from seeking recourse for actual damages they receive because of any product. It doesn’t. Don’t say that. It doesn’t do that. What it does is prevents a company, any company, who manufactures these agricultural chemicals, it prevents them from being sued for following the law,” Sinclair said.
Democrats say the rise of cancer cases in Iowa is cause for concern, and the bill prevents Iowans from seeking justice. Senate Minority Leader Pam Jochum said, “There’s this old saying, ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig’, so you can try to dress this up whatever way you want, but the bottom line is this: this bill is stripping away the legal protections for Iowa farmers.”
Republican Senator Jeff Edler of State Center says glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup, is now banned in 33 countries due to fears about its safety, but scientists have yet to prove it causes cancer. Edler says the legislation is needed due to a flood of lawsuits against the manufacturer. “Glyphosate is one of the least harmful chemicals we deal with and under what’s going on, we could lose that,” Edler said.
Chinese chemical companies are cut out from the protections. The bill passed the Iowa Senate in a 30-19 vote. It now goes to the Iowa House.
DES MOINES, IA – Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law Tuesday evening at The FAMiLY Leader’s “Family Champion Dinner”.
Republicans say it will better protect people’s religious freedom, while Democrats say it could allow people to discriminate.
In a statement, Reynolds said the legislation is needed since religion is under attack.
“Thirty years ago, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed almost unanimously at the federal level. Since then, religious rights have increasingly come under attack. Today, Iowa enacts a law to protect these unalienable rights—just as twenty-six other states have done— upholding the ideals that are the very foundation of our country,” Reynolds said.
In a statement, Democratic State Rep. Lindsay James said the bill weaponizes religion to justify discrimination.
“This bill is not about religious liberty— it’s about weaponizing religion to justify discrimination. It’s wrong. This bill opens the door for a business to deny services to an LGBTQ+ patron, a landlord to evict a single mom from because she’s not married, for a pharmacist to deny a birth control prescription on religious grounds. It’s no surprise the Governor signed the bill behind closed doors with the biggest special interest group in Iowa, an organization that wants to ban all abortions, ban gay marriage, and ban books. This has never been about people, it’s all politics,” James said.
During debate in the senate, Democrats said the bill gives people a license to discriminate. “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act has become a blank check for people to impose their religious beliefs on others and to discriminate against people they don’t like,” said Democratic State Senator Janice Weiner of Iowa City.
Weiner has concerns it could have unintended consequences. “A perpetrator of domestic violence would be able to hold up protective order proceedings, divorce and custody proceedings, and criminal proceedings by claiming that they have the right to discipline their family as they see fit under their religion,” Weiner said.
Republican State Senator Jason Schultz of Schleswig said Democrats were overreacting. “There anybody here who thinks that an abused child was drug into court crying, and bleeding, and bruised and the lawyer said, ‘well, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act says we can do this. Oh okay, well we’ll talk about this next week. Take your child home and do that some more and come back and hear your defenses’.? No, that didn’t happen!,” Schultz said.
Democratic State Senator Bill Dotzler of Black Hawk County said culture war policies like RFRA are hurting the state. “We can’t bring people here and worst of all, the Iowans that are going to our universities and college, the young people of this state have had enough. They’re looking elsewhere,” Dotzler said.
But Republican State Senator Jeff Taylor of Sioux Center said RFRA is needed because the courts have eroded religious freedom in recent years. “The courts have eaten away at religious freedom nationally and that applies to our state as well. This is a defensive mechanism saying we need to prioritize the First Amendment,” Taylor said.
WATERTOWN, S.D. (Brad Johnson, South Dakota Searchlight) – About 1.8 million of the estimated 9 million encounters at the southern U.S. border in the past three years are “people they call got-aways,” U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, told a gathering of Rotarians recently.
“In other words,” he said, “they didn’t catch them.”
But officials did apprehend 169 people who were on the terror watch list, he added.
Immigration was the first of several topics Thune addressed with the Rotary Club on March 28 in Watertown. Others included inflation, federal spending, political and societal polarization, green energy, war funding for Ukraine and his relationship with Donald Trump.
He said immigration is dominating political discourse.
