Moving MN Forward just released an ad to counter “A Better Minnesota’s” latest round of Dayton family and union-fundeed “spend more or we kill this dog! ads:

Pass it around.

Mark Dayton, from a bit on the TV news yesterday, on his veto of the GOP’s budget bills:

“The problem…apparently…seems to lie with some of the extreme right wing members, especially the new ones, who don’t seem to know how government works”.

So Tom Bakk’s stupid remark about the GOP freshmen not being part of the government club…

…is the official DFL party line?

Along with the whole “everyone who opposes Dayton is an “extremist”” schtick?

During World War II, there was a story recounted by legendary Marine fighter pilot “Pappy” Boyington in his book Baa Baa Black Sheep.  He and his flight were involved in a dogfight high over the Pacific; they were outnumbered by a flight of Japanese planes.  He and his wingman, George Ashmun, got separated.  Ashmun called out on the radio trying to find Boyington.  After a moment, Boyington called back “I’ve got five Zeros (Japanese fighters) surrounded”

“Where?” called Ashmun.

“Outside this cloud I”m in”.

I think Hamline U prof David Schultz has gotten a touch of the same thing in  his “Schultz’s Take” post from yesterday:

If ever a party were trapped by its political rhetoric it is the Republican Party of Minnesota (RPM). With two weeks to go before the end of the regular legislative session it is more than ever clear that there will be no budget deal by then, forcing a special session and perhaps running a risk of a partial government shutdown on July 1.

Right now it does not look like there is a common ground or room for compromise–mostly because of the GOP–and the Republicans stand to be the biggest loser if there is a shutdown, so long as the DFL can play it right. Fortunately for the RPM, the DFL is probably unable to set the political hook.

That’s because the GOP is “trapped” by “rhetoric” that won it not just an epic victory last November, but turned around two cycles’ worth of crushing defeats.

We’re surrounded outside that cloud they’re in.

And they’re trying to “set the hook” with nothing but…

• …a message most of Minnesota refudiated last fall – 22% spending hikes per biennium, and private sector workers being obliged to work ’til they’re 70 so government workers can retire at 55.
• …A lot of sniping, carping and attacks.

Schultz:

Since January the positions of Dayton and the Republican legislature have hardened even more, with them turning more firm in the last few weeks.

First, Tony Sutton, RPM Party Chair, sent a letter to the Republican legislators urging them to remain firm on no tax increases. Second, Geoff Michel has stated that the Republicans have already compromised enough in agreeing to spend $34 billion or $3 billion more than they wanted. (Yet he did not indicate how with that compromise the Republicans planned to pay for that extra spending).

Er…with growing state revenues?  The way conservatives always pay for more spending?

Maybe Schultz was busy in March…

Conversely, Dayton has made it clear that he does not support these cuts. He also stated last week he would prefer a special session rather than sign these bills.

The lines have been drawn in the sand. There seems to be no room or avenue for compromise. Both sides are playing chicken, waiting for the other side to blink or give in. As of now, there seems to be no middle ground for compromise, rendering deadlock and partial shutdown a possibility.

Good.

Let Dayton impale himself on the message of “you peasants can work ’til you die so AFSCME can retire at 55”.

Governor Dayton tells the legislature to “suck it”:

Gov. Mark Dayton says Republican legislative leaders are underestimating his resolve if they think he’ll back off his plan to raise taxes on Minnesota’s top earners.

Fewer than three weeks remain in the legislative session, and Dayton and legislative leaders aren’t close to reaching agreement on a plan to erase a $5 billion budget deficit.

Dayton seems to be counting on the GOP reverting to its traditional behavior – bowing to media pressure and DFL browbeating.  Their most recent model – the “Gang of Six”, the GOP “moderates” two years ago who caved in on a DFL tax and spend bill.

And we know what happened there, don’t we?

It’s not the same GOP as it was two and four years ago.

Dayton said the Republican budget is more than $1 billion out of balance, and that they should agree on spending cuts instead of relying on budget savings that will never materialize…

…according to a Management and Budget director that serves at his discretion, using formulas that are not designed to account in any way for savings.

“This is real to so many thousands of Minnesotans and they won’t now, two months away from the beginning of the next biennium, even tell the people of Minnesota what it is they’re willing to do to them. And that I do not respect,” Dayton said.

Dayton is, of course, unwillling to point out that down his path lies madness; 20% spending hikes in this biennium will be followed by 20% more in 2013, and more after that.  And if the economy improves, and tax receipts climb with it?  All of that will be spent too.

Dayton doesn’t want to talk about that.

Dayton said there’s enough time to reach a deal but worries that Republicans aren’t going to budge on their opposition to tax increases. He said Minnesotans want them to compromise.

“They want us to work out our differences. So it seems to me that they have that responsibility. I have that responsibility,” he said.

