Tim Walz, as governor, and Keith Ellison, as attorney general, took office Jan. 7, 2019. Walz had been a congressional representative from Minnesota’s 1st District, most of southern Minnesota. Ellison abandoned his congressional seat representing the 5th District, most of Minneapolis, to run for attorney general. Ilhan Omar, with Ellison’s robust support, won the congressional seat Ellison’s leaving had made available and was sworn in Jan. 3, 2019.
Minnesota has essentially been financially destroyed ever since.
There were intervening calamities that Walz, Ellison and Omar had nothing to do with, COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd. But both episodes will go down in state history as poorly handled, bungled beyond all understanding, the two shoves on our back that sent us spiraling out of control. Businesses closed. Buildings burned. Law enforcement was held in contempt. Schools closed. Masks were required. We didn’t come through COVID or Floyd with any cohesiveness or solidarity. We were shredded apart and remain so, stained forever by mistrust and a sudden tribalism that seems to define us.
And then fraud, which, looking back, was inevitable given our shattered and incompetent leadership.
Walz and Ellison were brought before the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee in Washington this past week and filleted on fraud. Predictably, our fellows were filleted by Republicans, just as Republicans would have been filleted by Democrats. These hearings are theatrical in nature and orchestrated to serve the vocal chords of a Congress that hasn’t done much of anything else under the spell of President Donald Trump.
“You have not been good stewards of the taxpayer dollars,” Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky told our squirming worthies. “And the Democratic position is to keep the money flowing. The American taxpayers have had enough.”
No, Minnesota taxpayers have had enough. Other states did not squander an $18 billion surplus and raise taxes to boot. Other states can’t equal our records for fraud. Walz tried to blunt the inquisition by blaming the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and, by extension, Trump, but even the most rabid Walz supporter has to realize that ICE and Trump have nothing to do with our state swirling down the drain. Walz, Ellison and Omar knew about the fraud. Omar was instrumental in legislation that streamlined the rules to pay for food during COVID.
Why? That’s the billion-dollar question.
Nothing came of the Oversight Committee hearing. Walz and Ellison were humiliated and could not account for their blundering. But we are left wondering what is the point that the hearing establishes. Such a hearing is useful only because the players, Walz and Ellison, were grilled by people not obsequiously invested in them and who don’t hold back their accusations of malfeasance. Confronted, Walz claimed he didn’t know that money paid to autism care providers in Minnesota went from a base of a million dollars to more than $300 million in a couple of years. Think about that.
Such hearings put the players in a spot they will never encounter at home. The conventional newsgathering institutions have been worthless in getting to the bottom of anything, especially the billion-dollar why question. There are independent news outlets that are picking and poking at the fraud, and former federal prosecutor Joe Thompson, before he resigned, was on a good roll throwing fraudsters into jail, but we are left still wondering how many more billions have been stolen in frauds we don’t even know about yet. Thompson called it industrial-scale fraud.
Will we ever get to the bottom of it? Well, we would need arrests and indictments of top-level officials and only then if they were somehow found to have created quid pro quo criminal arrangements with the thieves.
Confidence in such a development doesn’t seem likely. We are the state that doesn’t work. We are like the Edmund Fitzgerald. It looked pretty good when we left the shore of 2018, but then all hell broke loose and we were lost.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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