Over the last week, Gov. Tim Walz has negotiated spending plans and tax cuts with House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, and Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller, R-Winona.
But lately, Scott Jensen, the Republican-endorsed candidate for governor, has tried to insert himself as a factor in those ongoing talks by the legislative triumvirate.
Jensen last week said he opposed the deal for using the rest of Minnesota’s historic budget surplus — $4 billion in tax cuts and credits, $4 billion in spending on government programs and $4 billion in reserves — and has instead called on Republicans to “hold the line” and keep more of the cash for GOP priorities next year when he might be governor.
“Give the “Surplus” BACK,” Jensen said on Twitter at the time.
Legislators passed little of their negotiated deal before the regular session ended Sunday night because top leaders and key committee chairs couldn’t agree on many details of the budget “framework” announced last week. Walz wants to finalize agreements over spending plans and call a special session, which Hortman supported but Miller was skeptical of. The governor said House and Senate leaders wanted a few days to mull over their next steps.
Jensen, a physician from Chaska and former one-term state senator, said he’s been talking to legislators, including Miller, about the unfulfilled legislative deal. And Jensen was at the Capitol on Monday to officially file for the governor’s race, but he held a news conference and an outdoor rally where he outlined what he thinks the Legislature should do next.
“Right now we need to be more frugal with our money,” Jensen said. “Let’s go ahead and have the election in November and then in November we’ll decide who’s going to be there in January.”
Jensen’s role
Jensen was critical of the budget and tax cut deal when first announced, a position similar to minority House Republicans. But on Monday in some ways he sought to align himself closer to the Republican-led Senate.
Jensen said the surplus belongs to Minnesotans and said there is a lot of “fluff” in the proposed spending. But Jensen praised the $3.88 billion tax bill made up of cuts and credits, which includes a full elimination of a state tax on Social Security benefits.
He said the tax bill should have been passed by lawmakers and the spending “lopped off.” But since one was tied to the other, Republicans “did exactly what they had to do,” by standing against “irresponsible spending.”
“I have every confidence that the Republicans are going to do everything they can to pass the $4 billion tax relief bill for Minnesotans and that’s where it stops,” Jensen said. “We don’t need more spending.”
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Walker Orenstein[/image_credit][image_caption]Jensen was at the Capitol on Monday to officially file for the governor’s race, but he held a news conference where he outlined what he thinks the Legislature should do next. Running mate Matt Birk is at right.[/image_caption]
Jensen endorsed “targeted” spending on police, nursing homes and improved literacy for students, but said, “if it’s coming with a lot of other, if you will, fruits and boondoggles and things like that I would not be interested.”
“I think if you want to give $4 billion back now and then work to get the next probably $6 to $8 billion taken care of in January, February, that seems more appropriate,” Jensen said.
It’s not clear how much influence Jensen has had. Jensen said he has talked to Miller “multiple times” and they have a relationship where they can share priorities but disagree on some things. He said he talked to lawmakers Sunday about negotiations but wouldn’t say who he spoke with. On Monday, Jensen walked around the Senate chambers and chatted on the Capitol steps with lawmakers about the failure to pass the tax bill and other spending.
Miller, for his part, said last week he respects Jensen’s opinion and said “at the end of the day we’re trying to get good things done for the people of the state of Minnesota.”
“We think the framework of the agreement that we put forward accomplishes that,” Miller said. “If we can get permanent ongoing tax relief for the people of Minnesota, that’s a great thing for the people.”
Have he or his office been contacted by residents following Jensen’s suggestion to lobby lawmakers against the budget deal?
“Nope,” Miller said.
Jensen also sought Monday to contrast his leadership style with Walz. He claimed Walz hadn’t been public enough about negotiations and wasn’t transparent in general. Jensen suggested, for instance, holding meetings in front of reporters instead of behind closed doors.
Last week, Walz told MPR News that he had a cordial relationship with Jensen when they worked together on the bill to tap drug companies for the costs of responding to the opioid crisis.
That changed after Jensen became a candidate for governor.
“It’s hard to govern if you decide the whole thing is on division,” Walz said last week. “Compromise is a virtue, not a vice. I think you’re seeing it play out in Minnesota, not shutdowns, good budgets, working together getting compromises. It becomes very difficult when you don’t just disagree with people, you’re threatening to jail them, you’re threatening to criminalize them. It’s very hard to govern if you burn the house down.”
