Dear Neighbor,
In these opening days of the legislative session, the Democrats have been preoccupied with parading their accusations of civil rights violations committed by federal law enforcement officers during Operation Metro surge and beyond. The proposals that they’ve been bringing are completely unworkable and impractical state-level policy changes that would not work under the Supremacy Clause the United States. In their discussion of these proposals, they’ve continued, through their rhetoric, to undermine the legitimacy and lawful authority of ICE, DHS and CBP, operating under the unstated premise that the federal government has no authority to enforce immigration.
The thing they’ve conveniently ignored is the choice that their party has made – from Gov. Tim Walz all the way down – to refuse to coordinate state and local law enforcement with legitimate federal immigration enforcement efforts. All of the chaos, disruption and insanity we have seen in our streets – and yes, the deaths of Pretti and Good – all could have been avoided simply by state and local authorities being allowed to work alongside federal immigration authorities to enforce our federal law.
This is important because everybody knows we have different branches and different levels of government that depend on one another to function. Like the teeth of gears in a machine, they must be aligned and coordinated. Otherwise, the machine doesn't work.
Walz and the Minnesota Democrats have removed the state and local gear from the machine, and now they’re complaining that the machine has gone haywire. Well, you broke it. But now they are trying to come up with all these novel ideas that don’t replace that gear, and the machine is not going to work any better unless we do. We need real solutions.
OIG bill
Minnesota has a serious fraud problem, but Democrats continue taking an unserious approach to it.
It happened again this week, including when Gov. Tim Walz had a press conference to unveil all these wonderful new things that he’s proposing to combat fraud. Well, one of the things he’s already done is spent $2 million on a report that is so heavily redacted it’s meaningless. This report was commissioned by a third party (Optum) to look into certain aspects of how the administration has been handling payments and processes. It breaks down to about $74,000 per page of black streaks. Click here to see it with your own eyes.
This report is in no way helpful to our efforts to crack down on fraud and hold to account anyone who may have been complicit at the state level. It just shows how deeply unserious this administration and the Minnesota Democrats are about actually combating this problem.
We’ve seen the same farcical approach from them over the course of the past two weeks with the games they’ve been playing to stall legislation we need to create a truly independent Office of the Inspector General with full enforcement authority. The Democrats say they really want to get something done but then keep taking every opportunity presented to them to thwart progress. The bottom line is fraud is only going to be addressed in St. Paul down when there’s a change in Democrat leadership – or at least a change in their tune. Keep that in mind as the session progresses.
Disgusting Democrat comments
The comments made by Rep. Leigh Finke during a recent hearing for a bill that would simply require age verification for children to ensure they can’t access adult material online are disgusting.
In an official House committee meeting, Finke said, “The AGs in many starts are very clear about, they’re almost jubilant about, being able to use these laws to ban young people from accessing content that could be educational if they are queer. And you’re a principal. You have LGBT students in your school, and we also know that they're not receiving sex education for queer kids. We know that prurient interest could be. for many people. the very existence of transgender kids. More and more people are saying there simply are no transgender kids.”
The idea that adult commercial sex material online has an educational purpose for minor children is heinous and must be condemned. There’s no other way to put it. This is what we're contending with here at the Minnesota Capitol, but we're up for the fight and we’re going to keep doing it.
Gun-control bills
House Democrats rolled out a slate of extreme gun bills this week that go after law-abiding citizens by banning firearms and magazines, while doing little to hold violent criminals accountable or address serious mental-health warning signs.
Many of these proposals are unconstitutional, impossible to enforce, or have already failed in other states and in countries such as Australia and Canada. We’ve even seen recent mass shootings there despite the very laws being pushed here.
As I mentioned during the committee meeting where these bills were heard, none of the gun-control measures Democrats enacted when they had full control of our state government prevented the Annunciation tragedy from happening. We need real solutions, including stronger school safety for public, charter, and private schools, and serious investment in mental-health response. Let’s lock up violent criminals and not turn responsible gun owners into criminals for exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Have a good weekend and we’ll be back with more from the House soon.
Sincerely,
Walter