Senator Satveer Chaudhary has made the news with reports of his stealthy and self-serving last minute legislation he convinced a member of the Minnesota House to put in on his behalf as reported in today's Strib.
The obvious apppearance of impropriety in the way he got the legislation enacted is bad enough (apparently he didn't feel any public hearings and other such formalities were necessary). It would be a refreshing change for a politician, especially a liberal Democrat, to quit digging the hole deeper and just own up and take responsibility and apologize for his lapse in judgment. Chaudhary's weak claims of "getting bad information" are just lame and do little to excuse his actions.
What really irks me is his casual statement that he is thinking about taking action to repeal the legislation next year when the senate re-convenes. He obviously thinks he is a shoo-in for re-election. Minnesota faces some very serious budget problems over the next few years, many of which were caused or exacerbated by long time political careerists like Chaudhary. As I expressed in my previous post, clearly change is needed to sweep out elected officials who seem to have lost sight of why they are in the legislature.
I'm going to work hard for the Gina Bauman campaign to try and run this self-centered careerist out of office. Chaudhary is well funded with a lot of liberal special interest support from both inside and outside of Minnesota, so Gina can use all of the help she can get if you feel like helping out. I'm sure she would be more than happy to introduce the repeal of Senator Chaudhary's self-serving legislation if the voters decide to give him the opportunity to seek a private sector employment opportunity.
Since this little ol' blog doesn't get the traffic the big guys get we probably won't get a lot of comments, but here are some submitted in response to the Pioneer Press coverage of the story, many of which I think reflect the sentiments of many of us in District 50.
