On a Facebook post Saturday, Minnesota state representative Joshua Heintzeman,R-Nisswa, wrote:
So this week the governor's office released his spending priorities to the legislature. Help me out, does this make sense to anyone?
But rather than linking to the Governor's job/bonding proposals as a whole, the freshman lawmaker posted the bottom of page one of a letter that Dayton had sent to Rep. Jim Knoblach, R-St. Cloud, and Sen. Bobby Joe Champion, DFL-Minneapolis, in their capacity as chairs of the Legislative Working Group on Disparities (membership at the bottom of the page here).
Here's a screenshot of Heintzemann's post:
Here are photos of the entire letter (via Representative Mary Franson's official Facebook page):
Heintzeman had circled the bullet pointed about "an innovative employment strategy as recommended by Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC) and Black Lives Matter."
We think we can help Representative Heintzeman out, since he asked.
As we've already noted above, the letter isn't the whole of Dayton's priorities, but the part of it directed to a working group addressing economic disparities.
The groups mentioned at the bottom of page 1 of the letter? Governor Dayton held meetings in the last week of December 2015 with the local branch of the NAACP, NOC and Black Lives Matter. These meeting were widely reported in the statewide media. Witness KARE 11's Gov. Dayton meets with BLM, NAACP:
Gov. Mark Dayton met with several leaders of the Black Lives Matter community, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and the local chapter of the NAACP this week to discuss the work to be done in 2016.
The first of the meetings began Monday, when Dayton met with representatives from NOC and BLM -- following up on a previous meeting on Nov. 21.
A statement from Linden Zakula, deputy chief of staff for Dayton's office, was released Wednesday:
"At the meeting, Governor Dayton heard from the leaders present their sense of urgency for policies, programs, and funding to eliminate the serious economic disparities faced by black Minnesotans and other people of color in Minnesota. The Governor invited their participation in developing those initiatives in a possible Special Session and in the 2016 Legislative Session."
The statement continued:
"In the meeting, Governor Dayton restated both his respect for individuals' rights under the First Amendment 'peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances' and also his understanding of the urgency leaders' felt to redress those grievances. Governor Dayton also expressed his deep concern for protecting the safety of all Minnesotans and he stressed the dangers caused by blocking access to the region's major international airport."
In a second meeting on Wednesday, Dayton met with local leaders of the NAACP at his residence.
Zakula said Dayton committed to working with the NAACP to get funding for a Minnesota Department of Human Rights St. Cloud Office during a possible special session. He also agreed to conduct an independent performance audit of the State of Minnesota's affirmative action policies, state procurement practices and enforcement of the Minnesota Human Rights Act.
Though that's pretty transparent, Heintzemann's Facebook friends nonetheless seem pretty outraged by the circled section of the letter. Several mention that the Muslim Brotherhood is behind Black Lives Matter, because they'd heard that was the case (we'll get to that in another post). Perhaps the most public person raising an objection is Republican political operative Gregg Peppin, husband of Minnesota House Majority Leader Joyce Peppin, R-Rogers. Mr. Peppin commented:
Gregg Peppin What would the media say if a Republican governor substituted recommendations from The Tea Party and Center of the American Experiment? #bigtimedoublestandard
Good question. While Minnesota's last Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty spoke to a couple of anti-tax rallies, the Tea Party emerged near the end of his second term and he was never one of their darlings. But his engagement (and that of Governor Carlson) with policy advanced by the Center of the American Experiment is well documented in the media.
What did "the media" say about GOP governors and CAE policy?
In 2002, the last year of Independence Party governor Jesse Ventura's term, Rob Levine was highly critically at alt-weekly City Pages in This Is a Charity?, but skimming other sources, we find the media to be less harsh. In 2006, an election year, Kevin Featherly and Frank Rossi took a long look at the CAE in Will the Center Hold? While the focus of the feature was on the need of CAE to shore up its finances, the journalists wrote about the engagement of Republican governors with CAE policy recommendations:
With those concepts in mind, Bell and Pearlstein staged CAE’s first public forum, which they called “The New War On Poverty: Advancing Forward This Time.” The daylong program was the first step toward “an expansion of what we mean by conservatism” in Minnesota, Pearlstein says. “[At] our very first event…the objective was not to beat up on welfare mothers, and not just to save money, but rather to save a whole generation of kids,” he says. That event established a template for the programs that followed. “It was a structure people could hang their hats on,” says Bell, who later became CAE board chairman. “The Center was the rational right…. It provided a vehicle for conservative ideas to get heard and tested.”
Kersten (who declined to be interviewed for this article), an erstwhile Chicago financial analyst, university budget planner, and attorney, helped Pearlstein start CAE and later served as its chairwoman and senior fellow. Her role often was to provide the intellectual underpinnings for CAE’s positions. Perhaps her most notable achievement in this regard was marshaling the arguments that, in June 2003, helped kill off the Profile of Learning, Minnesota’s first attempt at statewide education standards. According to Pearlstein, her research skills also proved instrumental in winning the debate that derailed a 1994 school desegregation plan the Center argued was untenable.
As a writer and activist, Kersten would parlay the exposure CAE afforded her into dozens of local and national media appearances. She also found an unlikely soapbox from which to rail at liberals: the op-ed page of the Star Tribune, where she had a weekly column from 1995 to 2003. The paper offered her a community columnist position in 2005—something of a media coup both for Kersten and her cause. “The Star Tribune was browbeaten into acknowledging the legitimacy of conservative thought and the conservative movement in Minnesota,” says Jacobs.