57% of Minnesotans voted against Dayton.  He’s the one that needs to compromise.

The GOP?   No way.  They got sent there with a mandate.  They had best follow it.

When I coined the various “Berg’s Laws“, they were – doyyyyyyy – tongue in cheek.

And yet for all that, they are absolutely impeccable reflections of human nature . Especially Berg’s Seventh Law:

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

It popped into mind this past week, when Governor Dayton, the DFL and the media (pardon the serial redundancy) accused the GOP of “theatre of the absurd” in its budget process.

The House GOP Caucus reponded – but “Berg’s Seventh Law” could have sufficed.

Becuase for all of the Governor’s chatter about “absurd drama”, it’s he that’s been stalling.  Which is, naturally (and according to Berg’s Seventh) behind the chatter:

To help the process along, the Legislature requests of all governors that they submit their bills within 15 days of their recommendations. This year, that deadline was March 1.

How mal has the governor’s feasance been?

Agriculture funding bill, introduced March 28, 27 days late.

State government finance bill, introduced March 28, 27 days late.

Health and human services budget bill, introduced March 28, 27 days passed deadline.

Transportation finance bill, introduced March 22, 21 days too late.

Environment and natural resources funding bill, introduced March 22, 21 days too late.

Higher education bill, introduced March 21, 20 days too late.

Governor’s tax increase bill, introduced March 21, 20 days after the deadline.

Education finance bill, introduced March 17, 16 days passed the deadline.

To recap: After failing to meet the deadline to even get his own budget bills considered by the Legislature, Governor Dayton is now demanding the Legislature meet his new arbitrary deadline.

The reason for this – as for most instances of Berg’s Seventh – is simple; Dayton can count on the fact the media will carry and promote his narrative, to cover his own slow, ponderous tracks.

I gotta confess, when I hatched the “Dayton Dust Bowl” idea way back last fall, I had no idea it would catch on like this.

But then, I didn’t think Minnesotans were dumb enough to elect a governor whose entire platform was “killing dynamism and growth in Minnesota” and “going back to the seventies”.

But Minnesotans surprised me – not in a good way – and so here we are, having serious discussions about raising taxes during a crippling recession after the idea of “raising taxes during a recession” has gone 0 for 300 worldwide in the past 200 years or so.

The Minnesota Majority, thankfully, is on the case.  About an hour ago, they rolled out…

…the Dayton Soup Truck!

From MNMaj’s press advisory:

“Soup Truck” Launched in Response to Dayton’s Job-Killing Taxation Proposals.

Aims to inform Minnesotans and help them prepare for tough economic times ahead.

Coming soon to a bread line near you.

Unless the GOP wins the budget battle this session, of course.

Coming soon

Dayton “wants the GOP to be honest ” about their budget cuts:

Gov. Mark Dayton is renewing his challenge to the Republican-controlled Legislature to come up with a balanced budget without raising taxes — and without hurting the state’s most vulnerable residents.

“They aren’t being honest about the cuts they would have to make to achieve their budget targets,” Dayton told MPR’s Morning Edition on Tuesday. “Tell us the truth about what the results of that would be and then we can discuss whether that would be in the best interests of Minnesotans.”

…in an argument where all cuts, or even cuts to the DFL’s planned increases, are assumed to be catastrophic, and the “best interest of Minnesotans” means “keeping government fat and happy at all costs”.

Lest you thought the DFL had trouble staying on message (emphasis added):

Dayton, a Democrat, has said balancing the budget through $5 billion in cuts would hurt nursing home residents and others, but he acknowledged that something must be done to slow the growth of health care spending. Dayton has proposed some cuts to health and human services spending and has asked health care providers to return profits to the state.

“We can’t just throw people out of nursing homes or deny them the care that they need,” Dayton said of cutting health and human services spending. “It has to be done skillfully.”

Interesting how Dayton figures that the budget can be done “skillfully”, but he figures the state’s nursing homes and health care providers are too stupid do figure out how to do their job with a lower budget – the sort of things that Minnesota families do every day when budgets shrink.

The DFL is vamping.  The GOP has beaten them; the only venue they have left is to tell the public that something that walks, flaps and quacks like a duck is really a schnauzer.

I talked with a MN state legislator last night.  It was a Republican from the western suburbs of the Twin Cities, by the way, although not one who is regarded as among the most conservative of the lot (and before anyone asks, it was not Rep. Banaian).

Being somewhat new to having interest in the budget process, I wanted to know more about the “Fiscal Notes” that the Democrats are yapping about.

Is the GOP bypassing them because they are products of Minnesota Management and Budget (MMB), which is a partisan office (its head, Jim Schowalter, was appointed by Gov. Dayton, who can also remove him).

“That’s part of it”, the legislator responded.  But there’s more.

