Minnesota House Republicans will have more than one choice for minority leader when caucus members meet Saturday to select their leader.
In an email sent to caucus members Sunday, state Rep. Tom Emmer of Delano announced he will seek the House caucus leadership position.
House Minority Leader Marty Siefert also emailed GOP House members Sunday saying he would again seek the post.
In other news, Speaker Kelliher was seen dancing a jig up on the 4th floor of the State Office Building.
But seriously folks, I can understand why some Republicans would want to dump Seifert. After the 2006 elections, most observers thought the DFL had reached their saturation point in the MN House - 85 seats was supposed to be our high water mark. 2008 was supposed to be a year of Republican pickups, the only question was how many. As we all know, however, the GOP actually lost two more seats is last week’s elections.
In addition to their electoral woes, Seifert was also behind the great moderate purge of 2008. In a vengeful rush to punish the Override Six, Seifert and conservative activists drove two members into retirement, denied three members the Republican endorsement and ended up losing two long held seats to the DFL.
But Emmer is hardly guilt free in this debacle. Jim Abeler, one of two Override Sixers that were reelected last week, sent this letter to the GOP Caucus after Emmer made an appearance at his endorsing convention:
Shockingly to me, Rep Emmer showed up at the convention on Saturday around 9:45, declaring himself as representing the caucus. “Marty went south, and I went north.”
Following a nice commendation of Rep Hackbarth for providing good representation of his district (no mention of me), Tom went onto bash the “Democrat transportation tax bill.” The entire speech lasted 7 or 8 minutes, during which time the crowd got actively engaged, since as a group they were about 3:1 opposed to the bill and many were angry at me anyway. When comments came about “those 6 republicans” Tom gestured in an encouraging way, and crowd whipped into a frenzy against those 6 (including me) resembling an Obama rally. There was no doubt as to the local object of this aggression, me. As he closed, he received tumultuous applause and left…
…What shocked me is that the caucus would send Tom Emmer who has obvious and unresolved anger issues toward me and expect his appearance in already tense situation to go well. I think in human resource circles they call this the Worst Possible Decision.
I wonder what Abeler will do if Emmer is elected Republican Leader?
Also, what does Emmer’s move do to the 2010 AG’s race? Emmer was seen as Lori Swanson’s most likely GOP challenger. Who’s the Republican candidate now?
People Are Shouting
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