Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (R) sued the Department of Justice on Monday for trying to place poll monitors at polling locations in the state on Election Day. The DOJ announced on Friday that it was planning “to monitor compliance with federal voting rights laws in 86 jurisdictions in 27 states” for the general election. One of those jurisdictions is St. Louis.
Read More
New York District Attorney Letitia James on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to block a lawsuit from Missouri that is attempting to stop former President Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case.
Read More
After almost a month following former President Donald Trump’s conviction by a New York City jury on May 30, Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced on June 20 that his state is suing New York for its “direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump”.
That’s good — better late than never — as Bailey stands as the first Republican Attorney General to actually announce such a lawsuit, with not much time before Trump’s scheduled sentencing on July 11, which could imprison to presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Read More
Missouri GOP Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced Tuesday evening that a judge has rejected a motion by Planned Parenthood to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the state that alleges a clinic traffics minors out of state to obtain abortions.
“One step closer to eradicating Planned Parenthood from the State of Missouri,” Bailey wrote on the social media platform, X.
Read More
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) plans to spend more than $25 million on the November elections and will particularly focus on pro-abortion state constitutional amendments.
This year, the ACLU is spending the largest amount of money it ever has on elections, Deirdre Schifeling, ACLU’s chief political and advocacy officer, told NBC News.
Read More
As the number of states banning ranked-choice voting (RCV) is increasing, some are facing ballot measures this November that would implement the voting system.
While 10 states have banned RCV and more may join them this November if voters vote for the ballot measures, six other states will have ballot measures to switch their elections to RCV.
Read More
In February, Harrison Butker kicked the longest field goal in Super Bowl history—a massive 57-yard three-pointer—to help carry the Kansas City Chiefs to a rollicking win over the San Francisco 49ers.
Recently, he’s made headlines again—this time, arguably, for far more profound reasons.
Read More
Parents, children, and supporters of school choice have cause to celebrate this National Charter Schools Week.
Charter schools earned the top two spots on a list of the best high schools in America, according to a recent report by U.S. News & World Report. And, of the top 100 public high schools, charter schools claimed 19 spots—10 in Arizona alone—despite accounting for only 8% of all public schools in the country.
Read More
Four law enforcement officers were shot dead in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week. On hearing the news, I was reminded of my mother’s frequent warnings about police work. Her message? Steer clear. With her husband and her brother patrolling the mean streets of Newark, she didn’t need the added anxiety of having her sons do the same. Today, for the children and spouses of police officers, that anxiety must be unbearable — and not just because of the obvious danger.
You may not have heard of the Charlotte shooting. It vanished from the national news in a flash. Despite the magnitude of the offense, within two or three days the national media had dropped the story cold.
Read More
A coalition of states has filed a legal challenge to President Joe Biden’s latest executive effort to forgive a portion of Americans’ student loan debt.
The lawsuit comes after Biden on Monday announced the plan, which the states in question say is an overreach of executive authority. The White House claims that Biden has so far canceled at least some of the debt for 4 million Americans, totalling $146 billion so far.
Read More
Forty-five years ago today, future vice president Albert Gore Jr. stood in the well of the House of Representatives to discuss an innovative development in television programming. There was nothing remarkable about that in itself: Al Gore had been a newspaperman before becoming a Tennessee congressman and had a genuine interest in both new technology and mass communication.
Except that there was something momentous about Gore’s speech that day. It was the first time that remarks delivered on the House floor by a member of Congress were televised. It was an event long envisioned by a 38-year-old Indiana-born, Purdue-educated, U.S. Navy veteran who had worked as a White House and Capitol Hill aide before returning to journalism. His name was Brian Lamb. As the Washington bureau chief of the trade publication Cablevision, Lamb had dreamed of creating a nonprofit cable network that would focus exclusively on public affairs, particularly Congress. It was called C-SPAN, and on March 19, 1979, that dream became reality.
Read More
Federal officials privately scold reporters and attempt to shape or even stop their coverage on a regular basis, without getting sued for First Amendment violations.
How close is that to White House aides privately and repeatedly badgering their counterparts at social media companies and President Biden publicly accusing Facebook of “killing people,” for insufficient censorship of disfavored narratives on COVID-19?
Read More
Donald Trump swept the Missouri and Idaho Republican caucuses on Saturday and captured all 39 delegates at the Michigan GOP convention ahead of Super Tuesday as he marched toward a third straight presidential nomination.
