Ross Hausfeld, Minot

Well it’s done. Despite receiving a super-majority Do Not Pass vote from the House Transportation Committee of 9 to 5 the House at large voted to pass Senate Bill 2362, foisting upon us the gift of the police’s watchful eye on whether every person in a motor vehicle is wearing a safety belt or not. This despite virtually all these same Legislators voting not one Session ago that it was also our ‘right’ to not wear a mask and spread infectious disease as much as we would like.

Endangering other people good, endangering yourself bad. So says the North Dakota Legislature. Was the mask mandate ban simply political posturing in the heat of the moment to score points or does the hypocrisy really not register for them? They are politicians after all so I’ll leave the reader to decide. I know I for one simply cannot wait for the gloating from our police-parents this summer in radio and television ads that they’ll be ‘cracking down like never before’ and establishing police checkpoints to monitor our behavior. There is nothing I love more than being casually threatened and patronized as a law abiding citizen. Perhaps you think this is hyperbole; it is not. I’ve witnessed it in other states and this is what they do with that new power. I can bet they’ll love the ticket revenue too.

I have learned a great deal about our state’s political machine after closely observing it this year compared to perhaps any other year in my life. For example I did not know that unlike every other state I can think of our legislative committees don’t apparently have the power to table bills. If they did, the House Transportation’s Do Not Pass vote would have succeeded in ending this bill’s progress and preventing a chamber-wide vote. It brings me to a question; if the committees’ votes are nonbinding why even have committees? For the hearings? That doesn’t make sense to me. May as well just throw every bill out front and ask for Yes or No votes all day long and call it a day.

I have also seen the true depths of the issue of how one political party’s death-grip on power here has allowed it to drift fully into a shiftless, amorphous blob. Competition is good and necessary in virtually all facets of life and politics is no different. Will the recently mandated term limits help to coax these career Legislators out the door and bring in people who actually believe in something? I’m not sure but it’s nice to hope.

We suffer the same issues as Wyoming does in this case: a Republican Party far too comfortable with unthreatened power. In Wyoming the Republican Legislature has indeed fractured into two different factions with one calling the other ‘liberals’ and the other calling it ‘the far right’ and invoking interesting rhetoric to try limit their membership. This is in contrast to Montana where Republican control is not tomorrow’s promise and they have to actually deliver their brand. It has been fascinating watching their legislative progress as a voting bloc working in concert to deliver ‘the goods’ to their voters. Unlike here in North Dakota, where they are still fighting over how best to give us taxpayers as few scraps as possible from the enormous budget surpluses.

The lesson I leave to anyone reading is the importance of actually paying attention to what your elected leadership is doing. If you leave them alone this is what happens and you may not like the results. Life is so busy and adding something as time consuming as meaningful political engagement to it is barely on the radar of most people; I get that. If you have ever thought of running for office with new ideas, regardless of which area of the political compass you fall on, I would encourage you to seriously consider running in the upcoming cycle. Give these career politicians some competition for once.