A Pre-Shutdown Note To The GOP Legislative Majority

I’ve said this to some of you before.  As Mark Dayton’s little game of chicken careens toward its intended denouement, I’ll say it again.

Come back with your shield, or on it.

You hold the high ground.  Use it.  We didn’t send you there to cave.

And I don’t believe, in your collective heart of hearts, that you intend to.

But just in case you had any doubt where we, the people who sent you there, stand?

Make Dayton – or, more accurately, his union and special interest owners – squirm.

8 thoughts on “A Pre-Shutdown Note To The GOP Legislative Majority

  1. The DFL strategy comes down to two little words: “You Lied.”

    They got kicked last election. They have no plan to fix the budget. They cannot hope to retain much power, much less regain dominance, unless they can find a compelling reason for voters to reject Republicans.

    The Great DFL Hope is that Republicans who took the No New Taxes pledge now blink to end the shut-down. Even if they only agreed to raise taxes one penny on billionaires only, that’d be enough for every DFL candidate to run ads saying:”You can’t trust the GOP, they lied last time and they’ll do it again.” Which Pat Koessler would be forced to admit is true and no amount of explaining or spinning would save the Republican candidates from a true charge of lying.

    This isn’t about the shut-down. This isn’t about the budget. It’s about the future of the party, and the future of the state, in the next election and beyond.

    You lied.

    You are a liar.

    Don’t trust that Republican, she’s a liar.

    Starting to annoy you? This is nothing – wait until the Democrats run that ad in every election, in every paper, on every channel, and stand on your mother’s lawn waving signs saying “You Raised A Liar.”

    Now is not the time to go wobbly.

    .

  2. I noted here that the unions weren’t out in nearly the same force as they were a week earlier. What that means, I’m not certain. But it can’t be bad to have fewer unionistas this week than last.

  3. Seems to me the people most hurt by this shutdown are Dayton’s strongest supporters, the unions. And since Dayton decided on layoffs rather than furloughs, they won’t be getting back pay when the thing ends, but they WILL get unemployment money after two weeks. That tells me Dayton intends for this to last a long time. I cannot imagine any sensible reason for this except that he hopes to damage Republicans politically by inflicting all this “pain” and having the media trumpet it day after day until the GOP “caves.” I hope they all have titanium spines and Dayton has a tin ear.

  4. Oh, and I suspect we are going to find out just how much government we can do WITHOUT, and that ought to be fodder for the GOP in the negotiations. “Well, let’s see, we’ve discovered that this and that are non-essential, so we’re phasing them out over six months.” Let us run a surplus for a while before talking about tax cuts, but we don’t need any tax increases.

  5. MPR News – Answer Todays Question: If the state government shuts down, who will you hold responsible?
    http://mprne.ws/5sRRS
    Might be fun to “flood the zone”. (If only to hear Kerri Miller complaining that the wingnuts hacked the comments.)

  6. This morning, an AFSCME member called into Davis and Emmer this morning and he solely blames Dayton. He claimed that hundreds more of his colleagues blame him, too. He also claimed that he and others i nthe union, have sent letters to every one of the elected GOP members and told them to stand their ground and fight!

  7. I posted on that MPR news “answer today’s question” thing.

    One commenter posted “No solution will be simple, but there are a lot of Minnesotans depending on state government to redistribute the wealth fairly”

    “Redistribute the wealth fairly.” I wanted to throw up. And I posted such.

  8. I wrote an email to Zellers and told him this is what the plan should be. Hold a press conference and tell Dayton today he gets $34.0 billion. Tomorrow he gets $33.9 billion and cut it be at least $100 million a day. Dayton just to perserve government will have to cave quickly.

    Walter Hanson
    Minneapolis, MN

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