Read More
Missouri must continue to allow taxpayer dollars to flow to Planned Parenthood, the state’s supreme court ruled on Wednesday.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that a 2022 state budget measure cutting Planned Parenthood off from state funds was unconstitutional, according to court documents. The legal dispute stemmed from a line in the state’s 2022 budget, which allocated $0 in Medicaid funds for any healthcare organization that provides abortions or is affiliated with an abortion provider, the Missouri Independent reported.
Read More
California is adding Missouri, Nebraska and Wyoming to its list of states to which government-paid travel is restricted, over legislation considered to be anti-LGBTQ+.
A 2016 California law banned state-funded travel to any state determined by the California Justice Department to be discriminatory against the LGBTQ community. And state Attorney General Rob Bonta must maintain and post a list of such states whose total numbers is now at or nearing 26, according to The Center Square.
Read More
by Philip Lenczycki A Chinese intelligence agency quietly operates “service centers” in seven American cities, all of which have had contact with Beijing’s national police authority, according to state media reports and government records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work…
Read More
At least 20 states have either restricted or banned transgender procedures for minors, with many of them facing lawsuits and temporary blocks by courts as a result, while future litigation is possible in states considering adopting such laws.
The states that have enacted legislation against such procedures are: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia – essentially all conservative-leaning.
Read More
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) signed two bills Wednesday, one that blocks biological males from competing in women’s sports and another that protects minors from experimental transgender drug treatments and surgeries.
Read More
A Missouri elementary school allowed a parent to read the transgender-promoting children’s book “I Am Jazz” to a second-grade class without first informing other parents, although state law requires school districts to notify parents beforehand about lessons on sexuality.
Webster Groves School District, located in the suburbs of St. Louis, allowed the parent to read “I Am Jazz” to the second graders in September as part of Clark Elementary School’s “Mystery Reader” program, where a family member surprises a child by reading to the class.
Read More
by Eric Lendrum On April 7th, an amicus brief was filed in favor of Florida’s current ban on using state funds to support “transgender” treatments, with 17 state attorneys general voicing their support for the law. According to the Daily Caller, the brief’s filing was part of an ongoing legal…
Read More
Three more red states — Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia — this week followed Louisiana and Alabama in withdrawing from a multistate data-sharing partnership that facilitates voter registration and maintenance of voter rolls, citing unmet concerns over protecting voter information and partisan influence at the nonprofit.
The latest withdrawals from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) came after the nonprofit’s board of directors rejected changes proposed by a bipartisan working group of several member states.
Read More
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey led 19 other Republican state attorneys general (AGs) in a warning letter to CVS and Walgreens that asserts federal law forbids using the mail to send or receive drugs that are intended to be used to produce an abortion.
Bailey and the coalition of attorneys general wrote to the two drugstore chains, informing them that their announced plan to use the mail to distribute abortion pills is both unsafe and illegal.
Read More
Google agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states after an investigation found that the tech giant participated in questionable location-tracking practices, state attorneys general announced Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it a “historic win for consumers.”
Read More
Missouri State Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick announced on Tuesday that the state’s pension fund is selling all of its assets that are managed by BlackRock, a move that will divest up to $500 million from the asset manager.
The Missouri State Employees’ Retirement System (MOSERS) is withdrawing its assets from BlackRock’s control because the state believes that the company is using its control of pension funds to push a “left-wing” agenda as opposed to making money for its clients, according to a press release. Missouri joins several other Republican-run states that have also pulled funds from BlackRock for similar reasons.
Read More
A Missouri school district will use spanking as a form of punishment in the 2022-2023 school year, according to the school handbook.
Cassville School District in Cassville, Missouri, is implementing a policy that uses spanking with a paddle as a form of punishment for students, according to the school handbook. Corporal punishment, or the use of physical force, will only be used to correct a K-12 student’s behavior when deemed necessary by the principal of the school.
Read More
Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri abruptly ended an interview with a St. Louis reporter Monday after being asked about a possible re-election bid by President Joe Biden.
“Do you want to see Joe Biden run for a second term?” a reporter asked Bush in a video posted by Mark Maxwell, political editor for KSDK News on Twitter.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump is ruling out the idea of endorsing Republican Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler in her Senate bid and praised one of her “controversial” primary opponents.
