March 11, 2010 - Legislative Report #15

Day at the State Capital

On Wednesday March 10, 2010 Tim Utz spent the morning in St. Paul attending several committee hearings and other activities with CCCR campaign reporter Peter Lydecker.

We first attended the Civil Justice Committee meeting, chaired by Representative Joe Mullery (DFL), District 58A, in Room 10 of the State Office Building. A number of bills passed the committee with little or no discussion and hardly an objection from Republican members.  Bills prohibiting parents from accessing their minor student's school records, expanding homosexual protected special privilege rights throughout our Minnesota legal system, and removing parental authority under child protection when other children are involved in protective orders. These and other bills passed out of committee that morning are examples of state government removing your personal liberty; using law to regulate your personal conduct leads to the government's version of proper conduct.

We then attended the noon Crime Victims/Criminal Records Division committee meeting held in Room 300S of the State Office Building with Chair Representative John Lesch (DFL), District 66A. I stayed long enough to listen to proceedings and testimony on HF 1396 introduced by Representative Michael Paymar (DFL), District 64B. This bill elevated household pets to human status by requiring courts to include household pets in orders of protection and restraining orders. If signed into law, this bill would clog an already overburdened court system, increase animal control expenditures statewide, and place police officers and other emergency service personnel in greater danger responding to domestic disturbance calls. Additionally, law enforcement would be required to spend a greater amount of time sorting out volatile environments where family members already have elevated violence to levels requiring police force involvement. This bill shows how out of touch our elected leadership in St. Paul has become. The Constitution has considerable restrictions concerning liberty for government, and places personal responsibility on "We the People" to self govern. Elevating pets to the status protection of a human restraining order violates reason, logic and government authority.

I returned to the Capitol rotunda for a construction union rally to support the bonding bill. Several DFL legislators (who are not union members) proudly joined the rank and file. The DFL legislators spoke eloquently to the crowd about this bonding bill being a "jobs bill." The guest DFL speakers failed to inform the large, boisterous crowd of the details of the bonding bill.

Current law does not require state construction projects to use union labor only. The lowest qualified bidder receives the construction work, and that could be a non-union contractor. The irony is that all these unemployed union construction workers who support the DFL leadership are deceived by that leadership. The union members (my labor member brothers and sisters) could in theory not see one dollar of the $900,000,000.00 construction bonding bill.