My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

I attended Rep. Jim Hagedorn’s town hall in Mower County on Nov. 6. Just like in his fundraising emails, it was clear he appeals heavily to his conservative base. Considering he eked out a win in a traditional swing district held by a Democrat for the previous six terms, this positioning seems oddly-tuned.

In contrast, Rep. Pete Stauber, a Republican from Minnesota’s 8th District who is also serving his first term, has co-authored a couple pieces of legislation which passed the House with bipartisan support. Hagedorn has nothing like this to show for his time in office yet.

At his town hall, Hagedorn repeated his commitment to protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the oil industry and of megamillionaires in general. This is who he primarily represents, and a handful of these people may even live in the 1st District.

Hagedorn was honest that he sees the giant holes Trump punched in the budget with the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the 0.01% as an opportunity to make cuts in Medicare and other entitlements. He made no mention of rolling back any tax cuts, so Glen Taylor can sleep easy. Less well-heeled senior citizens and future ones hoping to retire someday, maybe not so much.

Here are some notable moments:

1. “You’re not going to like it, but nobody has been tougher on Russia than Trump.”

In this ludicrous statement, Hagedorn fluffs up a president who publicly sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Trump is now promoting a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. This isn’t even a homegrown, Made-in-the-USA scheme. It’s a Kremlin-driven narrative.

In January, a Washington Post report revealed that no detailed record exists from five of Trump’s interactions with Putin. This is not normal, not transparent and certainly not tough.

2. Hagedorn said the U.S. is “the most generous country in the world on immigration by far.”

This is a whopper, and here’s why:

• The number of refugees the U.S. resettled in the past two years dropped to less than one-third of the annual average resettled during the Obama administration. Canada, with a fraction of the U.S.’s population, resettled more refugees in 2018 — about 29,000 versus 22,000.

• According to the libertarian Cato Institute, the U.S. ranked 34th (which is definitely not 1st) among the wealthiest countries in terms of new immigration as a share of total population, 2015 to 2017.

• A whistleblower, one of several in the Department of Homeland Security, recently reported to Congress that “Remain in Mexico” (Migrant Protection Protocol) violates both U.S. and international law. They assert the policy is “clearly designed to further this administration’s racist agenda of keeping Hispanic and Latino populations from entering the United States.”

• Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s immigration policy, was exposed last week as an unabashed white nationalist in a trove of emails leaked by a former Breitbart editor. In any other administration he would be cleaning out his desk.

3. Hagedorn seems to think our economy functions apart from our climate.

When an Austin woman asked about a disturbing Pentagon-commissioned analysis of the impacts of climate change on the U.S. military, Hagedorn pivoted first to his belief that the climate has been changing since God created the world, then to his opposition to a Green New Deal and finally to his belief that we should explore for more oil and gas. As a metaphor, his response was: Our house may be on fire, but God is in charge of it, so let’s not aim a fire hose at it. In fact, let’s throw more fuel on it.

If you have children or grandchildren, or hope to someday, I implore you to vote for candidates who are less blasé about the mounting evidence of escalating climate change and what it will mean for all the systems — ecological, economic and social — we depend on for life and quality of life every single day.

4. “There’s no underlying crime.”

Hagedorn conceded that although Trump attempted to extort Ukraine’s Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden, it’s not a crime because U.S. military aid came through. This defense is a house of cards, and it reminds me that when I was growing up, the Republican Party in Minnesota called itself the Independent-Republicans, to distance the party from Nixon. Watergate may soon seem like a mild caper compared to this.

What Hagedorn lacks in charisma and results, he has so far been able to compensate for in family name and blind partisanship. The five Albert Lea High School students I saw in attendance at the town hall deserve a better role model, of either party. Our entire district deserves better representation.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.