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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

On March 17, Gov. Tim Walz joyfully signed a bill to enact universal free lunch for all school children in Minnesota. The children surrounding him cheered and hugged him.

I thought back to my elementary teachers passing out a stack of lunch cards — green for full price, yellow for reduced lunch and pink for free lunch — so we could individually hand them to the lady who punched them each day as we went through the line.

I mentally threw those color-coded cards in the trash and cheered along with the kids. School attendance is mandatory, and the people of Minnesota will feed kids while they are there to learn. No stigma, no drama, no debt.

It was also a day to remember Philando Castile, an elementary school cafeteria manager in St. Paul who died at age 32 after a police officer shot him during a traffic stop in 2016. To honor Castile’s memory, his mother Valerie founded the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which has donated over $200,000 to pay off students’ lunch debts since then.

State Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten commemorated Castile on the senate floor, stating, “He knew every student’s name and he never let any of his kids go hungry. He would always make sure that they had a meal. I think today we have an opportunity to step up as a state, so that it’s not on those individual nutrition staff.”

Philando Castile was an individual who took action to fill in a gap that he observed. The DFL is now closing that entire gap, and it makes our state a better place for all our kids.

Ten days later, school kids were running for their lives in a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. An adult former student reportedly under psychiatric care for an emotional disorder murdered three 9-year-old children and three adults with an AR-15, a weapon designed for maximizing internal damage to organs.

Thanks to the gun lobby’s death grip on Republicans, there are few restrictions on who can purchase and own these weapons that were originally designed for efficiently killing armed enemy combatants.

Gun industry money still talks louder than the screams of school children in the ears of elected Republicans.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican who grew up and attended law school in St. Paul, did not mince words in a PBS interview in 1991 when he said, “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime.”

That was over three decades ago. The gun industry is still perpetuating this fraud, and more kids keep dying at school. Yet Republicans in many state legislatures are focused right now on protecting kids from exposure to drag queens and certain books than from gun violence.

The DFL is working on strengthening red flag laws and safe storage laws in Minnesota to reduce the danger of both self-harm and harm to others (including law enforcement officers) posed by access to guns. This is one path forward.

Our local Republican representative and senator, Bennett and Dornink, are in lock-step with the gun industry. The only way to vote against gun industry wishes — and the carnage it accepts to protect profits —is to vote against Republicans. One or two election cycles, and they’ll all get the message.

I do give Rep. Bennett credit for voting for the House’s bipartisan bonding bill in which she got $11 million for local projects — $9 million to complete Fountain Lake dredging and $2 million for preliminary work on Albert Lea’s new wastewater treatment plant project.

Sen. Dornink, on the other hand, got zero funding earmarked for local projects (that I could find) in the Senate’s version of the bill, which he and all Republicans voted against.

Republicans in the Senate are playing games and pretending they didn’t lose the majority while everybody else is ready to get stuff done.

Now the DFL majorities will start over with cash-only bills in which they only need simple majority votes rather than supermajorities, and Dornink has wiped out Bennett’s leverage on this round of funding. It’s our loss.

Bonding has already been held up for over a year because Republicans gambled that they would win a trifecta last November. That backfired completely, and Republicans in the

Senate should not torpedo (again!) the next chance to pass a bonding bill later this session.

We’ve got one party in this state that gets stuff done for the common good and works for the people and brings joy to children’s faces. It’s the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

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