
Missouri Senator Roy Blunt spent some time in St Joseph on Friday to attend the annual Farm City Breakfast. We spoke with the senator in an exclusive interview before his speech.
The title of his presentation at the breakfast was “Advancing Missouri’s Agriculture Leadership in the 21st Century.”
Blunt tells us Missouri in general and St Joe and Northwest Missouri in particular are uniquely poised to take advantage of a spike in food demand in the next several decades. Blunt says in the next 35 to 40 years, worldwide food demand is expected to double.
“Nobody is better positioned to take full advantage of that than we are,” Blunt said. “We have the best Ag research institutions in the world. St Joseph is part of the all-important animal-health corridor.”
“St Joseph is one of the communities that’s continued to have a big food-processing footprint, a big understanding of what it means to live in the biggest continguous piece of agricultural land in the word, the Mississippi River Valley, which also, by the way, helps create a way we get to the world. Our highway system, our railroad system and our river system, all important and all have benefits for Missouri, and I think particularly beneficial to St Joseph and Northwest Missouri.”
We also asked about replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Blunt says he agrees with his party and Senate leaders who say they will not entertain any nomination that might be coming from the White House. The Missouri Republican said the U.S. has “not filled a vacancy that occurred in a presidential election in nearly 100 years.”
We checked out this assertion and found it to be inaccurate, depending upon how you define “nearly 100 years.” On February 15, 1932, President Herbert Hoover nominated Benjamin Cardozo to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes, who retired on January 12, 1932. The Senate confirmed Cardozo by a unanimous voice vote on February 24, 1932. On January 4, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt nominated Frank Murphy to replace Pierce Butler, who died on November 16, 1939; Murphy was confirmed by a voice vote.
But Sen. Blunt stuck to his guns.
“This is so important, I think we have time to let the American people be part of this decision,” he said, “and the part of the decision they’ll make is who they elect President and who will make that nomination.”
“The Senate will not fill this position in the last few months of a presidency, and I think that’s the right thing to do. Whether it’s the politically right thing to do or not is not nearly as important as whether it’s the right thing to do.”