Trump calls data centers a mark of progress, his neighbors vote 6-0 no thanks

…(cont) Twenty-five days later, on September 25, the commissioners of Palm Beach County — the county that holds Mar-a-Lago, the president's own residence — voted 6 to 0 to impose a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers, the ones that draw at least 50 megawatts. Six votes. Zero dissents. In his own backyard.

The wire item on that vote cuts off mid-sentence — "residents expressed concerns sha—" — so what exactly drove the commissioners onto the record isn't in hand. What is in hand, filed a week earlier on September 18, is a separate account of what's chasing data centers around the country generally: reporting that the facilities may carry forever chemicals, the compounds that don't break down, turning up in the cooling systems that keep the servers cold. That's the industry's national weather, the same complaints stacking up county line after county line, whatever the Palm Beach commissioners said out loud that day.

Here's the count that holds regardless of motive: zero commissioners in the president's own county voted to let the data centers in unchecked. All six voted to pause.

That's the beat Lawler is standing on. He is out defending, to his own swing-district voters, a policy the president's own neighbors already voted down 6 to 0, with a full year to reconsider before it comes back. The insult was for somebody else's town. The moratorium was for his.

If a Republican county can block the president's signature industry and pay no price for it, the vote was never about backwardness. It was about who has a county commission close enough to Mar-a-Lago to be heard, and who doesn't.