Also Releases Comparison to Nebraska Prison Proposal
PIERRE, S.D. – Today, Governor Larry Rhoden released the full plan for a new prison to be built at the Benson Road site in Sioux Falls. This plan reflects the unanimous agreement by the prison task force. The plan will be voted on in the upcoming special session on September 23. You can find the full plan here.
“Thank you to the prison task force for creating a good plan and to the contractors for putting together a design that fits those parameters,” said Governor Larry Rhoden. “This is a fiscally responsible plan that will give South Dakota a 100-year facility with necessary space to reform our corrections system.”
The plan reflects the adjustments that were made to reduce the price tag from $825 million at the Lincoln County site down to $650 million at the Benson Road site. These changes result in a net reduction of 160,000 square feet of space without cutting vital programming space necessary to reduce recidivism.
The plan specifically reduces costs by $175 million by making the following adjustments:
A $125 million reduction in building costs, including:
A 176,000 square foot adjustment in net cell housing changes by shifting from seven smaller cell housing units to three larger ones, adding one dorm-style unit, and reducing dayroom space from 70 square feet per-inmate down to 40;
A 5,000 square foot reduction in intake space;
A 5,000 square foot reduction in the central utility plant; and
There is no decrease in programming space – in fact, there is a 27,000 square foot increase in vocational space;
A $25 million reduction in site costs; and
A $25 million reduction in soft costs.
Governor Rhoden also released a comparison to the Nebraska prison proposal, which was a frequent point of discussion by the prison task force. You can find that comparison here.
Governor Rhoden previously released the draft legislation for the new prison, which you can find here. An outline of the legislation can be found here.
You can find answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the prison plan here.
Johnson Continues Efforts to Ban Individual Stock Trading for Members of Congress
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Representative Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) cosponsored the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which bans members of Congress and their families from buying and selling individual stocks during their time in Congress. This bipartisan legislation was introduced by U.S. Representatives Chip Roy (R-TX) and Seth Magaziner (D-RI).
“Athletes can’t place bets on games they play in because they have too much of an influence on the outcome. It should be the same for members of Congress – our votes can influence the market or the success of a particular company,” said Johnson. “Serving in Congress is a public service, not a chance to strike it rich. Passing this bill will restore some of the honesty and trust that has been lost in our institution.”
“It’s far past time to ban members of Congress from day trading stocks, and for the first time, a bipartisan coalition is standing together behind a united proposal to do just that,” said Rep. Chip Roy. “The Restore Trust in Congress Act ensures that members of Congress will no longer be able to put the stock market first in their official decisions. This bill strikes a balance between being easy to comply with, but without tons of loopholes for members to continue trading while on the job. We must vote on this bill and put this conflict of interest to bed for once and for all. I look forward to seeing the Restore Trust in Congress Act move through the legislative process.”
Johnson has not bought or sold an individual stock since coming to Congress in January 2019. He has repeatedly called to prohibit individual stock trading for members of Congress.
The Restore Trust in Congress Act: Covered assets:
Prohibits all members of Congress, their spouses, dependent children, and their trustees from owning, buying or selling individual stocks, securities, commodities, or futures.
The following exceptions are permitted:
Widely held investment funds such as mutual funds and ETFs, provided that they are diversified and not concentrated in any industry, business, or single country other than the United States or single state, except for Member’s state of residence
U.S. Treasury, state, or municipal bond, note, bill
Precious metals (gold, silver, etc.)
Shares of Settlement Common Stock, as defined in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
An interest in a small business concern
Family trusts if no covered individual is a grantor of the trust, has contributed any asset to the trust, has any authority over a trustee of the family trust, or the grantor of the family trust is or was a family member of a covered individual
An asset that is received as compensation from the occupation of a spouse or dependent
An asset that is not owned by a spouse or dependent but is traded on behalf of others through their primary occupation
Personal residences in LLCs
Process for Divestment:
Upon enactment, covered individuals are prohibited from purchasing covered assets and must divest from all covered assets at fair market value within 180 days for current members and 90 days for incoming members. Individuals who acquire covered assets through inheritance during the course of their service will be required to divest those assets within 90 days of receipt.
