Minnesota Lawyer

While the politicians continue to bicker and stonewall over the state budget at the Capitol this month, Jeff Forester is blissfully in the middle of nowhere, off on Pine Island up in Lake Vermillion.

A gentle rain fell steadily on the Stone Arch Festival of the Arts last weekend, culling the crowd to a skeleton crew of damp stragglers dodging stray puddles as the potters and the kettle corn poppers fruitlessly hawked their wares. Sheltered on a stage beneath a bridge, his voice resonating, singer-songwriter Dan Israel played solo in front of maybe a dozen people.

DFL gubernatorial nominee Mark Dayton has not had a good September. The Department of Revenue estimated that his proposed tax increase on the rich would yield not quite half of the $4 billion he originally claimed it would generate; when Dayton submitted a revised budget, it got the tax proceeds right but still fell almost $1 billion of solving the deficit.

During the recent gubernatorial debate hosted by TPT-TV's Almanac, Republican Tom Emmer twice accused Democrat Mark Dayton of proposing a tax increase on middle class Minnesotans. Dayton has said that the lowest amount of taxable income that would qualify for an increase under his proposal is $130,000 for an individual and $150,000 for a couple filing jointly. At one point Emmer claimed that the individual minimum could drop to "$124,000 in some cases," but otherwise didn't dispute the figures.

Ever since Margaret Anderson Kelliher captured the DFL endorsement for governor at the party convention in April and turned her attention toward a primary challenge from two well-heeled rivals, Mark Dayton and Matt Entenza, the dynamics of the race have remained relatively stable.

Among the many reasons the DFL party establishment wants Margaret Anderson Kelliher to triumph in both next month’s primary and in the November general election is to finally halt the notorious string of ballot box failures wrought by its endorsed candidates for governor. The last time the DFL endorsement process lined up behind a gubernatorial winner was in the case of Rudy Perpich back in 1986. But that hardly counts, because Perpich was the incumbent at the time, a distinction he earned only after defeating the previous DFL endorsee, Warren Spannaus, in the 1982 primary.

Civics 101 teaches us that one function of elections is to keep leaders accountable to the people they serve. If a politician wants to attain or hold on to an office, he or she must behave in a manner that appeals to enough of the electorate to earn at least a plurality of the vote. That’s what representative democracy is all about.

As state lawmakers ready themselves for what promises to be a contentious and trying legislative session at the Capitol next week, Speaker of the House Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, finds herself in an unusually delicate position.

The charter school movement in Minnesota is at least temporarily on the ropes, reeling from a series of recent revelations that some of the state's approximately 150 charter schools have misused funds or failed to provide adequate oversight and accountability when it comes to leasing the buildings they occupy.

Election law, once the province of civics wonks, has increasingly become the stuff of partisan political food fights. The topic will be joined once again this Friday morning, when a public hearing will be held on the proposed rule changes in Minnesota election law submitted by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.