(Sorry. Couldn’t help but flash back to my auctioneer days.)

The Attorney General’s race seems to be showing some signs of growing from the field of the 4 current candidates. The word on the street is that Charles McGuigan, Jason Ravnsborg, Lance Russell and John Fitzgerald might be joined by former Butte County States Attorney Jim Seward, who’s most recent public service was as general counsel to Governor Dennis Daugaard from 2011 through 2016.

The word I’ve been hearing since this weekend is that Seward is making phone calls and testing the waters to see if there’s room for him to enter the already crowded field.

A Rapid City Journal article on his departure last year had Governor Daugaard praising Seward’s work during his tenure.

If you caught the post below, the House rolled out it’s tax reform package today, and Congresswoman Kristi Noem was one of those featured:

This just popped up in my RSS Feed. Apparently “super tough” Steve Jarding just filed a FEC Report for a new group whose domain (http://www.superheroesforamerica.com/) is parked but not in use for a group calling itself just that; SuperHeroes for America:

superheroes for america by Pat Powers on Scribd

The filers noted that “This committee supports/opposes more than one Federal candidate, and is NOT a separate segregated fund or party committee” and provides the following statement

This committee intends to make independent expenditures, and consistent with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decision in SpeechNow v. FEC, it therefore intends to raise funds in unlimited amounts. This committee will not use those funds to make contributions, whether direct, in-kind, or via coordinated communications, to federal candidates or committees.

Interesting. The big questions are whether the group is going to operate in South Dakota races, and where are they plan on getting their funding?

Just one to keep an eye on.

South Dakota Democrats responded to the charges by Donna Brazile Politico article about the Hillary Clinton takeover of the Democrat National Committee, as evidenced by the Argus Leader Headline:

Write it down Bernie Sanders supporters… Clinton PAC transfers are how Presidential Campaigns work.   

Especially when Hillary Clinton has assumed control of your party.

Thune, Senate Health IT Working Group Members Reintroduce Legislation to Improve Meaningful Use Program

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) today reintroduced the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Regulatory Relief Act (S. 2059), legislation that would provide regulatory flexibility and hardship relief to address compliance burdens faced by EHR users. Similar legislation was introduced in the 114^th Congress.

“Health information technology, especially the advancements in electronic health records, is an integral part of the future of America’s health care delivery system,” said Thune. “Our bill ensures that unnecessary regulatory burdens do not continue to negatively affect providers’ ability to leverage technology to improve patient care. With such strong and continued support for this legislation, I’m hopeful it will lead to swift and meaningful action in the Senate.”

“The American Medical Association says that for every hour doctors spend with patients, they spend two hours on electronic health records and desk work,” said Alexander. “This legislation will help reduce the regulatory burden doctors and hospitals have faced under the Meaningful Use program so they can instead focus on treating patients. I encourage the Senate to pass this bill to take a step towards getting our electronic health records system out of the ditch.”

“The use of electronic health records in our health care system has the potential to revolutionize patient care,” said Enzi.“But if we want electronic health records to work for providers and patients, we have to provide relief from unrealistic and burdensome requirements and build flexibility within the program. This bill will let hospitals and physicians maximize their use of electronic health records and allow our health information technology systems to move in to the future with a focus on the needs of patients.” 

“Health information technology holds the promise of improving patient care and better utilizing taxpayer funds,” said Roberts. “However, the meaningful use program has made health information technology nearly unworkable for our doctors and hospitals. This legislation provides much needed regulatory relief to the program so our health care professionals can spend more time focusing on what they do best – caring for patients.”

“Electronic health records have the potential to greatly improve care and these common-sense policies can help achieve that goal,” said Burr. “I am pleased to be working with my colleagues to provide greater flexibility to hospitals and doctors to support their efforts to provide quality care to all North Carolinians.”

“As doctors, we best spend our time looking into a patient’s eyes to make sure that she knows even though she has cancer, she has hope — not clicking on a computer screen to document something unimportant to her, but required by someone far removed from the exam room,” said Cassidy.

The senators’ legislation would shorten the reporting period for eligible physicians and hospitals from 365 days to 90 days, relax the all-or-nothing nature of the current program requirements, and extend the ability to apply for a hardship exception from the meaningful use requirements. Additionally, as implementation of the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System continues, the legislation would direct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to consider forthcoming recommendations from the Government Accountability Office with respect to ensuring flexibility in assessing physician performance.

Click here for a summary document of S. 2059, here for legislative text, and here for information on past work by the Senate’s health IT working group, Re-Examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT, of which Thune, Alexander, Enzi, Roberts, and Burr are original members.

