The Fall Of The House Of Sutton: The Brodkorb-Koch Angle

Michael Brodkorb channels his inner Hugh Hefner

It’s been a busy few days in the North Star State, as a whole battalion of chickens have come home to roost at the Republican Party of Minnesota.

First, there was the mysterious stepping-down of Amy Koch on Thursday morning from her Majority Leader post in the State Senate; she gave no real reason why she was stepping down, and also said that while she wasn’t going to run for re-election, she would retain her state Senate seat until her term expired.

That apparently wasn’t good enough for the state party leadership, because on Friday morning, it was announced that she’d been forced out over an “inappropriate relationship” with a male Senate staffer whose name was not mentioned.

Then, well after the deadlines for the six o’clock and even the nine and ten o’clock evening newscasts, it was announced that Koch’s nominal underling, Michael Brodkorb — Tony Sutton’s right-hand man and a guy who until October of this year had been the Deputy Chair of the Minnesota Republican Party and its communications boss — had resigned his job at the state Senate. (See also Tild’s lovely graphic above, which may also be found here.)

My, my.

The jockeying to replace Brodkorb’s sock puppet as Majority Leader has begun, with inspid right-wing talk-show host and freshman Senate Republican Dave Thompson already expressing interest in the gig. (Be careful what you wish for, Dave: The RPM powerbrokers, especially the Sutton-Brodkorb crew, would love to see you nominally presiding over the state Senate GOP caucus when the Republicans lose control of it next year. They’ll blame the loss on you and use it to try and vault back into power, hoping that nobody notices that their fingerprints will be all over that loss.)

Pass. The. Popcorn.

UPDATE: And now we find out that Brodkorb has resigned from the campaign of Mike Parry, who is competing with Allen Quist for the right to get a butt-kicking from Tim Walz next November. Yeah, I think we can safely say that the circumstantial evidence is piling up here.

The Courage of their Convictions

One of the grimly ironic activities of observing politics is separating out what the parties fundraise over vs. what they actually do. Here’s an advertisement from the Guardian of 12/17 and the link to which it leads.

What you get if you follow the link:

And this is what you get if you look through their press releases, news, and so on on voter suppression:

Yes, this is the sum total of what the Democratic governors are doing to end voter suppression: using it as a wedge issue and fundraising tool. And even this is narrowcast to readers of a left-wing British newspaper. They don’t even have the courage of their convictions to stand up and say what needs to be said publicly–that denying the vote to significant numbers of people destabilizes a country, leaving those who are disenfranchised with no stake in the nation. They aren’t taking steps in states where they have control to extend the franchise as widely as possible. Nothing forbids California, for example, from automatically registering every US citizen who pays taxes; buys a license from the state; has a child enrolled in the schools; or otherwise interacts with the state.

Nor are Democrats safeguarding the vote. In one of the most notorious cases of suppression of minority votes, a Democratic Secretary of State (later indicted, though not convicted as of this date) acting under a Democratic Governor had to be sued to get the state to address ballot spoilage rates vastly higher than those in Anglo-majority areas. Why should citizens have to spend the enormous amounts of money required to sue a state just to get voting machines that work? Is it really controversial that votes should be counted?

Maybe the Democratic Governor’s Association will do something to make me believe that they take the issue of the franchise seriously. But so far, the courage of their convictions extends only as far as their strong belief that they need more money.