If you are a political conservative, a recent report about the Minnesota Legislature has good news for you. If you’re a liberal, the news is that you’ve got to work much harder to elect legislators who represent your views.
The American Conservative Union released its ratings of Minnesota Legislators and the three people who represent our area received high scores.
Founded in 1964, the ACU is the nation’s oldest conservative lobbying organization. The group advocates for political action that guarantees free exercise of individual rights by strictly limiting the power of government. It “seeks to preserve and protect the values of life, liberty and property for every American.”
To calculate this year’s ratings, the ACU selected a range of bills to determine a member’s adherence to conservative principles. As the report’s introduction says, “We selected bills that focus on Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of the ‘three-legged stool’: fiscal and economic, social and cultural, and government integrity.”
The ACU assigned scores to 17 Senate bills and 30 House bills and then calculated ratings for each member.
In the Senate, first-term member Jeff Howe (R-Rockville) received a 94 percent score for voting with the group’s positions. He was one of only seven senators who received the ACU’s Award for Conservative Excellence.
A special election in Senate District 13 sent Howe to the upper chamber after he served in the House. Howe’s most recent rating improved from 77 percent when he was a House member and his career rating of 88 percent.
Over in the House, Tim O’Driscoll (R-Sartell) joined Howe with an Award for Conservative Excellence with a 90 percent rating. His lifetime score is 87 percent.
Freshman House member, Lisa Demuth (R-Cold Spring), needs to pick up the pace if she wants to join her colleagues in the conservatives’ ring of honor. She “only” rated 77 percent.
Howe lost points by missing a vote to improve Affordable Care Act enrollment with tax credits. The ACU opposed that measure, SF 761, which failed in the Senate and did not advance in the House. Howe voted in favor of a bill regulating licensing for assisted-living providers that was opposed by the ACU.
In the House, O’Driscoll also voted for the assisted-living licensing. He also voted to include e-cigarettes and vaping in the law that already prohibits smoking in restaurants, workplaces and public spaces. The ACU believes the use of tobacco and e-cigarettes is a matter of individual liberty and that it infringes on the right of businesses and workplaces to set their own policies. The House passed the bill and, after the Senate approved a similar measure, it became law.
Demuth joined O’Driscoll by voting for the e-cigarette measure and the assisted-living regulations. She missed eight of the 30 votes in the ACU ratings so that may have lowered her score. Several of those were amendments to bills that included assisted-living facilities and Medicaid.
Demuth split from the ACU by voting in favor of the hands-free phone bill that has become law. O’Driscoll did not vote on that bill. She also voted for a bill that favored licensing for early education teachers. The ACU opposed the additional licensing.
Of course, there are many measures of how well our legislators represent our wishes but the ACU is the gold standard for promoting conservative policies. Our area elected three Republican legislators and they have certainly delivered on a conservative agenda.