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Noem: Tax Reform Means Stronger Families and a Stronger Future

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Kristi Noem today announced the release of a once-in-a-generation tax reform package which aims to strengthen families and offer a stronger future for all Americans. The legislation was drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee, on which Rep. Noem is the first South Dakotan in history to serve. For the latest information, please visit Noem.House.gov/TaxReform

“People deserve a break,” said Noem. “For years, we’ve watched as energy, food, healthcare and child care costs increased, but people’s paychecks remained largely unchanged. Small businesses have had a hard time expanding in that type of environment, and families have struggled to achieve the degree of financial independence they’re aiming for. In order for America to move beyond this, we need a tax code designed to strengthen our families and offer a more optimistic future. While no proposal will be perfect in everyone’s eyes, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would make the tax code much more simple and fair, delivering family-friendly credits, lower tax rates, small business incentives, and, ultimately, a full and permanent repeal of the Death Tax. It’s taken years to get to this point, but I’m encouraged by the progress and look forward to continuing this debate in upcoming committee meetings.”

The tax reform package released today would:

• Substantially simplify the tax code so an individual or family can file their taxes on a form as simple as a postcard.
• Significantly lower individual tax rates for low- and middle-income Americans to Zero, 12%, 25% and 35%. High-income Americans will maintain the 39.6% rate.
  • 0%: Married couples making less than $24,000 / Single filers making less than $12,000 (the increased standard deduction protects these families from taxation)
  • 12%: Married couples making $24,000-$90,000 / Single filers making $12,000-$45,000
  • 25%: Married couples making $90,000-$260,000 / Single filers making $45,000-$200,000
  • 35%: Married couples making $260,000-$1,000,000 / Single filers making $200,000-$500,000
  • 39.6%: Married couples making more than $1,000,000 / Single filers making more than $500,000
• Nearly double the standard deduction to $24,000 for married couples and $12,000 for single filers.
• Provide unprecedented support for families.
  • Increases the Child Tax Credit to $1,600 per child (60% larger than under current policy).
  • Eliminates the “marriage penalty.”
  • Creates a new Family Flexibility Credit, which provides a credit of $300 for each parent and non-child dependent.
  • Preserves the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (also known as the Child Care Credit) to better support working parents.
• Phase in full and permanent Death Tax Repeal by doubling the Death Tax exemption levels for the first six years and then fully repealing the Death Tax by 2024.
• Preserve and strengthen the Earned Income Tax Credit with provisions to stop widely reported fraud.
• Preserve the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction for existing mortgages and maintains the home mortgage interest deduction for newly purchased homes up to $500,000.
• Retain popular retirement savings options, such as the 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts.
• Streamline higher-education benefits.
• Continue the deduction for charitable contributions.
• Exclude the Indian Health Service’s Student Loan Repayment program from tax to help in recruiting. It’s based on Noem’s 2016 legislation.
• Allow businesses to immediately write off the full cost of new equipment, which is critical for South Dakota’s agriculture community.
• Create a separate and historically low small business tax rate.
• Lower the corporate tax rate to a globally competitive 20%.

Noem was selected for the House Ways and Means Committee in January 2015. Just over a year later, the committee released a blueprint for tax reform that outlined what a pro-growth, pro-family tax plan would look like. Over the course of the next year, Rep. Noem sat down with hundreds of South Dakotans to discuss the plan – both in the state and in her Washington, D.C. office. Noem also participated in more than a dozen formal Ways and Means Committee hearings on tax reform and brought South Dakota farmer Scott VanderWal to the table to testify on tax reform’s impact on agriculture.

All in all, the House Ways and Means Committee has been working on this proposal for more than six years, holding more than 40 public hearings since 2011.

South Dakota Leading the National Fight to Bring Tax Fairness for Local Retailers

PIERRE, S.D. – Attorney General Marty Jackley is pleased to announce that 36 Attorneys General are supporting South Dakota’s position that sales tax obligations should be applied fairly to both internet and main street businesses. Colorado has filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of South Dakota’s petition to the United States Supreme Court asking that Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992) be overruled.

“South Dakota is leading the national fight to bring tax fairness for our local retailers and to help support main street businesses. I want to thank Colorado Attorney   General Cynthia Coffman and my other Attorney General colleagues for their overwhelming support in seeking tax fairness for local retailers. Nobody enjoys paying taxes, but if necessary a tax should be fair and equal,” said Jackley.

In Quill, the U.S. Supreme Court required that a retailer have a “physical presence” within a state before a seller can be obligated to collect and remit that state’s sales taxes on purchases delivered into the state.