Members may apply to the supervising ethics committee for an extension of a divestment deadline if investment can’t be sold by a deadline due to low liquidity, vesting schedules, or contractual restrictions.
Capital gains taxes may be deferred for all divestments through a Certificate of Divesture process, as is currently permitted for executive branch employees.
For example, if a member divests all previously held individual stocks and reinvests in a mutual fund, the taxes on the sale of the individual stocks may be deferred until the member later sells out of the mutual fund.
Enforcement:
Supervising ethics office to impose and enforce penalties and issue any additional guidance.
Fine
Equal to 10% of value of covered asset plus disgorgement of profits
Must be paid with personal funds, not office or campaign funds
Supervising ethics office will publicly disclose fines and disciplinary outcomes
Didn’t Toby Doeden do a fundraiser a few weeks back? If memory serves…
The person from Aberdeen – Ol’ Scowly McScowlyface – had a fundraiser with 6 hosts back in July. Moving forward 60 days, it looks like he’s probably needs to take notes, because Team Dusty is coming to Aberdeen, and they don’t feel the need to hide where he’s having his reception. Plus, they have at least 6x the number of hosts.
The Dusty Johnson for Governor campaign has invites out today for their fundraiser on September 22 in Aberdeen at the Refuge Retreats Clubhouse in Aberdeen starting at 5 pm, with a number of well known names around the Aberdeen Community such as the Lamont Family, Kesslers, Jewett’s, Fouberg’s, and the list goes on.
If you’re in the Aberdeen area on September 22nd, go check it out!
Hot out of my mailbox, Congressman Dusty Johnson is having a fundraiser here in Brookings coming up on September 24th for his campaign to be our next Governor:
If I can work it out, I might have to make an appearance. And I always laugh at my fairly non-political sister appearing on the Brookings area fundraising invites with her very community-involved spouse. But I shouldn’t be shocked, as we both grew up in Pierre with Dusty hanging around on occasion with our youngest brother. (It’s a seriously small state.)
Anyway, for those readers in the Brookings area who want to get in early to support our next Governor, Cubby’s in Brookings is the place to be on Wednesday September 24th from 5-6:30.
Attorney General & Congressional hopeful Marty Jackley has an interesting rally/fundraiser tomorrow in Sturgis where I wonder how the crowd is going to mix when you look at the host list:
On one side you have hosts like Kip & Kristi Wagner, Brad “Murdoc” Jurgenson and Senator Randy Deibert. And on the other you have Senator “California” Carley, Texas transplant Karen McNeal, and Majority Leader Scott Odenbach. It’s at the Loud American in Sturgis tomorrow from 5-7 PM, and the public is invited.
Although, I’m sure this isn’t the first time they’ve had different gangs in the Loud American the same time wearing their colors. (I’m sure there will be a law enforcement presence in the room to keep the peace.)
A Nominations Rules Change Is Coming By Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) Breitbart
For decades, Democrats and Republicans have regularly cooperated to swiftly confirm the many, many individuals selected by each president to serve in their administration.
Regardless of the party in the White House, both sides have long agreed that a president deserves to have his or her administration in place, quickly. That doesn’t mean we don’t disagree. But it does mean when nominees are held up, opposed, or blocked—it’s for a legitimate purpose, not for leverage in partisan games, to score political points at the expense of public safety.
Now, while I agree with the above sentiment, those sentences aren’t actually mine. Those are the words of Democrat Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2022, when President Biden already had 405 Senate-confirmed nominees in place, 230 of whom were confirmed via voice vote.
By the time Leader Schumer was complaining about the nominations pace, the Senate had already confirmed numerous batches of nominees via voice vote, as it has always done. In fact, every president has had a majority of his nominees confirmed this way.
Until now.