Trump made the Hartzler comments Friday evening on Truth Social, his social media platform. He later joined One America News on Friday and called Eric Greitens, the former governor, “a little controversial” but “tough” and “smart.”
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, covered the plot by an ex-wife and her sister, a political consultant linked to Senate Majority Leader A. Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell (R.-KY.), to force Navy SEAL veteran Eric Greitens out of his run for the 2022 Missouri Republican Senate nomination.
Read More
Missouri and Kansas are no strangers to border conflict. No, we’re not talking about the chaos that inspired “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” The fear today is over cross-border job poachers. However, that doesn’t justify giving Fidelity Security Life Insurance $12.7 million just to stay inside Kansas City. No one gets a gold medal in a race to the bottom — but politicians will waste endless taxpayer dollars trying to tell you that they’re “winning.”
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, interviewed Missouri GOP Senate hopeful Eric Greitens about Karl Rove’s role in his ex-wife’s accusations against him.
Greitens, a Navy SEAL combat veteran and former Missouri, said told The Star News Network, his ex-wife has admitted that she wrote her statements off a draft by Rove and that her accusations have been disproven.
Read More
Most of the nation’s 48.2 million public K-12 students are assigned to their schools based on geographic school districts or attendance zones, with few options for transferring to another public school district. This method of school assignment intertwines schooling with property wealth, limiting families’ education options according to where they can afford to live.
A 2019 Senate Joint Economic Committee report found that homes near highly rated schools were four times the cost of homes near poorly rated schools. This presents a real barrier for many families – and 56% of respondents in a 2019 Cato survey indicated that expensive housing costs prevented them from moving to better neighborhoods. The challenge has only deepened as housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic, putting better housing and education options out of reach for many.
Read More
An attorney for Missouri Republican primary candidate for US Senate Eric Greitens said Thursday he filed four subpoenas to obtain phone records to determine whether Greitens’ ex-wife had contacts with any political operatives prior to making abuse allegations earlier this month.
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, attended the March 29, 2022, press conference held by Tim Parlatore, the attorney for Missouri GOP Senate hopeful Eric Greitens, about how Republican establishment mandarin Karl Rove worked with the hopeful’s ex-wife Sheena Greitens as she crafted an affidavit that claimed her ex-husband was abusive.
Read More
Twenty-one states have filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s continued mask mandate on public transportation, including on airplanes.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody are leading the effort. Moody filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida along with 20 other attorneys general. DeSantis said the mask mandate was misguided and heavy-handed.
Read More
Missouri’s Republican Majority state House is likely to agree to the timid Senate-passed compromise on the state’s congressional redistricting plan on Monday.
The Missouri state House stands adjourned until Monday, March 28. The filing deadline for candidates seeking to run in primaries for one of Missouri’s eight U.S. House seats is the following day, March 29.
Read MoreThe Missouri State Senate has passed a redistricting plan that keeps the current partisan makeup of the state’s eight congressional districts.
The current Missouri delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives consists of six Republicans and two Democrats.
Read More
The New Hampshire State Senate is set to vote on the House-approved redistricting plan on Thursday.
New Hampshire is one of four remaining states that have yet to complete their congressional redistricting process. The others are Louisiana, Florida, and Missouri.
Read More
Democrats currently have the lead in redistricting efforts with four states still working on new maps.
Forty states, 46 if the states that have one congressional district are included, have finished the process of drawing new maps for U.S. House of Representatives districts. Only Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and New Hampshire have yet to finish their redistricting process.
Read More
Missouri Republican Rep. Vicky Hartzler scored another major endorsement in her bid to succeed Sen. Roy Blunt as polls show that the race’s frontrunner could be a risky general election candidate.
The Susan B. Anthony List endorsed Hartzler Tuesday, calling her an “unwavering pro-life champion” who is “Planned Parenthood’s worst nightmare.” It comes just days after Republican Sen. Josh Hawley also endorsed her over the rest of the crowded GOP field.
Read More
On Wednesday, the Biden Administration announced its intention to sue the state of Missouri over a law passed last year that protects residents’ Second Amendment rights from federal government overreach.
As reported by The Hill, the lawsuit was announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland, targeting Missouri’s House Bill 85 as an alleged violation of the “Supremacy Clause,” which “is preempted by federal law and violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity.” Garland’s Department of Justice (DOJ) will argue that the law harms cooperative efforts between the federal government, state governments, and local jurisdictions.
