By J. Patrick Coolican | Editor-in-chief
Good morning, Reformers.
My 9-year old and I biked to the Bell Museum for chemistry camp, and we got to take in the diverse sights (and smells) of the city waking up — a man doing some edging in Calvary Cemetery, high school soccer players prepping for their season, maintenance crews patching up our sorry roads. And, the State Fair, where final preparations are underway for Minnesota’s most overhyped event.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar will be there, I’m pretty sure, at 6 a.m. Thursday, as by tradition. First though, she’s “meeting with local leaders, farmers, educators, and small business owners in Cottonwood, Faribault, Jackson, Martin, Murray, Nobles, Pipestone, Rock, and Watonwan Counties to discuss child care, agriculture, and workforce development.”
The press release helpfully notes that she visits all 87 counties every year.
On the one hand, I roll my eyes as she chases a handful of voters, seeking to reclaim some rural DFL glory that’s been nearly extinct since at least 2014, with trendlines going back much farther. That said, I admire her effort to talk to regions that won’t support her, if nothing else to show that she intends to govern the entire state.
Partisan polarization is toxic, but the geographic polarization it has engendered is in some ways even more so, as it leads to one-party rule in both urban and rural areas. An important feature of democratic self-governance is that it’s self-correcting. Someone screws up, you replace them. But that’s nearly impossible with one-party rule. More from conservative writer David French here.
To the Reformer:
By Brian Martucci
Attorney General Keith Ellison and the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota filed separate petitions saying, in effect, that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission improperly increased Xcel’s authorized return on equity this summer following a rate case proceeding that began in November 2024. Return on equity, or ROE, is a measure of shareholder profit that utility regulators use to set customer rates charged by investor-owned utilities.
“CUB believes the decision to increase Xcel’s return was neither in the public interest nor supported by record evidence in the case,” CUB Minnesota Executive Director Annie Levenson-Falk said.
Your rates are going up, but consumer advocates are trying to intervene. (Photo by Ken Paulman/Energy News Network)
By Rob Levine
Levine, a Minnesota writer and photographer, looks at the long history of the NewRange copper-nickel mining plan and frames it this way:
“A conversation with a well known prevaricator is fundamentally different from a conversation with a person who has a track record of honesty. The first instance calls for maximum skepticism, not good will.
This principle comes to mind reading a press release from a company called NewRange Copper Nickel — formerly known as PolyMet — as it touts a set of ‘project enhancements’ for its long stalled copper-nickel mine near the northeastern Minnesota city of Babbitt. The announcement makes many nice-sounding promises about plans for the state’s first copper-nickel mine, including its goal of ‘reducing environmental impact.’
To anyone who has followed the NorthMet saga as it has wound its way through the courts for the past eight years, this triggers a warning light.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Fentanyl seizures plummeted as Trump administration shifted focus to immigration | Reformer via States Newsroom
Court says Trump can go ahead for now with his $400M ballroom | Reformer via States Newsroom
Experts skewer new Trump administration analysis claiming noncitizens voted in 2020 | Reformer via Votebeat
Trump threatens 50% tariff on cars and parts from Canada | Wall Street Journal
Cattle producers condemn Trump cut in beef tariff | Farm Policy News
OH BY THE WAY
John Ganz has an incisive take on last week’s news that President Trump is reducing the tariff on beef imports to help consumers, which has angered the cattlemen that have supported him for the past decade.
All of these ridiculous tariff carveouts are a feature, not a bug of his faux-autarky.
“Once access to a market depends on exemptions, waivers, quotas or discretionary permits, profits increasingly flow not simply from producing more efficiently but from securing privileged access to the state. The barrier itself creates a rent; political influence determines who gets to collect it. Firms will cultivate patrons, lobby for special treatment, or position themselves as indispensable intermediaries between the executive and the market. In that sense, the apparent chaos of constant exceptions can be politically functional: it turns economic policy into a system for distributing favors, disciplining rivals, and binding business interests more tightly to the regime.”
When President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package put some money into renewable energy and adjacent companies (including Tesla), Republicans decried this as a “picking winners and losers.” (It was a ridiculous argument — the government has been picking winners and losers forever, e.g., without the Department of Defense and its Cold War spending, there would probably be no Silicon Valley as we know it today, for better or worse.)
In Trump’s case, however, it’s everything Republicans said they feared — one man using the levers of trade to fix his immediate political needs while creating an opening for massive graft.
Anyway, it’s funny watching one supposed principle after another just fall away as the demands of dear leader require.
Movie recommendation from the weekend: “The Drama.”
Have a great day all! JPC
Thanks for reading Daily Reformer. Did you know our weekend digest is also free? Sign up here. And if you enjoyed today’s edition, please forward to a friend. Increasing our readership helps us cover more news.