Democrats have made President Donald Trump the first president on record to not have a single nominee confirmed via voice vote or unanimous consent, and they are forcing time-consuming votes on noncontroversial nominees who go on to be confirmed by large bipartisan margins. It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome on steroids.
It’s delay for delay’s sake, and it’s a pettiness that leaves desks sitting empty in agencies across the federal government and robs our duly elected president of a team to enact the agenda that the American people voted for in November. This historic obstruction also chews up valuable time on the Senate floor that would be better spent working on legislation, like moving appropriations bills on time, reauthorizing programs critical to national defense, and considering and debating some of the more than 120 bipartisan bills reported out of committee that aim to make families and businesses stronger and more prosperous.
Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this obstruction any longer. We have tried to work with Democrats in good faith to batch bipartisan, noncontroversial nominees and clear them expeditiously, according to past precedent. Democrats have stood in the way at every turn.
Over the past month, I organized a group of Republican senators representing various points of view within the party to develop a solution. We have developed a plan, based on a previous proposal from Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Angus King (D-ME), that would allow the Senate to batch nominations together and clear the growing backlog. The Klobuchar-King proposal was designed to speed up the confirmation process at a time when the Senate was regularly confirming batches of nominees by voice vote, a luxury Democrats have not allowed this Congress. We have modified this proposal to account for the added obstruction by allowing nominees to move in larger groups.
When the Senate convenes this week, I will begin the necessary procedural steps to reform the Senate’s rules. No party should be able to weaponize the confirmation process the way that Senate Democrats are doing now, in a way that has never been done before. This total obstruction simply cannot be the standard moving forward – both in principle and in practicality. We must return to the Senate’s traditional confirmation process that existed before this unprecedented blockade.
This year, the Senate has taken more votes than any Senate has at this point in more than 35 years. We’ve taken more roll call votes in eight months than most Senates take in 12. We’ve also spent more hours in session through August than any Senate in more than 15 years. All that to be slightly behind pace of the last two administrations’ confirmation rates.
At the current pace, and facing the same level of Democrat obstruction, the Senate would need to conduct more than 600 additional roll call votes to clear the nominees who are currently in the pipeline. That’s more votes than this already record-breaking Senate has taken all year, and it doesn’t account for the additional nominees who will be added to the current backlog. Today, more than 1,200 positions are subject to Senate confirmation. If we were to continue at our current pace, the administration would have hundreds of vacancies remaining by the time President Trump’s term ends.
I refuse to accept that reality. President Trump and Republicans received a mandate from the American people in November. It is far past time that the president’s nominees receive confirmation votes from the Senate – and this Senate Republican majority will take steps this week to make it happen.
John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader and the senior U.S. senator from South Dakota.
In what might be the most anti-climactic announcement for office this year; after serving as a bureaucrat under the Biden Administration, the former State Director of USDA Rural Development Nikki Gronli has filed paperwork to run for Congress as a Democrat:
I’m not checking out her website though, because it completely freaked out my live web protection.
Gronli was the former Chair of Minnehaha Democrats who spent a career in marketing until Joe Biden was looking to fill appointee positions in South Dakota… and then became the head of USDA Rural Development in the state.
In case you’ve forgotten about her positions, Nikki “Three Shell” Gronli, a.k.a. Gun Grabber Gronli has some interesting positions that she’s espoused in the past that she will try to bring to Washington:
Well, good luck there. Let’s get this party started!
Thomas E. Simmons is a professor at the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law in Vermillion. His views are his own and not the views of USD, its administrators, or the South Dakota Board of Regents. The opinions expressed above are merely those of private citizen.
Guest Column: A Son’s Father (Book Review) by Thomas E. Simmons
Novelist Frederick Manfred was born in Doon, Iowa, kicked around in Dinkytown and Bloomindale, Minnesota, built a house amongst the blue mounds north of Luverne, Minnesota, and worked for a time at the University of South Dakota as a writer-in-residence. He died in 1994 of brain cancer.
