Mike Lindell's embarrassing and dangerous fellow travelers among GOP elected officials
Jennifer Carnahan's spectacular implosion as chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota is not even the most concerning recent event for Republicans or — more importantly — the rest of us.
Yes, her close ties to indicted donor and party operative Anton Lazzaro — followed by a cascade of stories of her bullying behavior — are tawdry and dispiriting to those of us who would hope Minnesota's best would volunteer for public life.
The more important event, however, took place recently in South Dakota, where the frenetic pillow mogul Mike Lindell held a three-day conference in which he purported to offer proof that the 2020 election was stolen.
Which, OK, fine. The man with the colorful past of cocaine, champagne and what he called a “fake" bankruptcy wants to stay famous and sell more pillows. Who cares, right?
The problem is that a parade of Minnesota Republicans followed him over there, people with real power and influence over our state's future, including GOP Reps. Erik Mortensen, Glenn Gruenhagen and Eric Lucero, apparently among others.
“You can actually smell freedom over here," Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, said on social media from South Dakota.
Perhaps COVID-19 has knocked out Drazkowski's sense of smell, because that odor wasn't the smell of freedom. It was the smell of equine dung being served up by Lindell.
Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, is both a Republican and a network engineer with 20 years of experience, so he's well positioned to gauge the veracity of Lindell's claims. He put it plainly: “There's no there there."
Garofalo thinks there's legitimate debate about how the rules surrounding mail voting were changed last year without legislative input, and he wants to require voters to present a valid ID at the polls.
I don't agree, but at least he lives on planet Earth: “Those issues have nothing to do with tabulating the votes," he said of Lindell's claims of Chinese election theft. “That's internet hucksterism."
As Garofalo notes, the presidential election in Minnesota just wasn't that close. President Joe Biden's win was nearly identical to President Obama's victory over Mitt Romney in 2012. And, if Democrats were going to fix the election, why would they give up a U.S. House seat, state House seats and allow the Republicans to keep the state Senate?
It's almost embarrassing to have to explain how the vote fraud nonsense is wrong, like explaining to someone how a pyramid scheme will eventually collapse, but let's do it anyway:
After every election, a random group of precincts in every congressional district is chosen for review, totaling roughly 440,000 votes after the 2020 election, spanning more than 200 precincts. Guess what: The hand tallies were virtually identical to the machine tallies.
(People who keep asking for an “audit" don't seem to know or care that we already do this after every election.)
This has been true in other states. Georgia, for instance, completed a hand tally of every vote cast, and the result was the same.
The primary conceptual problem with these assertions of widespread fraud is that our election system is decentralized. The secretary of state does not count ballots. The votes are tallied in every county. Major fraud would require a lot of people's participation, even as a lot of other people from both parties are looking on.
Aside from the looniest Q-Anoners, Minnesota Republicans know all this. Senate Majority Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said this at a recent party social: “Three precincts that we looked at in St. Cloud, where one of our guys lost by 300 votes and there were some college town area, a Somali area, and I wanted to know, so we did a recount of three precincts and looked at all the data. Compared to the machines, it was the same. Hand count was the same as the machines."
(It's a tad offensive that he thinks Somali-American voters are suspect. Also, the “one of our guys" he's referring to is the late-Sen. Jerry Relph, whose daughter believes he caught COVID-19 at a crowded GOP Senate victory party the week of the election. He died a few weeks later, but I digress.)
The point is: Gazelka knows the election was not fixed.
But Gazelka still “sent a team," as he put it, including Sen. Paul Utke, R-Park Rapids, to the Lindell-apalooza.
Lindell offered up $5 million to anyone who could disprove his claim the election was stolen based on the “evidence" he offered up. Big problem for Lindell, as the Washington Times reported: “The cyber expert on the 'red team' hired by Lindell now says the key data underpinning the theory that China hacked the 2020 election unveiled at the Cyber Symposium is illegitimate."
And now someone wants the 5 million bucks.
Local news in South Dakota reported that Bill Alderson of a Texas-based cybersecurity training outfit called Security Institute paid his own airfare and lodging to go to the Lindell event. He previously worked with the Pentagon after 9/11 and in Afghanistan. Having proven Lindell's whole theory was nothing but a buncha hokum, he's put in his application with Lindell's lawyers for the money.
He'll never see it, because the con just goes on and on.
