If you’ve enjoyed the top ten SDWC political stories of 2023, I would encourage you to check out the latest podcast from Dakota Town Hall, where I join hosts Jake Schoenbeck and Murdoc Jurgenson on an audio review of the SDWC top ten issues. Alway enjoyable.
And with that, After parts one and two, on to part three, and the top two stories of 2023!
2. State Senator Julie Frye Mueller and her harassment of a legislative employee.
Is Julie Frye Mueller being a creep a bigger issue than pipelines or conflicts of interest? Maybe, maybe not. But it encompasses and represents some of the other issues that have already popped up in the top 10, and it completely overshadowed political discussion for months.
The complaint is literally the most awful behavior that you can imagine an employer doing to an employee, as related by Joe Sneve at the Dakota Scout:
Frye Mueller was accused of creepy behavior that went over the line in being crude, lewd and potentially sexually harassive. Because who suggests to an employee that her spouse”bump-start” her breastfeeding.. while Frye-Mueller’s husband stood there. Not to mention her crazy rant on vaccination, etcetera.
That horrendous incident set off legislative hearings, which many – myself included – thought she could have been (and maybe should have been) expelled for. But, in the South Dakota legislature, it’s challenging to get an expulsion for sharing a bed with a legislative page, so probably not going to happen for bad lactation counseling.
But stupidly, Frye Mueller would not take her lumps for her wildly inappropriate behavior and move on. Along with her only defender for her behavior, State Senator Tom Pischke, Frye-Mueller and her ally actively pursued trying to bring charges against those who sat in judgement of her awfulness, and acted to suspend her – to separate her from the employee – during the time when the harassment investigation/hearing was going on.
Pischke and Frye Mueller actually called on the Attorney General and the Hughes County States Attorney to bring charges against the 27 State Senators who acted to protect the victim and created boilerplate “Victim Impact Statements” which they shopped around to their allies.
What seeking his fellow Senator’s arrests earned for Pischke was a seat on the floor next to Frye-Mueller during caucus time, as now both found themselves expelled from the Senate Republican caucus.
This wasn’t the end of things by any means, as after the legislative session several Republican County Committees ignored the fact that Frye-Mueller was tried by a jury of her peers of the conduct, and censured for her actions. They actually gathered some of the funds contributed to them by donors seeking to support Republicans running for office, and sent them to Frye-Mueller for some sort of legal defense purposes to fight the action taken by her colleagues.
The fight continued underground during intervening months with Frye Mueller having threatened a further lawsuit. As a result of Piscke’s actions (in part, there are other reasons) he earned himself an early primary opponent.
And at one Republican event, Frye-Mueller went so far as to claim that the complaint was in fact false, and fabricated by Legislative Leadership:
After Senator Pischke read his speech off, Frye Mueller got up and gave a fish story which I hadn’t heard to date:
“ you could see this was an orchestrated attempt.. and what Senator Schoenbeck.. and yes you’re watching.. and if you are good for you. His goal I believe was to have me hang my head and walk off the floor. And never come back. And that wasn’t going to happen.
Because I believe he’s the one who made up those words, as that staffor didn’t say those words, and I didn’t say them either as in my kangaroo court I testified to.”
Watch that here at about 1:08 into the video.
In response, Senator Schoenbeck provided a tidbit that many were unaware of:
The whole senate leadership met with Julie in my office. Pischke was there (at her request for moral support) and she admitted almost all of it, the rest she wanted to only tell her whip (the weird stuff she did on lactation). Pischke admonished her for her inappropriate behavior, in front of all of us.
Next day, he’s standing by her at a press conference denying everything. There’s a reason nobody trusts these people. It’s a small state. You can’t behave and lie like that and expect it to be forgotten.
Read that here.
A month or so after this, Frye-Mueller also found herself with a primary election opponent.
Given this is one of the wildest stories in South Dakota politics, OF COURSE at the end of December, it wasn’t done as of yet. The long promised lawsuit that Julie Frye-Mueller had promised against the state senate finally materialized. To interesting effect:
Schoenbeck, a veteran trial lawyer, also dismissed the legal theory under which Frye-Mueller is seeking Court intervention.
“Unless you’ve studied Klingon, you’re not going to be able to understand it,” he said, referring to the aliens in the science fiction series Star Trek. “And I don’t want to badmouth the Klingons, but this is not in English.”
Read that here.
And that’s where we ended up with this side-show rolling into 2024.
1. Rise of the election truthers/populists.
Yes, I know this is inside baseball. But, on my list, I don’t think anything has affected the landscape of South Dakota politics more than the “election truthers/populists.” And maybe that’s a catch-all phrase that doesn’t adequately encompass the movement of what we might otherwise term a group of activists whose politics seem to be driven more by what they read on facebook than their knowledge of government or a sense of civic duty. It is populism run amok as the group is less about supporting Republican or Democrat candidates as much as they are against Government doing anything than dismantling itself.
The small clusters of people along this vein have been happy to co-opt various Republican organizations to serve their needs, without actually supporting the Republican party, and they are just as quick to abandon them as they are to claim them.
Secretary of State Monae Johnson can attest to this.
Johnson rode the wave into office in 2022, yet in 2023 as she attempted to govern, she found that the election truthers who had propelled her into office turned on her as and labeled her a swamp dweller, and at this point are in an active state of war against her as their activists attack her in word, and their officeholders use their position to actively sabotage the Secretary of State’s office.
The truthers/populists seem more intent on burning everything down in pursuit of their own goals as opposed to serving the needs of their community.
If a debate were to come up to find a solution to how to fund our highway repairs, and for example, the future of the gas tax was that it would not generate sufficient revenue because of an influx of electric vehicles, they wouldn’t debate replacement income through a wheel tax or tolls to pay for road upkeep – it would devolve into a debate of the federal government subsidizing electric vehicles, and how we shouldn’t accept federal funding of our highways.. and the potholes in our roads would remain in disrepair.
It’s all well and good to debate ideology ad nauseum, but the average South Dakotan doesn’t subscribe to the same intense reliance on dogma. They just want their damn road fixed, because it ruined their second tire rim, and someone should be fixing the road. The truthers/populist can whip people up on select targeted issues, but they quickly lose interest in participating in the debate when the long-term societal effects set in.
These groups successfully took over a handful of Republican County organizations in late 2022/early 2023, and their handiwork has been evident since that time. The Yankton County GOP fell to their minions, and now instead of hearing from candidates at their annual events, their GOP faithful is subjected to 45 minute power-point presentations on election conspiracies from SD Canvassing.
The largest county republican organization, Minnehaha County, had the same happen. And they find themselves with a leadership team who finds more value with garage sales than meeting a quarter million voters. A leadership team that they now find themselves facing having to pry out of office like a stubborn engorged deer tick. And those are just a couple of quick examples.
These groups are more interested in self-aggrandizing than getting people elected. And their eagerness to upset the applecart is going to come to fruition this year. The end result of these groups means that there could quickly be a shift in the balance in the state’s next election cycle, as increasingly competitive Democrats find themselves facing off in elections against some weak and disorganized Republican county organizations who let them steal the limelight because the public at large isn’t buying the bag of crazy that the facebook adherents are attempting to sell.
To me, the rise of the truther/populist groups is the biggest political story of the year, as if they have their way, what they are going to accomplish is to swing the pendulum back from Republican leadership, and give Democrats the leg up in state politics that they have been unable to achieve on their own over the last several election cycles.
And those are the top ten political stories for SDWC for 2023!
Pierre, SD – District 24 Senator Jim Mehlhaff announced his intention to seek re-election Tuesday for a second term.