He and I may have passed each other on a sidewalk of the USD campus when I was an undergraduate, though I think I would remember the event (and I don’t) given that Manfred’s stature – 6 foot 9 – would have made quite an impression on the young man I was then. I did meet his personal physician once, immediately after I had finished delivering a talk on Manfred’s portrayal of landscape at Augustana University’s Center for Western Studies, but that is the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Manfred himself.
As I visited with Manfred’s doctor, he recalled delivering the news to Manfred that the writer had cancer. It was terminal. He cared for Manfred at the end. To shake this doctor’s hand is the closest I’ll come to shaking Manfred’s hand.
Manfred’s most popular novel is one of my all-time favorites: Lord Grizzly (1954). It recounts the true story of Hugh Glass and his solitary 1823 crawl across South Dakota after being mauled by a momma bear near the banks of the Grand River close to where Shadehill Reservoir is today, south of Lemmon. The story has been retold in film, most recently with Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass in The Revenant (2015).
That film’s substitution of the views of northwestern South Dakota with Rocky Mountain crags betrayed the truth of the epic crawl that Hugh Glass completed. The stunning landscape of buttes and vistas stretched across Perkins, Corson, and Dewey Counties outranks the Rockies any day.
Recently, I read a much more obscure book of nonfiction essays by Manfred titled Prime Fathers (1988). Very unlike Lord Grizzly, it’s a spare, simple book of four essays focusing on fatherhood. To round out the page count, there are also three shorter essays and selections from an interview with Manfred.
Politial junkies might enjoy the lengthy essay on Manfred’s work as a young man on Hubert Humphrey’s unsuccessful first campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. Word-nerds will like the pair of essays on Sinclair ‘Red’ Lewis. But I treasure the essay about Manfred’s own father; a condensed biography.
Here is a snippet of a close call from his father’s boyhood:
[W]hile shingling the cupola on the locally famous Reynolds round barn, the cleat on which is foot rested gave way, and he began sliding. He fell off the cupola and hit the main roof. Despite desperate clawing and scratching, he kept on sliding. When he knew there was no way of stopping the slide, he figured out where the fresh cow manure pile lay below and, deliberately rolling himself over and over as he slid, managed to aim himself for it. He shot out over the edge of the roof, and miracle of miracles, landed in six feet of loose green slush.
Miraculously, he was unhurt. But Manfred starts his father’s biography earlier, with the genealogy of the man’s parents who left Tzum (in the Netherlands) when his father was a baby. At Ellis Island, Manfred’s father’s (and father’s father’s) first names were changed from Frjentsjer to Frank.
Manfred’s paternal grandmother and grandfather initially settled in Orange City, Iowa (a Dutch town if ever there was) and then moved around a lot, even residing briefly in South Dakota’s Badlands, before settling permanently in Doon.
Frank Jr. grew up there at a time (the 1890s) when the primary mode of transportation was either horse or horse and buggy. One could still find wild, untilled prairies, especially in the rougher terrain and along the rivers. Some houses were still built of sod. Manfred’s father once rode a horse for ten miles without encountering a fence.
The numerous stories of Frank Jr. are told with his son’s accessible yet polished prose. They tell of a father’s boyhood and adulthood, ending with his death. (The title of the essay is a quote from Frank Jr. near the end: “Ninety is Enough”). It’s funny, sad, and moving. If you happen across a copy, I’d give it a read.
Thomas E. Simmons University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law Vermillion, SD
Growing up on the ranch, you learn that results matter. No matter how much you wish it might rain or wish it wouldn’t hail, the only thing that matters is whether it did – the actual result. And it doesn’t matter whether you planned to do a task – what matters is whether you got it accomplished – the actual result.
Results matter. And I’m pretty proud of some of our recent results to keep South Dakota safe.
We recently wrapped up the first saturation patrol in the Sioux Falls area as part of Operation: Prairie Thunder. I shared the results with some members of the media, but I’d like to share them with all of you, as well.