Despite the stars in his midst, however, Pearlstein remained the Center’s focal point, standing at the helm as the loquacious, quotable explainer of all things conservative. In public, he has always played the jovial, insistently civil, erudite conservative, possessing a rare talent for making a center-right message palatable for Minnesotans, many of whom had never before confronted their inner Republican.
Pearlstein and his nascent Center immediately drew plaudits from most corners, including favorable early press from the Star Tribune. But the good vibes extended beyond the newspaper pages. “In the mid-1990s, I used to teach a class in welfare policy at Minneapolis Community College, and there was no question, of the 50 students in my class, 49 were on welfare,” says David Schultz, now a professor in the Hamline University Graduate School of Management. One day, Pearlstein addressed that class. “This would have been a hostile audience for anybody,” Schultz says. “But he was gracious, and even though my students disagreed with him, they felt he listened to them.” . . .
Pearlstein credits his Center with helping pave the way for Governor Arne Carlson to win tax credits for low-income families who send their children to private schools (the credits apply to ancillary educational expenses, not tuition—a sort of “voucher lite” program). Carlson acknowledges the importance of CAE’s support, both for that tax break and for his welfare reform initiative.
In the late 1990s, CAE launched its biggest effort yet, the $400,000 Minnesota Policy Blueprint project, which in 1998 produced a 400-page playbook for a conservative, free-market government. Based on the work of 19 committees, it offered 250 policy recommendations to state agency heads and lawmakers, urging the state to strengthen some gubernatorial powers, eliminate the lieutenant governor’s position, undo HMOs’ monopoly power over health care, and replace state employees’ defined-benefit retirement plans with defined-contribution plans, among many others.
It was released with the expectation that a new Republican governor would be elected in 1998, but its arrival actually coincided with the beginning of Jesse Ventura’s single term. In 2002, 60 copies of the Blueprint were hand-delivered to governor-elect Tim Pawlenty’s transition team. While few would contend that the Blueprint has served as a template for the Pawlenty years, the Star Tribune has reported that a half-dozen of its ideas helped shape such Pawlenty policies as tax-rate reductions and cuts in Local Government Aid.
Chris Georgacas, who spearheaded the Blueprint project, suggests that the manual actually wielded more legislative clout during the year following its release. “There was no systematic effort by the leadership to push…the Blueprint,” he says. “But I think it actually had more of an impact on some of the bills and agenda items that were introduced in the House.”
Perhaps CAE’s most quantifiable influence, however, has been in populating the Metropolitan Council, the governor-appointed body that manages transit, water resources, sewage treatment, and land use in the seven-county metropolitan region. Two members of Pawlenty’s 2002 transition team—Georgacas and Meeks—were appointed to the council; Bell became its chairman. All had ties to the Center. CAE staff members also recommended Cheri Pierson Yecke to Pawlenty; he named her his state education commissioner. She led the charge for new academic standards until the DFL-led Senate declined to confirm her appointment—after she’d already served 15 months, unconfirmed, in the position. Yecke, whose promotion of social studies and history standards with a strongly conservative bent largely led to her downfall, went on to work briefly at CAE before moving on to a state education post in Florida.
Not surprisingly, CAE’s ties reach deep into the heart of the Minnesota GOP. Republican John Kline, now the state’s Second District congressman, was hired in 2001 as CAE’s executive vice president to help straighten out its flagging finances. Meeks once worked as deputy chief of staff to Newt Gingrich. Georgacas chaired the state GOP. Nearly every major Minnesota Republican, from Norm Coleman to Vin Weber, has some association with CAE. More than 400 people—the overwhelming majority of them Republicans—have either participated in the Center’s events or written for its publications. . . .
And while still at the Star Tribune, Rachel Stassen Berger reported in 2014's New 'blueprint' for free market policies out soon:
. . . More than a decade ago the group released a nearly 300-page package of policies, funded by well known corporate and philanthropic Minnesota names and written by the state's Republican thinkers and officials. For years, Republicans developed and sometimes adopted the thinking from that document, particularly after Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty came to office in 2002. . . .
In short, the CAE has played a role in governing--and by in large, the media reported it, while CAE-based commentary was regularly published in the Star Tribune and elsewhere. We can only hope that the media is as respectful to the ideas that Black Lives Matter, NOC and the NAACP present as it has been to the Center of the American Experiment.
Indeed, Bluestem wonders just what is perplexing for Heintzeman and his Facebook friends about the presence of stakeholder groups in policymaking. We see representatives from ag commodity groups being appointed to councils that advise the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Groups that advocate for child care, the disabled, nursing homes, cities, lake home owners, hunters and anglers, chambers of commerce, gun owners, the mining industry, clean water, trout. . . . all seem to get a place at the table. Does Peppin want to eliminate all stakeholder groups?
We're not sure why Heintzeman is shocked by this--or that Peppin seems to think Republican governors would not be able to use CAE's policy blueprints. We must be missing something.
Legislative Working Group on Disparities hearings
It might also be helpful for Heintzeman to watch the videos of the two hearings that his colleagues on the Legislative Working Group on Disparities have held; the latter, held on Friday, includes public testimony.
Here's the first meeting on January 7, 2016:
Here's the second meeting (it's over six hours long, since there's a lot of public testimony) on January 15, 2016:
We hope this information helps Representative Heintzeman out. Some of the ideas in the public testimony would make the CAE folks happy, while others are more in line with Black Lives Matter, NOC and the NAACP.
Photo: Rep. Josh Heintzeman, R-Nisswa.
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