South Dakota passed a law in 2016 that would require out-of-state retailers to collect and remit sales tax similar to in-state retailers. The law applies to out-of-state retailers if they have more than $100,000 in sales or complete more than 200 transactions per year within South Dakota.

Given the controlling precedent of Quill, on October 2, 2017, the Attorney General’s Office filed a petition for certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the South Dakota Supreme Court decision in State of South Dakota v. Wayfair, Overstock and Newegg.

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South Dakota Democrat Party Laundered Millions of Dollars for Hillary Clinton

In a damning report today, former Democrat National Party Chairwoman Donna Brazile explained on an op-ed on the Politico website that the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign used Democrat state party organizations including the South Dakota Democratic Party chaired by Ann Tornberg as a way to get around campaign finance limits.  According to reports filed by South Dakota Democrats with the Federal Elections Commission, South Dakota Democrats allowed the Clinton campaign to directly funnel over $2.25 million through the State.

South Dakota Republican Party Chairman Dan Lederman issued a statement “calling for South Dakota Democrat leadership to publicly disclose exactly what the terms were of the financial arrangements with the Clinton campaign in light of receiving virtually no funds, spending almost no money on joint activities, and the former Chairwoman Brazile claiming the arrangement was ‘unethical.’”

Lederman noted “It is unprecedented that a national presidential campaign send over 2.25 million to a South Dakota political party for purposes of washing funds to make them “legal” to return to the candidate. It also shows how much their party was controlled by Hillary Clinton.”

According to the Politico report, the state parties received little of the funds raised, and the Bernie Sanders campaign criticized the financial arrangement alleging that “Clinton’s campaign was “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign.”

“Not that Republicans are complaining, considering South Dakota Democrats suffered historic losses at the time, but it seems that they were little more than a financial clearinghouse for the Clinton campaign,” Lederman said.

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Update – I was in error when I said The Hillary Clinton Campaign ran 1.45 Million through the South Dakota Democrat Party’s coffers. It was more.

According to the South Dakota Democrat Party’s Post-General Election FEC Report for 2016, the Aggregate Year to Date total exceeded 2.25 Million Dollars that Ann Tornberg allowed the Hillary Victory Fund to run through the South Dakota Democrat Party under her leadership.

As noted, the Clinton’s campaign use of funneling money through State Democrat parties has come under scrutiny in a Politico story today from the former Democrat National Chair Donna Brazile.

Remember how we’d see big out-of-state donations from the “Hillary Victory Fund” ran through the South Dakota Democrat Party’s federal account during the last presidential political cycle? It left a few of us scratching our heads, wondering “what on earth Ann Tornberg was doing?”

And now the veil is being lifted.

The big story in Politico today by former Democrat National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile titled “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret takeover of the DNC” about how the Hillary Clinton Campaign ran money through the state Democrat parties, and took control of a victory fund that was supposed to be for the nominee, and the state party races.

But instead, it was used to keep the National Democrat Party afloat:

On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

Read that all here at the Politico magazine web site.

According to the report, something in the neighborhood of 32 states were involved in the Dem’s money shuffling scheme – and you can see that list included South Dakota, looking back to last year as we noticed cash being dumped into the SDDP:

In one of the larger monthly FEC Reports that Democrats have filed for a while, this report is remarkable as it notes a tremendous 637,214.28 in receipts, after beginning the month with 48,900.34 cash on hand, After spending around 30K of their new cash kitty, Democrats are left with over $650,000 in their federal account.

Where did all this loot come from? If you page down to page 2, 615,296.50 of these finds are said to have come from “Affiliated/Other Party Committees,” leaving a question as to whether these finds all belong to the South Dakota Democrat Party, or if the money is a component of a larger shell game of transferring cash from one entity to a state political party or other group in order to “launder” or otherwise clean the source of a donation for the cash for purposes of transferring to an entity where such a direct donation might be disallowed.

Who donated? The lions share of the funds – $600,000 of it comes directly from the Hillary Victory Fund

That’s a lot of cash from a presidential campaign to dump into a little state like South Dakota.

Read it all here at SDWC.

And consider these massive cash moves in light of more disclosures by Donna Brazile:

Right around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

and…

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

Read that all here at the Politico magazine web site.

The entire article is pretty interesting. Even more so considering the South Dakota connection. According to the image at the top of the page, it appears South Dakota Democrats passed through at least 1.45 Million (UPDATED –  2.25 Million) over the course of 2016 – at a time when locally Democrats suffered historic defeats!

I guess we know who got the better end of that deal.