More important than the partisanship is the fact, says the legislator, that MMB’s modeling does not account for savings to be realized by budget changes.  The models they use for calculating costs of budget iteams, in addition to being weighted toward racking up costs, do not (says the legislator) account for the money to be saved by the changes.  For example, MMB’s response to the GOP’s plan to consolidate the state’s Information Technology (IT) operations, in addition to the absurd cost projections (ten people, tens of millions of dollars), ignored the savings the consolidation would cause.

Now – did the savings get ignored because the MMB’s process isn’t designed to find them, or did they get ignored because MMB is run by a Dayton appointee whose employment depends on keeping his boss happy, ergo defeating the GOP?

Distinction without a difference, I say.

Two weeks ago, the DFL in the House and Senate together provided exactly one vote for the Dayton Dustbowl budget.

There was, of course, a theatrical letter from Dayton telling the various DFL caucuses not to vote for at – but there’s more than a little evidence that was sent to cover the fact that hardly any DFLers were going to vote for it anyway.  These things do not happen by accident on Capitol Hill.

Anyway…

Via the sources that he has so many of, Michael Brodkorb (via MDE) has released a copy of the DFL Legislative caucuses’ takes on the budget.

Here you go:

Indeed, so far this session looks like it’s been a three months vacation for the DFL.

The DFL loves playing politics more than just about anything else. One of their favorite ploys – using their advantage with the complaint mainstream media to frame all debates in terms that favor them.  Have you  noticed the way the media has, on cue, picked up the meme of the “all cuts budget?”  No significant Republican has used the term – but the DFL and its minions and press enablers use the term every single time the topic of the GOP budget comes up.

Now, in the bad old days when the GOP  was largely RINOs, a little of this framing was enough to help enough “moderates” flake away to help the DFL get pretty much everything it wanted.

Those days are done.  If I have anything to do with it, they’re dead, cremated, and scattered at the foot of Elmer Anderson’s statue.

The DFL hates losing at it more than just about anything else.  Yesterday’s vote on Governor Dayton’s tax proposals was the sort of thing the DFL used to excel at.  Gary Gross gives us a snippet of recent history (that the media would largely prefer disappear down the memory hole:

It’s that the DFL hasn’t stopped playing political games since the session started.

They want nothing to do with Gov. Dayton’s budget. They’re treating it like toxic waste:

One exchange:

Question: “Do you support the tax increases in this bill?”

Thissen: “The governor is delivering on what he promised. We have always been in our DFL caucus in favor of a solution that is going to be fair…We need to look at the details of it. I think the most important thing now to look at is asking the Republicans, okay, what’s your answer.”

Question: “That didn’t answer the question…Do you support these tax increases?”

Bakk: “If you look at the tax incidence study, it will show you that more well to do Minnesotans, especially those over $500,000 in income pay a little bit over eight percent of their income in taxes and the rest of us, in the middle class and lower income Minnesotans, pay about 12.3 percent. And I think from a policy standpoint, the governor is right that everyone should be expect to pay about the same percentage of their income in state and local taxes.”

A third:

Question: “So yes or no. Do you two support the tax package in the governor’s proposal? Yes or no.”

Bakk: “Well, I certainly want to see the budget pages and I’m not going to tell you if they offer a vote on it I’m going to vote yes or no on it because we are actually having a hearing in the tax committee (to delve into the budget) either tomorrow or Thursday…After Thursday I can probably give you an answer.”

That exchange happened on Feb. 15. Sen. Bakk still hasn’t given a reply to Rachel Stassen-Berger. The bottom line is this: the DFL want to criticize Republicans like they do every budget year. They just don’t want their fingerprints on anything that Gov. Dayton has put together.

And the GOP knew it.  Which was the entire motivation behind yesterday’s exercise; the good guys kicked some sand in the DFL’s face.

And they’re used to being the big guys on the beach, dammit!  Not only are they not used to being in the minority – they are not used to a GOP that does politics better than they do!

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius – who presumably has gotten the memo that the GOP’s budget is less than two weeks away, closing in on the DFL like Eisenhower’s fleet weighing anchor and turning toward Normandy, writes:

Instead of putting together their own budget proposal [Hahahaha! – Ed.] the MNGOP has been content to simply snipe at Governor Dayton’s proposal. Today was more of the same. Instead of finally revealing their all-cuts budget, they opted for a sham vote on a portion of Dayton’s budget.

The shorter Rosenberg – “I’m going to give an incomplete-to-the-point-of-dishonesty side of the GOP’s agenda – I’ll carp over one of an entire palette of GOP budget-balancing tactics, the cut, and gabble about the fact that the GOP hasn’t submitted a budget because I can count on the media not to point out that the DFL didn’t submit one until the literal last minutes of the last session – because it’s to my and my party’s political advantage to do so.  But don’t you dare do it yourself!”

