Plain Talk

After more than two decades in the North Dakota legislature, having served in some consequential ways, as an influential appropriator and eventually leader the majority Republican caucus, Rep. Chet Pollert is calling it a career.

On this episode of Plain Talk, he talked about that decision, as well as what changed during his tenure in office, and what challenges North Dakota might face in the future.

"There was a decorum," Pollert said of politics when he first got started in the legislature. "There was a process...and we seem to have gotten away from that a little more."

He said modern politics have become more personal, and more divisive. "I want us to be able to fight like cats and dogs but also be able to respect one another," he said.

He has some personal experience with how personal state politics has gotten. Under Pollert's leadership last year, the state House took the extraordinary step of expelling a member for the first time in state history. Luke Simons, at the time a Representative from a Dickinson-area district, was voted out of his seat after being accused by multiple women, including two fellow Republican lawmakers, in a landslide vote that included a 2-1 majority among his fellow Republicans.

"I felt it had to be done," Pollert said of the vote, though he added that it was "a very unpleasant time" during which both he and his wife received ugly phone calls and messages from Simons supporters.

Pollert said his proudest accomplishment as a lawmaker was showing his children the importance of public service. As for what challenges face North Dakota's leaders going forward? Protecting baseload energy production, and the reliability of the power grid, are at the top of his list as well as managing the Legacy Fund so that it can be a resource for funding the state's needs as oil activity, and thus oil revenues, decline in future decades.

Rep. Michael Howe, a Republican from West Fargo, also joined the show to talk about his interest in running for Secretary of State. The incumbent, Al Jaeger, has held that office since 1992. "I was in kindergarten then," Howe said. Now that Jaeger has announced he's retiring, Howe said it's time for some new leadership.

He'd like the office to get better at handling business filings, which has been a recurring theme of Secretary of State campaigns for years now. He also spoke about how he'd rebuild trust in elections, at a time when many Americans have lost it.

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I make a living writing and talking about politics, and I divide the topics I cover up into two categories.

First, there's the sexy stuff. The hot-button stuff. Topics that immediately stir up interest from the audience. It's the stuff we spend most of our time talking about. How big should the government be, and how much should it cost us? Stuff like that.

Then there's the unsexy stuff. Like blockchain.

What is blockchain? North Dakota Chief Information Officer Shawn Riley knows. He's an advocate for it. He tried to explain it to this humble political wonk on this episode of Plain Talk, and what he said makes a lot of sense.

Blockchain is a way of recording transactions in a way that's simultaneously secure and transparent. He believes it could be used in everything from recording title histories for property to tracking mineral rights and, yes, even voting.

Nerd stuff, I know, but the impact could be very sexy in terms of that thing we all care about, which is how much government is costing us.

Riley estimates that North Dakota has something like $1.2 billion in what he calls "tech debt," which is to say investments in dated technology that needs to be upgraded. There's no holding back the rapid advance of technology, but Riley argues that if we implement blockchain for the information our government is built around - all the little transactions and data the state records and keeps - upgrading that technology could be a lot cheaper in the future.

We all know how divided we are as a country. Politics has always been an ugly business, but it's perhaps uglier right now than any time in recent memory.

Given that, who would want to run for public office, and expose themselves to the brutal acrimony of an increasingly uncivil process?

On this episode of Plain Talk, I spoke with two candidates for the North Dakota legislature about that very topic.

Mike Motschenbacher is running for the state House in District 47 in the Bismarck area. Mason Wede is running for the state Senate in District 29. They're both Republicans, and they both say that, as bad as things are, it's a job somebody has to do.

Our state, and our communities, has challenges. There are budgets that must be written. And if principled grownups aren't willing to do those jobs, who will?

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Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic malaise, America's employers have been in a crunch. Not only are their costs rising due to supply line snaggles, but many of them are having trouble finding and keeping workers.

Jonathan Holth is one a North Dakota employer. He is a co-founder of the Toasted Frog restaurant in downtown Grand Forks, and has since opened additional locations in Bismarck and Fargo. He's also the co-owner of the Urban Stampede Coffee Bar in Grand Forks. On this episode of Plain Talk, he discusses what his business has been doing to keep workers on the job, which includes getting creative with leave time and other benefits.

Among the creativity is an accepting approach to employees struggling with addiction. Holth himself is nearly 14 years sober, and was appointed by Governor Doug Burgum to serve on the advisory council for North Dakota's Office of Recovery Reinvented.

Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I talk about the upcoming anniversary of the January 6 riot in Washington D.C. and the growing mainstream acceptance of political extremism in America.

One thing I think about, as our kids return to school from a long holiday break, is how hard it can be to get them back into the education groove.

That challenge is perhaps on the minds of parents more so now than before, given the way COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down.

