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Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gestures as the invited guests applaud while she gets seated at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, Tuesday, July 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday at her home in Washington after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Ginsburg, 87, a champion for women’s rights, was the second woman to serve on the nation’s high court.

Her death poses what promises to be a heated, partisan political battle over whether incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and the GOP-led Senate should quickly confirm a replacement, or wait until after the national election in six weeks. Mississippi’s two GOP senators will be part of that debate.

Here are reactions from Mississippi leaders on the vaunted justice’s death:

U.S. Senator Roger Wicker: “I was sad to learn of Justice Ginsburg’s passing. Her sharp intellect and passion for equality left a significant impact on the court and made her an icon for millions of Americans. I have disagreed with many of Justice Ginsburg’s opinions, but I never questioned her sincerity or motivations. In fact, her close friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia is a powerful example of how we can all work with and respect others. Gayle and I send our deepest condolences to her family, friends, and many admirers around the country.”

U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith: “Justice Ginsburg devoted her life to the law, becoming a respected and influential woman in our time. May she rest in peace.”

Mike Espy, Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate: “Mike Espy and the Espy for Senate campaign are saddened by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the most revered legal minds in this country. The second woman to ever sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Ginsburg was a legend and will take her place among the great justices in American history. Battling her health for years, Justice Ginsburg put her duty to this country and the law before everything else. She was a legal trailblazer, standing up for the less fortunate to ensure protections for gender equality, voting rights, civil rights, and health care. Justice Ginsburg will forever leave her mark on this country and on the lives of Americans.”

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson: “Rest In Peace to one of the greatest legal minds and jurists in American history. My prayers are with her family and loved ones.”

This article will be updated as additional statements are released. 

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

“I voted” stickers are in place for voters inside of Twin Lakes Baptist Church in Madison, Miss., Tuesday, November 5, 2019.

A pre-existing health condition that places a person at a greater risk from COVID-19 does not necessarily mean the person can vote early, the Mississippi Supreme Court said in a ruling handed down Friday afternoon.

The state’s highest court said Hinds County Chancery Judge Denise Owens erred in a ruling earlier this month when she wrote current state law “permits any voter with pre-existing conditions that cause COVID-19 to present a greater risk of severe illness or death to vote by absentee ballot during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Justice Dawn Beam, writing for the majority, said current law, as amended earlier this year by the state Legislature, requires a person to be directed to be quarantined by a physician in order to vote early.

“Having a pre-existing condition that puts a voter at a higher risk does not automatically create a temporary disability for absentee-voting purposes,” she wrote.

The Mississippi Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf a group of state voters, had filed a lawsuit attempting to garner the most expansive interpretation of the state law as possible to ensure people can vote early during the pandemic. Secretary of State Michael Watson, who appealed Owens’ ruling, conceded that the four individuals filing the lawsuit, based on their pre-existing conditions, should be allowed to vote early.

The Supreme Court ruling could place an additional onus on local circuit clerks to make decisions — based on their interpretation of the ruling — on who can can vote early.

Rob McDuff with the Mississippi Center for Justice said the ruling was still a victory for those with susceptible to the coronavirus because of pre-existing conditions.

“In filings before the Supreme Court, the secretary of state acknowledged that people with pre-existing conditions that meet the definition of ‘physical disability,’ and that increase the risk of severe consequences from COVID-19 can vote absentee, including four of the plaintiffs whose conditions include kidney disease, lupus, diabetes and severe asthma,” McDuff said. “The Mississippi Supreme Court never repudiated that statement by the secretary… The secretary stated that such conditions do allow absentee voting if they, like the conditions of the four plaintiffs, meet the dictionary definition of a ‘disability.’”

In a statement, the Center for Justice and ACLU said, “We hope the Legislature will go back into session and take action to protect vulnerable people during this public health crisis. Even if the legislators are concerned about mail-in voting, they could expand in-person absentee voting or allow early in-person voting during the pandemic and provide for counties to hold Saturday outdoor sessions during October so people can vote in an outdoor setting where COVID-19 is not so easily transferred.”

Mississippi is among a handful of states not allowing most people to vote early this year either by mail or in person to avoid large crowds during the pandemic. Even before the pandemic, most states allowed early voting, both by mail and in-person. But in Mississippi, early voting in allowed only for people age 65 and older, those away from home on Election Day, and those whose have a disability.