Walz also argued Monday that he has given up plenty of his priorities in negotiations and needs legislative leaders, primarily in the Senate, to do the same. Senate Republicans have argued Democrats aren’t budging enough.
[image_credit]Screen shot[/image_credit][image_caption]Scott Jensen on the Senate floor as Tom Bakk delivers his farewell address.[/image_caption]
“If the Senate Republican candidate for governor wants to oppose all of those things he might as well just choose a different party to run on because that is the Republican platform,” Winkler said.
Looking to the general election
Jensen’s news conference and rally Monday also seemed to mark the unofficial first day of his general election campaign. He still may face a primary challenge from former Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek. But the rally was meant as a show of unity. All the GOP-endorsed candidates for statewide office were there, and convention foe Kendall Qualls backed Jensen on the Capitol steps.
Jensen spoke in front of a sign with campaign themes that were not as prominent during the run-up to the endorsement. The sign called for lower taxes, lower gas prices, safe streets and excellent schools.
Jensen rose to greater popularity among the GOP base for questioning COVID-19 science around vaccine safety and effectiveness and death totals. At the convention in Rochester, he said he would shut down the government for election security priorities, reform emergency powers that Walz used to implement pandemic restrictions and relax gun regulations.
And he also again called for Secretary of State Steve Simon to be jailed for how he ran Minnesota’s 2020 election. Though many Republicans have questioned a pandemic-related lawsuit in which the state agreed to suspend a requirement for people voting by mail to have another registered voter witness their signature, the settlement was approved by a judge, and Simon has not been accused of any misconduct.
Asked on Monday, after his rally, if COVID-19 would play a major role in his general election campaign, Jensen said in an interview he’s “optimistic that COVID will continue to drift away and we’re going to have to do some preparation for the next pandemic.”
He called for a pause on the state gas tax for “maybe a year” and wanted to reduce government spending by 5 to 10 percent. (Walz previously said he was open to a gas tax holiday, an idea that was criticized by Republicans.)
Still, when Jensen was asked before the rally by reporters to reiterate his immediate plans if elected, the Republican didn’t mention taxes, gas prices or police in his “100-day plan.” That plan, he said, would include a re-write of emergency powers law, a voter identification law and a “constitutional carry” provision, which usually refers to laws that allow people to carry guns without a permit.
Jensen’s running mate Matt Birk said he’s alarmed about “some of this ethnic studies, if you will, some of the gender ideology is being taught in schools.” He said they are belief systems similar to religion and shouldn’t be taught in public schools, a view that has driven their campaign focus on “school choice” policies.
Staff writer Peter Callaghan contributed to this report
It appears that electing Jensen/Birk will ensure that our state legislature will be consumed with rewriting emergency power laws, voter ID laws, laws allowing people to carry guns without permits, and laws to restrict ethnic studies and addressing gender issues in our schools. That suggests that next year’s session will be too busy to address school finance issues, affordable housing, and access to healthcare. That, of course, is exactly the point and represents the GOP’s stance on those ‘peripheral’ issues, i.e. issues not espoused by faux news organizations.
They seem very capable of unearthing issue after issue for which they point their fingers at the DFL, but they don’t have any suggestions for solutions to anything other than ideological problems which most voters care little about. They also have yet to realize that building inflation into tax receipts means they also need to build inflation into tax expenditures as well. If nothing else, the GOP has consistently focused on the wrong issues for Minnesotans again.
I keep waiting for a Republican, any Republican, to tell us what they actually support. Instead, all we hear is grievance and fear mongering. It’s very sad that so many share a political philosophy that only defines what they’re against, not what they’re for.
Is this why Republicans stopped showing up for the joint budget meetings?
“Doc” Jensen’s continued call that the MN Sec of State be jailed for the 2020 election reveals the mind of both a crackpot and a fascist, sorry to say. That this is seen by the delegates to the Repub convention as a perfectly acceptable (indeed, laudable!) position shows just how far right this party has gone. It is, frankly, insane. A pity that there is no longer a consensus in MN that recognizes this.
