The Death of MN Nice?

By Vice President Louise Sundin

 

The 2021 legislative session ends with a whine, a whimper, and a bang or two.  The Governor has signed a $52 billion budget that includes:

• $70 million for small businesses.

• $250 million direct financial support for essential workers on frontlines of the COVID pandemic.

• $80 million in statewide grants to address greatest economic and redevelopment needs.

• $597 million to support child-care businesses and increase affordable quality child-care.

• $1.2 billion over 4 years for education - the largest formula increase in 15 years.

 

Were the results worth the partisan wrangling, fighting, name-calling, threats, hollering, screeching, endless filibustering, dueling press conferences, etc.?  Good stuff?  Sure.  At the end of the day (or the session), we fully expect legislators of all stripes to come together and do what is right for all Minnesotans.  It is our great tradition in this state. Is that a phenomenon of the past?

 

We know we are the only divided state in the country as far as the House and Senate are configured.  But, even so, it was not like in past years.  This session the two parties and the two houses see, hear, experience and say they represent two different Minnesotas.  MN politics has become a blood sport as in so many other states and in Congress.

 

The House adjourned “sine die” and the Governor signed all of the budget bills. The Senate continued in session to take up some commissioner appointments.  It looks like the Senate is using the Governor’s Commissioner appointments as revenge by forcing MPCA Commissioner Laura Bishop to resign.  The Senate already failed to approve two of the governor’s popular appointments supported by labor last session.  Twenty MN commissioners remain unapproved and in limbo after 2 ½ years.

 

That’s disappointing enough.  However, the process of sausage-making during the regular session and the special session following turned out to be more than disappointing.  Behavior and rhetoric of legislators was often mean, nasty, degrading, and sometimes disgusting.  It was anything but what we expect from Minnesotans.  It was school-yard taunts, grossly hypothetical speculations, and labeling the opposition in outrageous exaggerations. It is obvious that the rhetoric and recorded votes will appear in attack ads on TV and in election materials in the next election.

 

Even the formality and ritual processes of the legislature become disrespectful when snarled, sneered, or are endlessly challenged in vote after vote on procedural stalling and power plays.  It doesn’t help any to start with ‘Madam Speaker’ (House) or ‘Mr. President’ (Senate) if what follows is a procedural insult or merely a political stunt or stalling tactic.  Calling the Governor ‘Dictator Walz’ because he instituted rules that saved many retirees like us from COVID death is nothing but disrespect for the office and disrespect for the older Minnesotans who were saved by the quarantines and vaccines expertly distributed in MN.  

 

As an educator, I was particularly upset with the legislators for not being good role models for our young people. We teach students how to be good debaters in school by how to present a cogent argument without attacking the opponent as a person.  Now, the politicians attack the person and not the argument. We teach history, not hate.

 

Maybe we educators didn’t do a good enough job of teaching critical thinking.  Maybe it is just too difficult to expect that the national hostility, anger, distrust, volatility and deep political divisions and partisanship not to invade Minnesota.  We used to be so proud of our Minnesota exceptionalism.  It seems to have faded if not disappeared. 

  

Even U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, MN Third District, is discouraged about the idea of bipartisanship in polarized Washington politics. “The more that what I call the political industrial complex uses the notion that one side or the other can win in perpetuity is misguided and dangerous,” he was quoted as saying in the Sunday Star Tribune.  Phillips is vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

 

AFT Union President Randy Weingarten says, “Tragically, we are dangerously divided.  But our divides are not unbridgeable.  We can disagree yet still recognize each other’s humanity.  We all lose when we demonize and ‘otherwise’ our neighbor.  We win when we put hope over fear; when we seek well-being of everyone we love not just our own.”

 

Will we ever be able to get back to civility, respect, and eloquence in service of all Minnesotans?  We probably can’t expect the Gettysburg Address or the poetry of young National Poet, Amanda Gorman, at President Biden’s inauguration.  But, can’t we all just get along?  Can’t we at least expect a return to a modicum of “Minnesota Nice” as we are returning to a post-Pandemic new normal?

 

I hope the answer is, “Yah, you betcha.”