In the 2nd Congressional District, Tyler Kistner, who is again running against U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, is claiming he would have won if not for (non-existent) voter fraud, of which he has zero evidence. I got some audio of Kistner talking at a GOP picnic, in which he said, “They did an audit of just five precincts in Dakota County. In just those five precincts they looked at, there was over 1,500 votes that went towards me."
Not true. After the hand recount of those precincts, he lost four votes.
These lies are not without consequence.
“Huge, long-term damage to our collective, mutual trust in the system," Secretary of State Steve Simon told me. “It's really damaging and harmful. And Jan. 6 is just the most obvious expression," he said, referring to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Thanks to Lindell and his fellow travelers here in Minnesota, Jan. 6 may have been just the beginning of something truly sinister, not the end.
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Recalculating Nancy Pelosi’s big win
The preliminary win to advance Joe Biden's huge social services spending bill is being depicted as a parliamentary victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a small group of would-be Democratic spoilers. A day or more later, what looks more the case are two things:
It's our American obsession with winning rather than focusing on the basics.
As The New York Times summarized, "For now, the deal that Ms. Pelosi struck amounted to a precarious détente for Democrats that did nothing to resolve tensions between the moderate and liberal flanks or end the jockeying for political leverage."
It's an important distinction because there is no bill yet for infrastructure spending—small, medium, or huge—in place yet, and, other than general support for the substance over the timing of votes, there are lots of ways that this discussion about investing in our next 10 years still can go south.
As it stands, this contested vote essentially only lays the groundwork for Democrats to force through both a $1 trillion bill to fix roads, bridges, airports and a lot of rural broadband wiring and the three-times larger bill to address spending on "human infrastructure" that includes an array of improvements to universal pre-K education, health and prescription drug access and pricing, expanded Medicare coverage, child-care tax write-offs, paid leave and tax increases for the wealthy and corporations.
It's an important step, of course, but what we should remember is that Pelosi was forced to deal with a handful of "moderates" who basically don't support the full package.
What Pelosi Did
In case you were living your life and managed to avoid worrying about Congress, the group of nine moderates wanted an immediate vote on the already Senate-passed bipartisan hard infrastructure bill. Pelosi wanted to twin the two spending packages. What happed was, according to a variety of press reports and congressional statements, was extended legislative negotiation.
Pelosi's particular way out was to link all the spending under a singular "rule" vote that would set a Sept. 27 deadline for a vote on the roads bill, setting up the possibility for House committees to vet the social services programs and price them for a simultaneous vote. She won the day, but, obviously, there's not a lot of time to assess both the actual cost of these sprawling programs and to ensure the politics for passage.
Basically, Democrats want to use the so-called "budget reconciliation" rules to cram all the spending together in bills that can be passed by as little as a single-vote majority – something that is a real prospect in the Senate. In the House, there was an eight-vote majority for this measure, which is likely the maximum it can achieve in an up-and-down vote for final approval.
Politico and others have attempted to revisit all the back-and-forth conversations and late-night haggling between Pelosi and her closest minions and the group of nine, headed by Rep. Jeff Gottheimer (D-NY). It was a serious enough effort to force delay, and to put the outcome in doubt.
To summarize, it turns out that Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Mad.) and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) were able to separate and exploit individual concerns among the nine and to persuade them that they all need to pull in a single direction. We'll never know if there were individual promises.
Afterward, Pelosi praised the rebel group for its "enthusiasm" while announcing her commitment to pass the infrastructure bill it had opposed.
Topping off the 220-212 vote on the eventual spending bill was approval for a voting rights measure that the House passed soon after.
Our Focus
This House showdown reminds us of the power of just a handful of people to hold up approval of legislation – or court decisions, or even who's giving advice within the White House.
We keep thinking that we go to the polls every two or four years with the idea of setting an understandable direction for our democracy. But then we keep tripping up over those one- or two- or even nine-vote groups that decide that they are smarter than the rest of us.
We will go through this same discussion over what constitutes a fitting social services safety net for America when this big Biden spending package comes back to the Senate, and we must depend on the peculiar waverings of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz.
We think we're voting for an agenda when we cast ballots for Biden or Donald Trump only to re-discover daily that there always is a single vote over in the corner of the House or Senate that insists on standing in the way of popular support, whether the issue is more gun control, abortion, environmental rules, or economic issues.
It's bad enough that we have gridlock resulting from near-equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. It seems worse when one side or the other can't line up its own folks – or free them from party commitments to specific legislative agendas. We expect that democracy is messy, but not daily.