The Scouting Report: A weekly digest

Honoring a fallen bowler, sharing profits, VP breaks record, education lows and highs

When he died May 25, 2022, in a bicycle accident, 14-year-old Zander Heathcote of Dell Rapids had taken a liking to tournament bowling. Now organizers have created the Bowling for Zander Scholarship Tournament to honor Zander’s love of the game and to keep his memory alive in the bowling community. 

“The bowling community had a huge impact on Zander not only as a bowler but as a person!! Lots of life lessons are learned on those lanes,” said Kerri Tiesen in an email.

The tournament will be held Feb. 3-4 at the Pinz Bowling Center in Dell Rapids, but pre-registration is required. As of Dec. 9, Dell Rapids Youth Bowling had already raised more than $10,000 in scholarship funds, the group announced on its Facebook page.

“This is Zander’s way of giving back to a community that gave him so very much!” Tiesen said.

In National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a 1989 film that has become a Christmas classic, Clark Griswold becomes increasingly agitated while awaiting his holiday bonus. Calamity ensues when he learns his company president eliminated bonuses.

That won’t be the fate for employees at Morris Inc., the Fort Pierre-based company that employs more than 100 people in agricultural irrigation services, aggregate production and highway heavy utility construction.

Company President John Morris announced that the second-generation, family-owned company will distribute $670,000 to its team members as part of Morris’ 2023 profit sharing plan. Morris credited the company’s success to the commitment of his employees.

Implemented in 2022, the profit-sharing initiative is the company’s commitment to sharing success and supporting local communities.

“The profit sharing distribution reflects our company’s ongoing commitment to recognizing the invaluable role our employees play in driving the growth and prosperity of Morris, Inc.,” Morris said in an announcement. “This payout is a direct result of the dedication, hard work, and collaborative spirit that defines our workplace.”

In political news, Vice President Kamala Harris broke the record of casting the most tie-breaking votes in the U.S. Senate made by a vice president. Vice presidents – an office once described as “not worth a warm bucket of spit” by Vice President John Nance Garner – only vote when there is a tie in the Senate, and Harris has now cast a tie-breaking vote 33 times. Her last vote was for the nomination of Loren L. AliKhan as the U.S. district judge for the District of Columbia.

That’s familiar territory for Harris. Twenty-seven of her tie-breaking votes have been to support Biden judicial nominations, according to Ballotpedia, which tracks the votes. Harris was also the tie-breaking vote on two budget reconciliation bills: The so-called American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. Both of those bills pumped trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy.

Harris has made more tie-breaking votes than all vice presidents combined since 1981, which was George H. W. Bush. Vice President John C. Calhoun was the previous record holder with 31 votes made between 1825 and 1832. John Adams cast the third-most votes from 1789 to 1797.

Interestingly, both Bush and Adams were future presidents of the United States. Is Harris on a similar path?