Read More
If the federal government’s .25% assessment on each bushel of soybeans is halted, a bill in the Missouri legislature would capture that amount and add it to the state’s current collection of .25%, giving additional millions to the Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council.
“If the federal goes away and this (bill) were to go into effect, we would continue to collect at a rate of one-half of 1% like we are now,” Rep. Curtis Gregory, R-Marshall, told the House Agriculture Policy Committee on Tuesday during testimony on HB2387. “If the bill doesn’t go into effect and the federal is done away with, we’d revert back…to one-half a penny per bushel…That would not bring in the amount of funds necessary to fund the checkoff mission.”
Read More
The day after the St. Louis County Council voted 4-3 along party lines to enact a mask mandate, Missouri Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit to stop it.
Schmitt, a candidate for the seat of retiring U.S. Senator Roy Blunt, filed a 17-page petition in St. Louis County Circuit Court on Wednesday. Last week, St. Louis and Jackson Counties filed an appeal with the Missouri Court of Appeals over the November ruling by a Cole County Circuit Court stating all COVID-19 public health orders were null and void.
Read More
During news conferences on Wednesday, Missouri’s Republican legislators stated their priority is approving new Congressional district maps while Democrats acknowledged they’ve gained some influence over the process and pledged to uphold voting rights.
At the state capitol in Jefferson City, none of the Republicans wore masks while meeting with reporters while all of the Democrats wore masks. Leaders of both parties were asked about the affects of the resurgence of COVID-19 infections on the upcoming session.
Read More
Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson on Wednesday expressed confidence the Cole County prosecutor will charge the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for violating a state law protecting computer networks.
Gov. Parson called for the Highway Patrol to investigate the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Oct. 15 after it notified the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education its public-facing website contained Social Security numbers of teachers in its HTML code – visible to anyone using an Internet browser. Parson stated the “hack” might cost Missouri taxpayers as much as $50 million.
Read More
If the number of bills submitted in the Missouri House of Representatives and the Senate is any indication, lots of time will be devoted to debating taxes during the next legislative session starting Jan. 5, 2022.
Approximately 10% of the 1,020 bills filed contain the word “tax” in the description. Senators filed about 40 bills and joint resolutions while representatives filed approximately 60.
More than 50 bills cover taxation and general revenue.
Read More
A Missouri newspaper is standing by its recent reporting on COVID-19 mask mandates after it drew criticism from Gov. Mike Parson (R).
“Our story — which included all documents and data supporting it — speaks for itself. We stand behind our reporting,” Editor-in-Chief of The Missouri Independent Jason Hancock told The Star News Network.
Read More
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt on Tuesday sued one of the state’s largest school districts, alleging it has violated open records laws in an effort to thwart public disclosure of critical race theory training materials for teachers and curriculum for students.
Schmitt’s lawsuit charges the Springfield Public Schools with 13 counts of violating the state Sunshine Law that include charging exorbitant fees for records. The move comes a day after Just the News reported that the school district’s training materials suggested teachers could be engaged in white supremacist behavior just by insisting on English language in classes, calling police on a black suspect or using the term “All lives matter.”
Read More
The backlash from the incendiary language in a recent letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking for federal law enforcement to intervene on outspoken parents at school board meetings escalated this week when the group’s Ohio and Missouri chapters withdrew their respective memberships.
The Missouri School Boards Association in announcing its departure said the national group “demonstrated it does not currently align with MSBA’s guiding principles of local governance.”
The Ohio chapter was more direct, saying in its letter Monday that its departure was a “direct result” of the Sept. 29 letter to Biden.
Read More
Parents who protest public school policies on race, gender and COVID-19 are crying foul after Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to “discourage” and prosecute “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school boards, administrators, teachers and staff.
His “mobilization of [the] FBI against parents is consistent with the complete weaponization of the federal government against ideological opponents,” Rhode Island mother Nicole Solas, who is waging a public records battle with her school district over race-related curriculum, told Just the News.
Read MoreA black student admitted responsibility for racist graffiti that prompted a Sept. 23 walkout by over 1,000 students in a Missouri high school, administrators told St. Louis-area media outlets.
“The student responsible is not white, however, this does not diminish the hurt it caused or the negative impact it has had on our entire community,” Dr. Keith Marty, superintendent of the Parkway School District wrote in a Sept. 28 letter to parents.
Read More