Some questioned whether the saturation patrol would be effective, and the results speak for themselves. Our Highway Patrol troopers worked with local law enforcement to target drug hotspots around Sioux Falls over a three-day operation. Here are the results:
174 drug charges, including 44 felony charges;
44 arrests for outstanding warrants, including 24 felony warrants – that means we got 24 felons off the streets;
336 traffic citations, plus 256 warnings and 6 DUIs;
Eight illegal aliens handed over to ICE (these were incidental contacts – we weren’t seeking out illegal aliens);
Three members of gangs and cartel affiliates arrested; and
Four absconders (whether for parole or probation) arrested.
Nice work to the fifteen Highway Patrol troopers who surged to Sioux Falls for the operation and achieved those incredible results!
I also want to take the opportunity to say “thank you” to a woman who focused on results throughout her entire time as a leader of one of our state agencies. Secretary of Corrections Kellie Wasko recently announced that she’ll be stepping down from her role in October. Over her three-and-a-half years in the job, she accomplished some pretty great things for the state.
I’d like to share just a few of the many results she achieved during her tenure:
Raised pay for correctional officers by 43% and reduced officer vacancies from 36% down to 3%;
Upgraded equipment, both for our correctional officers and for security at our prison facilities;
Improved policies and trainings to promote staff security;
Improved inmate health programs, including curing over 300 offenders with Hepatitis C;
Reduced escapes from our prisons from 41 to just 1 in just three years;
Started construction of a new women’s prison in Rapid City, which is ahead of schedule.
I’m sure I’m leaving some out, but you get the point – her positive results were many and widely varied. Thank you, Kellie. I look forward to seeing the results that you accomplish in your next role!
I’m going to continue focusing on delivering results to keep South Dakota strong, safe, and free. If there are any particular results you would like to see, please do not hesitate to let me know!
Guest Column: “Attending West Point was the Greatest Adventure of My Life” By Landon, Rep. Dusty Johnson’s Military and Veteran Services Representative September 5, 2025
I was in fifth grade when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened. From then on, I knew I wanted to serve my country, and I joined as soon as I could. In fact, the month I turned 17 is when I joined the Army National Guard with my parents’ permission.
I became an infantryman in the Iowa National Guard, and in 2011, saw combat in Afghanistan. As the end of my deployment drew near, I began to think about what would come next. I had already spent a year at South Dakota State University, and I wondered if I would go back there. But I felt it would be hard for me to go back to a “normal” school environment after my experiences in Afghanistan. I wanted more purpose and direction in my life.
Landon in uniform
I decided I wanted to serve my country full-time and was willing to accept the challenge and burden of leadership as an officer. I wanted to be around other driven, military-focused people like me, like those at a United States Service Academy. I decided to apply to the United States Military Academy, commonly known as West Point.
After I applied, my commander nominated me, which is an option given to only about 100 enlisted service members for each academy. I also pursued additional nominations from my Congresswoman and Senators. Before I could complete the application process for these nominations, I was accepted by West Point for the Class of 2016.
Attending West Point was the greatest adventure of my life. I was pushed to my limits and grew in many ways. I met other determined and driven people like me and gained confidence as I accomplished things I didn’t know I could do.
After West Point, the challenges only increased. I became an Infantry Officer and successfully completed Ranger School. I led and trained a platoon of 46 soldiers and deployed with them to Afghanistan. Later, I became a Company Executive Officer, and finally a Ranger Instructor at the school I went to at the start of my officer career. Now, I am the Military and Veteran Services Representative for Congressman Dusty Johnson.
My experiences at the Academy and in the Army shaped who I am today. It is a path that is not for the weak or fainthearted, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Congressman Dusty Johnson’s office is accepting Service Academy nominations for the Class of 2030 at the Air Force Academy, Naval Academy, Merchant Marine Academy, and Military Academy at West Point. For anyone who thinks they’re up to the challenge, I encourage you to apply to attend a Service Academy.