Of course, they didn’t vote on Dayton’s entire proposal. Despite Dayton’s frequent objections, the MNGOP continues to treat the budget in a piecemeal fashion. In today’s sham vote, they voted on the tax portion of Dayton’s proposal while ignoring the rest of it.

Dear DFL: we are not here to make you look smart (and either, apparnetly, are many of you).  We are here to win.  The electorate sent the DFL packing, and sent the GOP to the Legislature, with a very clear mandate; kick DFL ass.  Well, no – not “kick DFL ass”, but to get the growth in budget and government under control, which will inseparably involve kicking DFL ass.

And they are.

And yes, compromise is inevitable.  It’s politics. The GOP doesn’t have complete control.  You DFLers are used to a GOP that would get intimidated by your framing, and by your old stranglehold on the media, and essentially fold its cards right after the deal and beg for mercy.

Those days are over.  The GOP is playing to go into those negotiations from a position of strength – not the craven, panicky accomodation of the hamster-like “Republicans” of the Carlson era.  The GOP is playing like it’s holding the full house, Kings over Tens, that it actually holds.

Deal with it.

Or live in the ancient past.  Your choice.

I had no idea that when I  suggested last week that…

…a Republican from a bullet-proof rural seat should sponsor the Dayton budget [and that] the GOP-controlled committees involved should pass it right through, so it can go to the floor immediately for a binding, highly-publicized, up-or-down vote.

I think we should let the DFL show their pride in and support for Governor Dayton.   I think they should show how unified they are!

…I gotta confess, I had no idea it could actually happen.

Yesterday, Senator Michel (a Republican who has taken some flak for being a “moderate” in the past, but who earned plenty o’cred with me) introduced the Dayt0n budget into the Senate.

And the DFL whined like stuck cats.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 63-1 [yesterday] against Gov. Dayton’s proposal to raise taxes on Minnesota’s richest residents, but Dayton and other Democrats called the debate meaningless theater.

“I’m glad people are having fun,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, said sarcastically. “I hope some of your relatives are watching.”

Only Sen. Dave Tomassoni, DFL-Chisholm, voted for the Dayton taxes.

Of course, the DFL has never been above staging up-or-down votes for political purposes – to get Legislators’ votes on  controversial issues on the record for political effect.

They’re just not used to being on the business end of the process.

Don Davis noted:

Dayton sent a letter to Bakk [yesterday] morning urging that all legislators vote against the proposal “as a way to reject this charade.”

Something the media has studiously avoided pointing out; Dayton did this purely to provide political cover for the fact that, had he not excused the DFL caucuses from supporting him, hardly any of them would have.  The DFL’s silence in the Dayton Dustbowl budget plan has been complete; asked if they support it, most prominent DFLers – Thissen and Bakk, among others – have squiggled smartly away.

There is no significant support in the DFL caucus for the Dayton budget.  That’s because in this economic climate, Minnesotans outside the bobbleheaded DFL base know that hiking taxes on the class that creates the jobs, or makes the investments that creates the jobs, is just plain stupid.

The DFL’s response?  Whimpering that “it’s just childish theatre”, and demanding to know when the GOP is going to come out with its budget…

…which was interrupted in mid-whimper with the news that the GOP will have its budget out in two weeks.

All in all, it was a masterful day of politics for the MN GOP.

I haven’t had occasion to say that much in the past 25 years.

It feels good.

More, please.

Brian McLung:

Also on Thursday, expect Dayton’s tax increases to get an airing in the Senate (11:00 a.m.) and House (3:00 p.m.) during their floor sessions. This will give DFLers a chance to put their mouth where the money is – by casting a vote for multi-billion tax increases proposed in Dayton’s budget. What’s the over/under on the number of DFLers willing to stand with the Governor?

We’ll be watching.

Count on it.

Nancy LaRoche had a conversation with a MN State Senator – and was amazed at what she heard:

One of the most remarkable comments the Senator made was how Governor Mark Dayton has transformed his office.

He installed cubicles into his office space for staff, and moved his office into… a closet. My first reaction was, “that sounds like a panic room.” The Senator replied that some Democrat legislators are struggling with how to work with him. This office space raised my concerns for his handling of leadership, and the location sounds like a physical way to insulate himself. The State Senator is also wondering about the state of Dayton’s mental state.

True North is going to be looking for more on this.

In the meantime, some more meaningful shrinkage, if you’re a Minnesota taxpayer; not a single DFL legislator, as of yesterday, had sponsored the Dayton budget in the Legislature.

That could change at any  moment, of course.

But this budget has been on the record for nearly a week, now.

UPDATE:  Dayton’s office was noted in a Strib piece a month back.  According to the story, he prefers a small, spartan office.

No word yet on whether he prefers small, spartan support for his budget among the DFL caucus.