Dear Neighbor,
Greetings from the Capitol, where House Republicans continue working to help the people of our state by advancing bills citizens want. Meanwhile, Gov. Walz proposes cutting education and House Democrats are clinging to their Trump Deflection Strategy.
The House Democrat answer to just about everything these days is, “Trump, Trump, Trump.” For instance, even the ranking Democrat on public safety claimed that it's fiscally irresponsible to increase penalties against criminals and hold prosecutors accountable because, yep: Trump. And House Democrats are taking no responsibility for the fact that they burned through an $18 billion budget surplus, increased state spending by an unaffordable 40 pecent and have us staring down the barrel of a deficit because, you guessed it: Trump.
House Democrats are so blinded by Trump they're even voting against common-sense, law-enforcement requested policies. They expressed opposition to increasing penalties for organized eco terrorism, with one testifier asserting that “so-called Minnesota” is on stolen land.
In other words, we’re right back to where we left off under the trifecta, where Democrats are catering to the radical-left activists instead of doing what most Minnesotans want. House Democrats continue taking extreme, activist-based positions on virtually every issue, even though they no longer have full control of the Capitol.
The good news is Republicans are pushing forward with the policy that we were sent to pursue. For example, I'm authoring a bill to protect Minnesotans from being placed on a state database for non-criminal speech by prohibiting the Department of Human Rights from creating such a database. My bill is in response to House Democrats spending the last biennium working to create a speech registry that most Minnesotans don’t want.
The contrast could not be sharper between the House Republicans’ focused approach and the Democrats’ waywardness on education. For example, the governor proposes to cutting teacher pay, cutting special ed funding, denying textbooks to school age children, completely defunding non-public pupil aid and effectively building a Berlin Wall around his broken education system.
The House Republican approach is vastly different. Instead of telling Minnesotans what they want, House Republicans continue seeking feedback and support of parents, educators and students to offer a plan prioritizing smaller class sizes and directing resources into our local schools – not to St. Paul. We do this by providing flexible funding to help districts address their unique individual challenges. Most importantly, Republicans are empowering local school boards and administrators to innovate, rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all approach.
But, yet again, the House Democrats are deploying their misguided Trump Deflection Strategy on education. They are trying to prey on fear by selling the narrative that shuttering the Federal Department of Education would cause Armageddon for our education budget. In reality, it would have minimal financial impacts for our schools because there's really not a lot of education money that comes from the federal government. The Federal Department of Education is not so much a funding source, it is a bureaucracy. That's all it is. Most of our education funding comes from the state, aka Minnesota taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the Democrat governor in our state takes the opposite approach by proposing giving less money to students and schools, while giving more money to MDE.
Thank goodness the trifecta is broken because House Republicans are working to do the things Minnesotans actually want. As another example, polls show around 80 percent of people agree that biological sex should determine participation in sports, and House Republicans have authored a bill (H.F. 12) to support that position.
I can’t wait to see where the House Democrat caucus stands on men playing women’s sports. Which side will Democrats choose? Will they vote with the 80 percent that wants to support our daughters through fair and safe competition, or will they side with the radical 20 percent that wants to allow men to compete in women’s sports?
We’ll see how this plays out when the bill comes to the House floor and the cameras are on, but we have our suspicions.
Sincerely,
Walter