Another lawsuit, filed in federal court by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private attorneys on behalf of state residents and organizations, is claiming the state’s absentee voting rules are unconstitutional because they could jeopardize the health of citizens trying to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The groups filing that lawsuit also are asking that provisions in state law be thrown out requiring the application for an absentee ballot and the ballot itself to be notarized. Mississippi is the only state in the nation to require both documents to be notarized, state Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, has said in the past.

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Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

Cindy Hyde-Smith smiles after winning the Senate runoff election against Mike Espy Nov. 27, 2018.

After a rare, brief public appearance on Friday, incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quickly ducked out, refusing to answer questions about her campaign or any other matters.

With less than a month-and-a-half left before Election Day, Hyde-Smith has done little campaigning or advertising, provided virtually no public access in-person or online, and has so far refused invitations to debates or forums with her opponent, Democratic former Congressman Mike Espy.

Hyde-Smith on Friday afternoon appeared briefly at a press conference with Gov. Tate Reeves and state Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson. The three briefly discussed the years-long push for a Yazoo Backwater pumping project to alleviate chronic flooding that has devastated the Mississippi Delta.

The incumbent senator took no questions at the press conference. Afterward, when she was asked by a Mississippi Today reporter if she would answer few questions about campaign, she did not acknowledge the reporter. An aide told the reporter she had another appointment to make.

With an apparent lead in polls, Hyde-Smith’s campaign has laid low, and she has so far done little public campaigning in person or virtually amid the pandemic. A campaign spokesman recently said she has focused more on her job as U.S. senator, but that she has done some virtual campaigning and fundraising online.

Most incumbent U.S. senators facing major party challengers, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have attended in-person events in their home states.

Espy has made numerous in-person and online public events, has purchased statewide airtime with two television ads and his camp has criticized Hyde-Smith’s lack of visibility and availability to voters and refusal thus far to debate.

Politicos have surmised that Hyde-Smith, prone to gaffes in the past in open public or media appearances, is hoping to ride her apparent lead and support in deep-red Mississippi for President Donald Trump and avoid voter scrutiny or media questions.

Reeves on Friday announced that the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency has completed an assessment of the impact of flooding in late 2018 through mid-2019 and that he presented that information this week to the Army Corps of Engineers.

The long-pushed pumps project must have federal approval, which it has failed to garner in the past. Hyde-Smith, Reeves and Gipson expressed optimism that the project will move forward, and thanked each other for their continued efforts to move the project forward.

“Over half a million acres was under water for six months, and almost 700 homes were destroyed or damaged,” Hyde-Smith said. The MEMA report also documented flooding of 548,000 acres, of which 231,000 were prime croplands — a devastating blow to the state’s crucial agriculture industry.

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Democrat Mike Espy wants to debate Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, but Hyde-Smith has not accepted invitations. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

With the Nov. 3 election quickly approaching, Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is not giving any indication that she plans to debate her Democratic opponent Mike Espy.

Espy has publicly accepted one debate invitation from WJTV in Jackson and most likely will accept a similar invitation in coming days from WLBT, another Jackson television station.

But it takes two to debate.

The Hyde-Smith campaign has not responded to questions from Mississippi Today about whether she plans to participate in a debate. In earlier interviews with Mississippi Today, Hyde-Smith spokesperson Justin Brasell said the campaign had received an invitation to participate in a debate but had not decided whether it could be worked into the senator’s schedule.

Most incumbent U.S. senators facing re-election this year, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have agreed to debates with their major-party opponents.

“Corrupt Mike Espy is desperate to attract any attention he can get for his failing campaign,” the Hyde-Smith campaign said to WJTV earlier this month. “He was too corrupt for the Clinton Administration and is too liberal for Mississippi. Voters in our state know we have a bright future with Cindy Hyde-Smith and have no desire to revisit Mike Espy’s past scandals.”

While serving as U.S. secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton, Espy was indicted on multiple public corruption charges. But he was acquitted on all counts.

In 2018, Hyde-Smith and Espy debated when they were vying in a special election to replace longtime Sen. Thad Cochran, who resigned for health reasons. Hyde-Smith was appointed by then-Gov. Phil Bryant to replace Cochran in the interim before the special election. She is now vying for a full six-year term, and Espy, who captured more than 46% of the vote in 2018, is challenging her again.