It appears that the crackpot’s idea of “governance” in a state where the Repubs are (still) the minority faction is that almost the entire Repub wish list be adopted now and the Dem side of the aisle get essentially nothing. Very reasonable, that sort of mature political wisdom should bode well for the state should the crackpot Doc somehow get elected. Back to the chaos and shutdowns that “conservatives” seem to love; that’s abundantly clear.
You know, standard economic analysis is that tax cuts to consumers would tend to be inflationary, far more so than targeted government spending on, say, education. (I say “tend” because economies are complex and there can be many variables). But if a party is truly seeking to combat inflationary pressures, then a broad across the board tax cut would surely not be part of the prescription. But this just shows both the economic ignorance of “Doc” Jensen and the lack of seriousness of his entire party. Only Dems can cause inflation, I guess…
About 38% of US populace believe the election was stolen. Going off that number, I don’t believe Jensen can get more than 45% of the vote for governor…
So let’s see – the Repub-dominated U.S. Senate won’t confirm Supreme Court nominees put forth by Democratic presidents because a Repub might win and be able to nominate someone they like, and now the likely Repub nominee for Governor wants Repubs to delay budget decisions until next year because he *might* win and be able to influence what’s to become of the money – especially if Minnesota Repubs end up winning majorities.
Repubs – the party of “Let’s just obstruct, obstruct, and obstruct until we win”. Yeah – THAT’S effective governance. NOT!
How about we lower the most regressive tad, the sales tax?
????
Aside from obstruction for its own sake, I’ve not seen Mr. Jensen provide any scientific / medical evidence that the pandemic was somehow “fake,” that vaccines don’t work, that quarantine-like measures for the public, including masks, don’t work and aren’t useful, or that Governor Walz somehow abused his emergency powers. That businesses suffered during the pandemic is undeniable. Also undeniable are more than a million Americans dead from COVID-19. Businesses can sometimes recover from disaster. The dead, not so much.
The Republican Party – my old party – appears to have gone completely over to the Dark Side, with neofascist mutterings about prosecuting the Secretary of State for, apparently, doing his job quite well, since the 2020 election was the cleanest election that I can remember. I’ve read of more voter fraud – itself a “fake” issue, since it didn’t, doesn’t, and in the past half-century hasn’t existed in significant numbers – by Republican voters than Democratic voters, and most of those few instances were in other states.
With another ghastly mass murder in Texas this week, the one constant theme of repeated mass shootings in the only country in the developed world where these sorts of horrific murders take place is the presence of, and easy access to, semi-automatic firearms. As a gun owner myself, I’ll just say that our current approach to gun ownership and possession, and especially the sort of “open carry” advocated by Mr. Jensen, approximates insanity. Universal background checks ought to be the very first in a long line of steps to make gun ownership increasingly limited, since it’s constitutionially-limited to members of a state militia.
I look forward to the day – likely not in my lifetime – when Republicans will once again become fiscally-responsible, realizing that investments (e.g., public education) are not automatically “costs” to be minimized, and reducing the state’s income (e.g., through tax cuts) is not automatically good fiscal policy. There ain’t no free lunch, folks. Paved roads, water that’s safe to drink, a population that’s intellectually and scientifically literate (thus able to sustain high-skill employment), and a society that doesn’t just offer platitudes, but actually provides equal opportunity to everyone, a police force that can enforce the law without killing people on a regular basis – all those desirables cost something. Taxes are the price of a civilized society. Sadly, my former party apparently prefers chaos, or a return to the 19th century at best. That’s not “conservative,” it’s reactionary.
” … we’re going to have to do some preparation for the next pandemic.”
Reassuring that the good doctor is thinking ahead. Can never start too early on your next crusade against vaccinations; or may be he means we should be stockpiling ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine? Lots to do in addition to making sure one of the most respected Secretary of State gets locked up and unilaterally commute the lawful sentence of a police officer even though you don’t have the authority.
Whenever I get a little nervous about how vulnerable Walz might be because of the way he mishandled the riots, it’s nice to be reassured by listening to Jensen for just a couple of minutes. Still can’t decide where the line is between a genuine nut job and a totally unabashed slimy politician who will say anything if he thinks it’ll get him a vote.
Here is how we can quadruple the surplus: Go to London and get a bet on Scott Jensen winning the election. Right up there with the Vikings winning the Super Bowl. Thank you MN GOP for selecting another unelectable candidate.
That would be an improvement.