Charles Tuttle

Minot

The North Dakota Legislature is no longer a Government of the people, by the people and for the people.

I really don’t know where to begin. The North Dakota Legislature has completely lost its way.

We have leadership telling new legislators to put away their copies of the North Dakota Constitution because it causes nothing but trouble.

We have misappropriation of constitutional funds from the common school’s trust fund and budget stabilization fund. When they were called out on this issue they refused to replace the constitutional amounts. We have government growth and spending beyond belief. Every proposed tax break for North Dakotans has been defeated. We are one of four states that tax our elders’ Social Security income, while we give hundreds of millions of dollars (over a billion in several biennium’s) to out-of-state families to come to our universities. They now want to end all transparency by preventing open records requests on state employees lobbying the Legislature.

Don’t we the people have the right to know what is going on? We have legislators that say the people can’t be trusted when initiating laws. Several bills will be put on the ballot to have us vote our rights away. The last session we had our new congressman push a bill that would have enriched his family and friends by hundreds of millions of dollars. It took a lawsuit to stop the unconstitutional gift of $187 million.

We still have common core curriculum called (North Dakota Standards). Our schools are ranked 43rd in the country, and what do our legislators do but nothing. We have now totally done away with God; in North Dakota, the Legislature finally after many failures has accomplished the removal of our Sunday blue laws.

Attending church in North Dakota used to be more important than making money. That’s what made us legendary. I shall end this with a quote from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that the government of the people, by the people, for people, shall not perish from the earth.