Thus far the campaign has been relatively low-keyed, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hyde-Smith has said she has been actively campaigning via the internet, though it is difficult to find examples of that.

“Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is afraid to debate because she knows that Mississippians are hurt by her policies,” said Joe O’Hern, Espy’s campaign manager. “Given Sen. Hyde-Smith’s availability to ‘do a lot of townhall meetings’ and her claims that she’s ‘covering the state’ with events, the senator certainly has enough time to debate on the issues that matter most during this pivotal moment.”

In accepting the WJTV debate invitation, Espy said, “Debates provide an important opportunity for Mississippians to hear from candidates on our vision for the state and on the issues that matter most to Mississippians as we approach the election.”

In 2018, Hyde-Smith also was reluctant to debate. She refused multiple debate invitations before finally agreeing to one hosted by the Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau had previously honored Hyde-Smith who was the commissioner of agriculture and commerce when she was appointed to the U.S. Senate. Her family also owns a cattle ranch.

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A little over two years ago, a shipping container-sized cylinder bearing Microsoft’s name and logo was lowered onto the ocean floor off the northern coast of Scotland. Inside were 864 servers, and their submersion was part of the second phase of the software giant’s Project Natick. Launched in 2015, the project’s purpose is to determine the feasibility of underwater data centers powered by offshore renewable energy.

A couple months ago, the deep-sea servers were brought back up to the surface so engineers could inspect them and evaluate how they’d performed while under water.

But wait—why were they there in the first place?

As bizarre as it seems to sink hundreds of servers into the ocean, there are actually several very good reasons to do so. According to the UN, about 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of an ocean. As internet connectivity expands to cover most of the globe in the next few years, millions more people will come online, and a lot more servers will be needed to manage the increased demand and data they’ll generate.

In densely-populated cities real estate is expensive and can be hard to find. But know where there’s lots of cheap, empty space? At the bottom of the ocean. This locale also carries the added benefit of being really cold (depending where we’re talking, that is; if you’re looking off the coast of, say, Mumbai or Abu Dhabi, the waters are warmer).

Servers generate a lot of heat, and datacenters use most of their electricity for cooling. Keeping not just the temperature but also the humidity level constant is important for optimal functioning of the servers; neither of these vary much 100 feet under water.

Finally, installing data centers on the ocean floor is, surprisingly, much faster than building them on land. Microsoft claims its server-holding cylinders will take less than 90 days to go from factory ship to operation, as compared to the average two years it takes to get a terrestrial data center up and running.

Microsoft’s Special Projects team operated the underwater data center for two years, and it took a full day to dredge it up and bring it to the surface. One of the first things researchers did was to insert test tubes into the container to take samples of the air inside; they’ll use it to try to determine how gases released from the equipment may have impacted the servers’ operating environment.

The container was filled with dry nitrogen upon deployment, which seems to have made for a much better environment than the oxygen that land-bound servers are normally surrounded by; the failure rate of the servers in the water was just one-eighth that of Microsoft’s typical rate for its servers on land. The team thinks the nitrogen atmosphere was helpful because it’s less corrosive than oxygen. The fact that no humans entered the container for the entirety of its operations helped, too (no moving around of components or having to turn on lights or adjust the temperature).

Ben Cutler, a project manager in Microsoft’s Special Projects research group who leads Project Natick, believes the results of this phase of the project are sufficient to show that underwater data centers are worth pursuing. “We are now at the point of trying to harness what we have done as opposed to feeling the need to go and prove out some more,” he said.

Cutler envisions putting underwater datacenters near offshore wind farms to power them sustainably. The data centers of the future will require less human involvement, instead being managed and run primarily by technologies like robotics and AI. In this kind of “lights-out” datacenter, the servers would be swapped out about once every five years, with any that fail before then being taken offline.

The final step in this phase of Project Natick is to recycle all the components used for the underwater data center, including the steel pressure vessel, heat exchangers, and the servers themselves—and restoring the sea bed where the cylinder rested back to its original condition.

If Cutler’s optimism is a portent of things to come, it may not be long before the ocean floor is dotted with sustainable datacenters to feed our ever-increasing reliance on our phones and the internet.

Image Credit: Microsoft