The Minnesota Democrat Farmer Labor Party endorsed state House speaker Margaret Anderson-Kelliher at their convention over the weekend. She edged out Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak after 6 ballots.

 

The DFL had a choice between radicals this year. No viable moderate or conservative candidate presented. How will ultra-liberal Kelliher be received outside the Twin Cities? Probably not any better than her policy decisions are received by her own urban constituents, which is to say, not well.

 

Minnesota Majority polled Kelliher’s Minneapolis district in 2008 on ten of the House Speakers’ votes from the 2007-2008 legislative session and found that the majority of her own constituents disagreed with Kelliher on 9 of 10 of her votes. It seems that Kelliher may actually be too liberal even for her own urban Minneapolis district!

 

Unfortunately, the majority of voters don’t pay very close attention to the actions of their state legislators, so Kelliher’s constituents are probably not even aware that they are in disagreement with their representative 90% of the time. That will change now that her profile has been raised. Her radical voting record will receive much more scrutiny as she campaigns to be Minnesota’s next governor.

 

Minnesota Majority’s legislative scorecard gives Kelliher a perfect zero, not just in the past session, but for her entire career. She has consistently voted against anything remotely traditional. To score a lifetime zero requires an unwavering commitment to undoing the traditional foundations of our society. She’s voted against protecting the genetic privacy of our citizens, against making health insurance more competitive and inexpensive, against installing pornography filters in our public libraries on computers children have access to, against stopping government grants of tax dollars to political organizations, against prohibiting gender-selection abortions, against requiring identification to vote, against requiring schools to give notice to parents before dispensing oral contraceptives to their minor children, against requiring prisons to report inmates with unknown immigration status to federal immigration officials, against freezing property taxes for seniors on a fixed retirement income, and she voted for billions of dollars in tax increases (on sales, income, property, gasoline and more), for paying for abortions with our tax dollars, and she voted to undermine health savings accounts.

 

Margaret Anderson-Kelliher may be the most radical liberal Minnesota’s DFL has ever endorsed, but she’s not guaranteed a spot on the November ballot. Matt Entenza, Mark Dayton and Ramsey County Attorney Sue Gaertner have indicated that they will ignore the endorsement process and take their case for nomination straight to the voters in a September primary. The rank and file Democrat voters will have to decide which of these candidates best represents their priorities for Minnesota.

 

The Republican endorsement convention begins on Thursday, April 29^th.