Minnesota’s lawmakers mostly pleased with State of the Union

WASHINGTON — President Obama used his State of the Union address to put forth a liberal wish list for the first year of his second term, laying out a vision in which the federal government helps facilitate a speedier economic recovery than the one we’ve seen over the last four years.

Minnesota’s congressional delegation responded largely positively. The state’s Democrats heralded the speech, and even it’s Republicans offered kind words and hints of compromise, though that doesn’t promise a new era of bipartisanship as the 113^th Congress gets down to business.

Obama’s State of the Union was heavily focused on the economy, as has been the case throughout his presidency. Tuesday night’s speech was broken into three main topics: how to bring jobs to America, how to equip Americans to fill those jobs and how to improve their quality of life.

To spur job creation, he called for new public-private manufacturing “institutes” and investments in clean energy using oil and gas tax revenues. As he has in the past, Obama said Congress should invest in infrastructure repairs and science research.

Obama proposed dual investments on both sides of K-12 education, specifically for universal pre-school and a Race To The Top-style competition to encourage high schools to partner with colleges to teach higher-level topics. He wants Congress to consider affordability before doling out higher education money and said he’ll launch a college new affordability worksheet for families this week.

Obama said the federal minimum wage should be increased to $9 an hour, tying it to the cost of living, and asked Congress to pass legislation helping homeowners refinance their mortgages. He told Congress to pass the Violence Against Women Act and a paycheck fairness measure this year as well.

“Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger America,” Obama said. “It is this kind of prosperity – broad, shared, and built on a thriving middle class – that has always been the source of our progress at home. It is also the foundation of our power and influence throughout the world.”

To Republicans’ incredulity, Obama pledged to do all of it without increasing the federal deficit — in fact, he pledged to work with Congress to decrease the deficit in place of deep cuts to federal spending set to take effect next month.

Obama tied several ancillary topics to the overriding theme of the economy. On climate change, for example, he said converting to clean, renewable energy could help the U.S. achieve energy independence. Immigration reform, he said, could bring high-skilled workers to the United States, and keep them here.

There were, of course, a handful of topics that stood on their own. Drawing down forces in Afghanistan, halving the number of troops in the country by the end of the year, received broad, bipartisan applause in the House chamber. And Obama ended his speech calling for more gun control measures, highlighting gun violence victims and their families sitting in the audience. Those victims “deserve a vote,” he repeated.

Democrats keen on speech

So, who liked what?

Let’s get into the obvious responses first. The Minnesota delegation’s most liberal members were quickest to heap praise on the speech — Rep. Rick Nolan, sitting through his first State of the Union since the Jimmy Carter administration, called it “just one of the best speeches that I’ve ever heard.”

Reps. Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison applauded Obama for his rhetoric on gun violence. Both are big supporters of his gun-control push and said they were heartened to hear Obama call for votes on the package of proposals, which the Senate is currently considering. Ellison invited 17-year-old gun-control advocate Sami Rahamim to the speech, and McCollum said she’d been talking to law enforcement about Monday’s shooting death of an Oakdale child.

“We need to find a common ground on it, and I’m not going to give up in making our community safer,” she said. “We need to do what we can.”

Rep. Tim Walz has opened the door to considering more gun control but said Obama’s speech did little to push him much further in that direction. He said he especially enjoyed Obama’s focus on education, manufacturing and renewable energy, calling the proposals “certainly an ambitious agenda, but a lot of things we can agree upon.”

Workforce development was on the minds of Minnesota’s senators, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken.

“I like that he proposed a bread-and-butter agenda, an economic agenda, I thought that was really important,” Klobuchar said. “I was glad that he talked a lot about the need to regain workers so that we can make things in America.”

Franken applauded Obama for looking to boast the ranks of American specialized workers.

“Training our workforce, the skills gap that we have all over the country and in Minnesota is very, very important and it’s a way that we can address creating jobs, and pretty quickly,” he said.

Rep. Collin Peterson, the most conservative of Minnesota’s Democrats, said Obama’s proposals were sound, but he didn’t think now is the right time, economically, to try investing in them.

“He can say this is paid for, but I don’t know how. I was sitting with the Republicans, and this was not going over. I don’t see how you get any place,” Peterson said. “There are good things in there but I don’t know how you pay for it.”

Republicans diplomatic

Minnesota’s Republicans weren’t overly down on the speech, either.

Rep. Michele Bachmann said she actually agreed with Obama’s push for more infrastructure spending and said her top priority this term is widening Interstate-94. She said she saw room for compromise with Democrats on energy — she appreciated Obama’s emphasis on increased American oil production over his time in office. But she shied away from Obama’s calls for green energy, saying it’s yet to prove itself to be economically viable.

“We can’t do everything, and the big problem that we’ve seen is that there’s been a misappropriation of where money needs to be going,” she said. “I think this is a priority, and we need to be putting money into new roads.”

Erik Paulsen had more good than bad to say as well, highlighting Obama’s call for college affordability and intention to expand trade in Europe. He was less keen on the president’s education and gun violence proposals (saying he’d review them as more details emerged) and said Obama’s desire to expand manufacturing was hypocritical given his support for the medical device tax Paulsen has been seeking to repeal.

“I think he missed an opportunity because he did talk about the importance of having America be the magnet for manufacturing, and I think the best way to do that is to make sure we’re not going to see this medical device tax move forward, and we need his help with that,” he said.

The most vocal Obama opponent Tuesday night was John Kline, who was noticably absent from the House chamber for security reasons. As chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Kline will have jurisdiction over a wide swath of territory Obama covered in his speech, and he objected to the president’s “case for more big government.”

“The president’s uncompromising belief that bigger government is the answer to the challenges we face is fundamentally flawed,” he said in a statement. “The American people, not the federal government, are the beacon of hope that makes America great.”

In the end, like many State of the Union addresses before it, much of what Obama pitched is dead on arrival in Congress, thanks to partisanship, over-ambition, scarcity of political capital or some combination of all that. But lawmakers, especially Democrats, said they left the House chamber Tuesday night charged for the political battles ahead of them.

“There’s so much to do and Congress just needs to get to work in doing it, and I think that was the president’s biggest message,” McCollum said. “Get to work. Do something.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry