Party of Fiscal Irresponsibility

Ironically, the self-styled party of fiscal responsibility in Minnesota is unable to pay the rent. As mentioned in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Politico has called the Minnesota GOP a disaster. The state GOP is more than a million dollars in debt only a year and a half after engineering a takeover of the Minnesota House and Senate and only narrowly losing the governor's office.

This comes on top of another story from a few days earlier: fired Senate staffer Michael Brodkorb is suing the GOP-controlled Senate for half a million bucks for defamation of character:

Brodkorb's new claim is that Senate Secretary Cal Ludeman defamed him when he told the press that Brodkorb was trying to "blackmail" and "extort payment from the Senate" through his legal case for wrongful termination. Brodkorb was fired in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch's resignation from the leadership after senators confronted her about the affair she was having with him.

Brodkorb was terminated after his affair with former Senate majority leader Amy Koch came to light (both are married to other people), and she resigned under pressure. He's also suing the Senate for wrongful termination and gender discrimination because he claims women who had affairs with male legislators in the past retained their jobs. And he's suing some of the senators for "invasion of privacy" for outing his affair. This is that same "right to privacy" that Brodkorb and other Republicans don't think women have when they're seeking contraceptives and abortions.

Brodkorb made his name for creating the infamous "Minnesota Democrats Exposed" blog. Now he's threatening to expose Minnesota Republicans as well, by airing their dirty laundry in court, bringing into evidence previous affairs that had been uncovered in the Senate (the blackmail and extortion that Ludeman was talking about).

This is exactly the sort of lawsuit that Republicans keep telling us is the absolute worst kind of welfare for trial lawyers. Somehow it's bad for us regular joes to file class action lawsuits against giant oil and gas companies that poison our drinking water, but it's perfectly fine for a Republican to sue his former colleagues in the state senate for getting caught boinking his boss.

The worst part of it is that Brodkorb's lawsuit will cost the state of Minnesota a ton of money in lawyers' fee, even if the state wins. Also quite irksome is the fact that Ludeman refuses to say how much state money he's spending on these lawyers: he's claiming lawyer-client privilege. The way I see it, the state taxpayers are the clients; we should at least have the privilege of knowing how much we're forking out for litigating this ludicrous infighting among Republicans.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are pushing a minority voter suppression amendment to the state constitution thinly veiled as "voter ID," and an amendment to ban gay marriage. Somehow Republicans think that gays marrying will "destroy" marriage, when it's clear that Republicans like Brodkorb (and Gingrich and Limbaugh) are well on their way to destroying marriage all by themselves.