In our posts, Before election, Dave Baker listed curbing outside campaign spending as #1 priority and Lots of MN House members not really tired of hearing voter complaints about election junkmail, we looked at how freshmen state representatives in both halves of Minnesota Senate District 17 had voted against a move to enact campaign finance reform in time to affect the 2014 year-end reports.
We weren't only ones watching. In Backer’s priorities support businesses, corporations, a letter to the editor of the Morris Sun Tribune, Adrian Ledermann of Brandon, Minnesotam writes:
. . .the first big vote that Jeff Backer [R-Browns Valley] took on the House floor was to block a bill that would help take the big money and secret donors out of state politics. Do you remember the onslaught of negative campaign mailers and TV ads in the last election? The corporate funders of many of those ads don’t have to report how much they are spending. Jeff Backer sided with corporate donors who are allowed to keep on spending, and keep it all shielded from you and I. Why doesn’t Jeff Backer want us to know how much money corporate interests spent in the last election? Is it because he benefitted from it? Is it because he is putting corporate interests ahead of ours?
We know that Ben Golnik, the source of many of those negative campaign mailers via the MN Jobs Coalition, benefitted from the win by getting a job as the Republican House Majority Caucus executive director.
For Backer and Golnik, there's certainly some personal job creation, so the disclaimers on those mailers weren't entirely off the mark.
Photo: The "board" of votes on the Winkler motion, via The Update.
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