In October Kirsten Baesler, the Superintendent of North Dakota's public school system, released data from testing showing significant pandemic-era declines among the state's students in proficiency levels for English and mathematics.

How worried should that make you?

Perhaps not as worried as you think you should be says Dr. Dann Conn.

Conn is a professor of teacher education and kinesiology at Minot State University. He's also the co-author of a book, Unraveling the Assessment Industrial Complex, which calls into question the purpose and efficacies of the very testing regime being used to measure educational declines.

"Kids are resilient," Conn said on this episode of Plain Talk. "They'll bounce back."

He argues that parents, educators, and policymakers ought to be more focused on what we might call real-world outcomes than testing scores.

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Wayne Stenehjem, North Dakota's long-time Attorney General, announced recently that he'll end a more than four-decades-long career in elected office once his term is up next year.

Who will replace him? The name you'll hear most often in those conversations is Drew Wrigley, who served two stints as North Dakota's U.S. Attorney, one under former President George W. Bush, and another under former President Donald Trump, and between them served six years as Lt. Governor under former Governor Jack Dalrymple.

Wrigley joined this episode of Plain Talk to say nothing definitive about if he's running, though it sure seems like he is. In addition to speaking about what his approach to the office would be, what priorities he'd focus on, and his philosophy about the job of Attorney General, Wrigley hinted that those interested in whether he's running or not might want to check the candidate filings at the Secretary of State's office in the first week of 2022.

This seems to me like a pretty good confirmation that he's running.

It's been a wild year in North Dakota politics, from a lawmaker getting expelled from the Legislature for the first time in state history to a small group of NDGOP leaders walking out of their own party's meeting just last week.

On this episode of Plain Talk I was joined by Chad Oban and Jamie Selzler, both former executive directors of the North Dakota Democratic-NPL, to talk about the year that was in North Dakota.

We also talk about what next year, an election year, has in store.

Wayne Stenehjem has served the State of North Dakota in elected office for more than 40 years, from his stint in the Legislature starting in the mid-1970s to two decades serving as Attorney General.

Now, he's calling it a career, announcing that he'll step down once his current four-year term is up. Stenehjem joined this episode of Plain Talk to discuss it.

To say that his career was consequential for our state would be an understatement. In the Legislature, where he served with two of his brothers, Alan and Bob, something he believes to be unprecedented in America's legislative bodies, he had a hand in creating the open records and meetings law state government operates under today. He pushed for a uniform court system, moving it beyond an antiquated system that saw different areas of North Dakota served by different sorts of courts. When he became Attorney General in 2000, the State of North Dakota didn't even have a crime lab to handle evidence like fingerprints and DNA.

But it wasn't all serious business. Stenehjem also recounts how he reacted with his brother Bob, then the Senate Majority Leader, would steal his parking space at the capitol during a legislative session.

Also on this episode, North Dakota has had an ongoing debate about ethics for years now, well before voters approved an ethics amendment for the state constitution. Some of the people behind that push have notions about what constitutes ethics, as far as campaign finance go, that are hard to square with how Americans have traditionally viewed free speech and participatory democracy.

Public Service Commissioner Julie Fedorchak, whose office has become ground zero for this argument, joined Plain Talk to discuss.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer joined this episode of Plain Talk and discussed all sorts of stuff.

The January 6 committee, and what it's revealed about the way former President Donald Trump handled the riot at the U.S. capitol.

The Build Back Better plan.

The state of inflation.

The retrenchment going on in the Republican party.

Carbon capture.

Also, the divides in the national Republican party are impacted the NDGOP as well. Cramer, a former chairman of the NDGOP, weighs in on some of the rule changes being discussed by his state party relating to how the party does its business around state conventions and endorsing candidates.

Politics in North Dakota are about as divisive these days as they are anywhere else. In our state, the divide in the Republican party is between traditional Republicans and a faction of conservatives, in-step with former President Donald Trump, who feel the state's Republicans haven't been conservative enough.

I've been writing and talking about this divide a lot, and recently state Rep. Jeff Hoverson, a Republican from Minot and a member of the Bastiat Caucus of lawmakers who align with this faction, asked to come on the podcast to talk it out.

So Hoverson joined my Wednesday co-host Chad Oban and I and we talked about Hoverson calling people who disagree with him "enemy" and the other things that are dividing us.

I'm not sure we changed anybody's mind, but it was good conversation.

Also, Oban and I discuss some of the changes the NDGOP is making to their state convention and candidate endorsement process. I wrote about the proposed rule change for the timing of the convention in recent column, and we talked about that, but we also discussed another potential rule change that would make it harder for candidates to seek the NDGOP's endorsement. It would even require the candidates to pay the party for the privilege of being considered.

Good idea or bad? We talked it out.