Lori Sturdevant – would would seem to be operating as a full-time DFL Public Relations operative – castigates Tim Pawlenty for keeping his word.

How?

As usual – by dredging up another mildewed name from Minnesota’s paleoliberal past.

You already know what’s in this article, don’t you?

1.  A reference to a Minnesota Republican in the sixties or seventies – one who allowed the DFL to get exactly what it wanted
2. A Republican in the legislature today who’d “frustrated” with his party and wants to follow the DFL’s orthodoxy.

With all these Republicans-who-really-hate-Republicanism that Sturdevant would have us believe she’s unearthing, it’s a wonder we have a GOP at all, isn’t it?

Unless it’s the same couple of representatives being recycled over and over, in the Larry Jacobs fashion…

Anyway, here goes:

Governors always attach messages, public and private, to their vetoes. The publishable ones that get hissed in legislators’ ears range from “Don’t you dare!” to “Go ahead. Override me. I won’t mind.”

The tale often told about GOP Gov. Harold LeVander’s famous 1967 veto of the bill that created the state sales tax is that it bore a message of the latter type. He shot that bill down, twice. In the 1966 campaign, he’d promised not to sign a sales tax into law. For an upright Lutheran lawyer, that ended the discussion. He would not break his word.

But by then, the state had endured years of financial struggle, and property taxes were soaring. (Sound familiar?) [Spendthrift legislatures strongarming an honest Republican into mugging the public?  Yep! – Ed] Legislators of his own party, then in charge of both houses, decided that more state revenue was both a political and a fiscal necessity, and a sales tax was the way to get it. The second override attempt prevailed on the strength of Republican (then Conservative) votes.

Sturdevant recites the drearily-predictable litany of betrayal.  And then…:

Jean LeVander King, the daughter of the late governor, said of her father’s veto stance: “He had made a pledge, but others had made different promises. It was not in his nature to say, ‘You have to break your promise, but I get to keep mine.’ He had great respect for the Legislature, and thought that each branch had to exercise its best judgment.”

Today’s news is recycled history. Last week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty felled the bonding bill with the first in what’s widely expected to be a batch of major-bill vetoes this year.

And here’s hoping he holds the line.

No gubernatorial subtext was needed on the bonding bill veto. That bill didn’t leave the House and Senate with the veto-proof majority — at least 90 votes in the House, 45 in the Senate — needed to raise the curtain on an override drama. If DFLers intend to run the veto gantlet with a bill raising the income tax, it’ll be the same story. Despite its promise of property tax relief for almost all Minnesota homeowners, the House tax bill limped into conference committee with 74 all-DFL votes.

Didja catch that?

Sturdevant trots out Levander’s daughter with one of her father’s moral lessons – and Sturdevant tries to dump it, lock stock and barrel, onto the current situation?

To scold the Governor into getting out of the way for yet another DFL gang-rape of the state economy?

Sturdevant relates one of the back-room – inevitably pro-DFL – intrigue that she must live for:

But there’s a lot of whispering already about the impending drama on transportation funding. It’s speculative stuff: Maybe as many as a dozen House Republican votes, and maybe, just maybe, all 85 DFL votes might be aligned in support of a conference committee report containing the right array of “revenue enhancements” for roads, bridges and transit.

I loved this bit:

Some corridor talk had Pawlenty looking for a way to bend his no-new-taxes rule and let such a bill become law, perhaps without his signature. (Here’s a line for his speechwriters, gratis: “I just couldn’t let Minnesota pass up the federal matching money Jim Oberstar is promising us.”)

Er, yeah.  Egregious porkmongering is such  a chuckle.

Cue the tame “Republican”:

“He wants us to make this issue go away for him,” groused a House Republican who might vote for a gas tax increase, but won’t go along with an override.

It’s now a complete Sturdevant editorial! 

When an override vote comes, they have a duty to exercise their own best judgment about what’s good for Minnesota.

He is.

It’s why we elected him.

Remember that?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 4:23 am and is filed under Media, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.