Last night's Minnesota House floor debate over Eden Prairie Republican Representative Jenifer Loon's HF2, which would impose state mandates on local school boards for teacher lay-off policy, often got testy as DFLers taunted Republicans.
As usual, Representative Ryan Winkler (DFL-Golden Valley) succeeded most often in getting their goats--not surprising, since millions were spent last year's campaign independent expenditures in telling us (some more than others if you lived, as we do, in one of those target districts) exactly where those goats are tied.
One can watch the whole six-hour thing, including Winkler's masterful rhetorically goat-roping and button punching, here.
And 20-something Carly Melin (DFL-Hibbing) came in with her own Millennial perspective on seniority and hypocrisy.
At The Uptake's Minnesota YouTube channel, Mike McIntee writes in a description of a clip pulled from the debate:
Would Republican lawmakers like a taste of their own medicine? That seemed to be the message behind an amendment Rep. Carly Melin offered to a controversial education bill which says seniority cannot be the only criteria for determining if a teacher can be laid off. Melin's amendment said that committee chairmanships in the House would no longer be determined strictly by seniority but instead performance would also be considered. Melin said her amendment was relevant because she lifted the requirements directly from the education bill (HF2) that was being debated. House Speaker Kurt Daudt disagreed and ruled the amendment was not germane to the bill.
If one watches the whole of Melin's time of having the floor, you'll see the spectacle of Speaker Daudt--not a committee chair--huddled over a discussion of the House rules, only to conclude that Melin was correct in the point of inquiry that she had raised.
Here's the video:
Given Daudt's innocence (and unlike Melin, he's already in his 40s), we begin to have sympathy with those Republican House members who supported Stillwater-area representative Matt Dean and Mountain Lake's Rod Hamilton's bids for the speaker's gavel for this session.
Perhaps Representative Melin, Dean and Hamilton can create a task force to develop a system of performance review for their peers.
Indeed, we're not certain if the House Majority Caucus really did use seniority in assigning committee chairs. Rather, in the legislature that now-Executive Director Ben Golnik purchased via contributions to the Minnesota Jobs Coalition IE PAC, geography is destiny.
Screenshot: Carly Melin asking for some standards around this joint.
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