“It’s a huge problem on the minds of people all across the country and all across South Dakota,” Thune said, noting how most Americans trace their ancestry to legal immigration.
“It is a reminder that inasmuch as we are a nation of immigrants, we are first and foremost a nation of laws, and we need to enforce our laws,” he said. “They are not being enforced today.”
Inflation is another major issue as the country moves into the presidential election season.
“Since President Biden took office,” Thune said, “the cumulative inflation has gone up 18.6%. That means about a thousand bucks a month to the average family of four.”
He said wages and income growth have not kept pace, while at the same time “this White House has great ideas on how to spend your money.”
How the U.S. Senate deals with spending will change, Thune said, if he becomes the next majority leader should Republicans gain control and tap him for the job. He is competing against Sen. John Cornyn, of Texas, to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, who recently announced he will step down as the Republican Senate leader in November. Thune presently is Senate minority whip, his party’s number two position in the Senate.
It is unclear how that will square with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has criticized both Thune and Cornyn in the past.
Thune said he recently spoke with Trump, and the two had a good conversation. “I don’t know if in the end he gets involved in the leadership race or not,” Thune said. “But I think we have an understanding and a relationship that, if nothing else, is at least professional.”
Thune noted that Congress recently passed a package of legislation that “funded the government for last year.” Included in that package is $500 million for the Israeli Cooperative Missile Defense Program and $300 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.
Left unfinished was another bill with billions more to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion, as well as additional aid for Israel and Taiwan.
The Senate has approved $95 billion in aid (including $60 billion for Ukraine), but it’s stalled in the House, where it’s expected to be addressed this month.
Thune noted that $38 billion of that aid would help the U.S. rebuild its military with new weapons while older weapons are sent to Ukraine.
“America needs to provide leadership,” Thune said. “The world is a dangerous place. Right now, our choice with Ukraine is to send them weapons and let them fight their battles, which they are happy to do, and they’ve proven they have an enormous determination to win.”
The alternative, he said, is to “send them American sons and daughters, which is what will happen if Russia succeeds in Ukraine and goes next against a NATO ally such as one of the Baltics – Estonia, Lithuania, or Latvia or Poland,” triggering U.S. involvement.
“Then our men and women are in that fight,” he said.
Thune noted that the House is considering a version of military aid that would be more of a lend-lease program similar to World War II aid. That would provide cover for a Congress increasingly concerned about the national debt.
Thune said the U.S. government must face the burgeoning national debt in the near future.
“It is a time bomb,” he said. “It’s ticking and at some point, it is going to go off.”
Addressing runaway spending will require presidential leadership, and both President Joe Biden and Trump are avoiding the issue, Thune said.
“Members of Congress, especially House members who run every two years, are not going to walk out on that limb and have somebody saw it off behind them. So, you are never going to get members of Congress willing to make hard votes to deal with the debt absent a president who is willing to give them political cover.”
Among other issues, Thune addressed:
The farm bill. The last farm bill expired at the end of September and Congress extended it for a year. “There are big differences of opinions between Republicans and Democrats about what the priorities ought to be in terms of funding allocations in the farm bill,” Thune said, adding there is a slim possibility it will be addressed sometime this summer, “but I’m not holding my breath on that.” Most likely, it will come up after the November election.
Electric cars and green energy. Thune said the Biden administration is trying to force people to change driving habits. “The idea that you are going to have two-thirds of America driving electric vehicles in eight years is unrealistic,” he said, noting it is impractical in weather- and distance-challenged states like South Dakota. This state is a leader in alternative energy with its hydroelectric power and renewable fuels, he said. “But the heavy hand of government — the mandates and everything that comes with it — has a very crushing effect on people.”
Political and social polarization. “The country is very divided right now and our politics reflects it,” Thune said. He noted that the Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows unlimited independent expenditures on political campaigns has changed the political scene. Spending surpassed $100 million in five U.S. Senate races in 2022. “That has changed politics in a way that sometimes I think is hard to wrap your head around.” A major obstacle in all of the issues, he concluded, is that social media is driving people into their own information bubbles and “nobody is hearing what the other side is saying anymore.”
