In Minnesota, the nominally (!) non-partisan supreme court justices serve six-year elected terms, or are appointed by the governor if a vacancy arises mid-term. This year, Justice Thissen, a former Democrat state legislator who was appointed to the court by former governor Mark Dayton, is up for re-election. Justice Thissen, as one might surmise by his history, is really just a legislator with a robe; whatever he prefers, so shall it be. The court currently has a 5-2 majority of such unofficial Democrats. Thus constituted, the court is reliably ‘liberal’ and utterly supine (at best) before our current governor's COVID mandates.
But his opponent is not exactly a dream candidate, having faced sanctions for questionable behavior in and out of court. For instance, she accused a judge of bias against her client in one (already ugly) case, loudly enough to draw an investigation of her own behavior. But the 'referee' didn't seem to be a model of impartiality, either. Ultimately, Our Hero was sanctioned (in 2016, by the Minnesota Supreme Court as things work here) for her behavior, but not so much as the referee had recommended.
Whatever the case may be with the challenger (perhaps she is as nutty as the ‘referee’ suggested, but I doubt it), I have had enough of the incumbent and his majority colleagues, enough to hazard some entertainment. I'd write in Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho if I thought it might help.
And what the hell: We once elected Jesse Effing Ventura to be our governor despite more than enough information at the time to know what we were getting into. And by ‘we’ I definitely don't mean me; I was happier (not thrilled, but happy enough given the alternatives) with one of the mainstream candidates, and knew enough of Mr. Ventura's politics and personality – speaking of nutty and unreliable! – to warn people, not that they were listening. ‘We shocked the world!’, he said on election night. ‘Shocked’, maybe. Disgusted, definitely.
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Completely aside: In 2004, I attended a rally at Minneapolis's Target Center (as I recall) for Bush 43's re-election campaign. At the time, the Meathead (former) Governor had taken to wearing beads in his beard and had been holding forth against Junior in his usual logic- and context-free way. (We hadn't yet learned of his assault on decency in a bar full of Navy SEALs.) Brock Lesnar, a ‘superstar’ professional wrestler at the time, jumped up on stage with a near perfect replica of the beard in hand and said, ‘I slapped it off of him!’ He didn't need to say whom. The crowd roared.
Btw, Ventura once pretended to be libertarian. Given power as the mayor of a Minneapolis suburb, he wasn't. Then he was with the Reform party and the splitter ‘Independence Party of Minnesota’. After he left office, he declared himself to be simply independent, and descended into conspiracy-mongering. (He was already a ‘Who shot JFK?’ crank, but went screaming downhill from there.) Now he's a Greenie. He might have been the victim of too many ‘pile drivers’ in the wrestling ring.
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