Tag: 3rd Congressional District

Dean Phillips offers a new direction for Third District Voters

Phillips emphasizes bipartisanship, transparency, and common-sense reforms at MPR News debate

Dean Phillips, DFL candidate for Congress in Minnesota’s Third Congressional District, today shared his vision of a Congress that puts people over the interests of corporations and wealthy special interests at a debate hosted by Minnesota Public Radio.
Phillips laid out thoughtful, specific plans to protect and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, guarantee access to quality affordable health care for all Minnesotans, and return transparency and accessibility to a political system that has become mired in dark money interests. Phillips is the only Congressional candidate in the country who has not self-funded or accepted any money from corporations, special interests, PACs, or Members of Congress.

On health care: “I think it’s time that our nation makes the moral decision to ensure that everybody has health care because we are the only developed nation in the world that chooses not to do so right now… I believe in choice. I believe in the freedom to have options. I believe in competition. I believe the way forward is to ensure that there is more competition and more choices… I think it’s time that we start rewarding prevention, rather than rewarding procedures.” Continue reading “Dean Phillips offers a new direction for Third District Voters”

Erik Paulsen voted to keep Trump’s tax returns a secret

Republican U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen is paddling toward reclaiming his seat as quickly as he can, in part by promising to “stand up to” his party “and President [Donald] Trump” if push comes to shove.

Well, last month, he had his chance. He did not take it.

At issue were Trump’s tax returns, which have remained secret and are now back in the limelight. After 18 months of trawling through the Trump family’s financial dirty laundry, The New York Times published a scathing report accusing the sitting president of “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud,” helping his parents sidestep taxes, and undervaluing that money so he could siphon as much as possible to himself and his siblings.

A Trump lawyer has called these allegations “100 percent false.” Trump himself described the story as “a very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

View the complete October 5 article by Hannah Jones on the CityPages website here.

Messages are dividing the country

The upcoming election is again subjecting voters to inflammatory and deceptive advertisements by candidates and special interest to artificial divide our country.

Recognizing that these divisive advertisements have some success in creating harmful divisions, I have faith we can still agree on something: Congress isn’t working as confirmed by Gallup Inc.’s 40 years of polling America’s approval of Congress. Since 2010 approval of Congress has hovered between 10 percent and 20 percent. The institution is broken. Why?

Listening to eulogies for Sen. John McCain, I was struck by one speaker’s words of the senator: “He did understand that some principals transcend politics, that some values transcend party. … he understood that if we get in the habit of bending the truth to suit political expediency or party orthodoxy, our democracy will not work.” Continue reading “Messages are dividing the country”

Voters consistently rank health care as their top political concern. What does that mean for Minnesota’s House races?

Ask any candidate for Congress in Minnesota this year about health care, and they’re almost certain to tell you it’s one of the most important issues in their districts — if not the single most important issue.

Opinion polling backs that up: a recent CBS News poll found that 70 percent of Americans think health care is a very important issue, a larger share than any other top issue. A similar conclusion has been reached by plenty of other polls conducted over the last few months, which also find that health care is foremost in voters’ minds, even above the economy and headline-grabbing topics like immigration.

Just because seemingly everyone agrees health care should be a top focus, though, doesn’t mean they agree on what parts of the issue to focus on: for the most part, Democratic and Republican candidates are telling voters very different stories when it comes to the politics of health care.

View the complete September 28 article by Sam Brodey on the MinnPost website here.

24 House Ratings Change in Favor of Democrats, One Month Out

 

Roll Call elections analyst Nathan L. Gonzales has two dozen House race ratings shifts — and they’re all positive for Democrats. Nearly one month from Election Day, Gonzales discusses how it’s more a question of Democratic prospects being good or great in the House than anything else. See below for a full list of all the ratings shifts and watch the video for more analysis.  Continue reading “24 House Ratings Change in Favor of Democrats, One Month Out”

These representatives voted to keep Trump’s sketchy tax practices hidden from the public

NOTE:  Rep. Erik Paulsen sits on the House Ways and Means Committee and is one of the representatives who voted to keep Trump’s taxes private — more than once.

21 House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee blocked disclosure of Donald Trump’s tax returns last month.

The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report on Tuesday accusing President Donald Trump of participating in “dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud.” Despite his many 2016 campaign promises to eventually release his tax returns, he refuses to do so, and the public is still in the dark about his personal finances. Now, thanks to a vote last month by the 21 Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee, those tax returns are unlikely to come to light in the foreseeable future. Those Republicans voted to keep the president’s tax returns hidden.

Relying on a “vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records,” the Times determined that Trump “helped his parents dodge taxes,” established with his siblings a “sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents,” assisted their father in taking “improper tax deductions worth millions more,” and formulated a “strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.”

A Trump lawyer claimed these “allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” but the president didn’t deny them. In a tweet, he repeated his standard and false claim that the paper is “failing” and described their story as “a very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

View the complete October 3 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Phillips is a champion for affordable health care

To the editor:

Why did Third Congressional District Rep. Erik Paulsen use a big money super PAC mouthpiece to mock DFL nominee Dean Phillips, instead of directly addressing affordable health care issues facing his constituents?

An advertisement claims that Phillips did not provide health care to his employees at Penny’s Coffee. Paulsen’s campaign then echoed the claim in an ad with a similar tone. These are misleading and false, as numerous local media outlets have reported.

First off, Paulsen does not know of the pressures of maintaining a small business, especially during the tumultuous first year of a company. If anyone is qualified to speak on such issues, it is Phillips. Continue reading “Phillips is a champion for affordable health care”

So, you saw a nasty ad …

As you may have noticed, Erik Paulsen and his special interest patrons are spending millions of dollars to flood the airwaves with negative attack ads again Dean Phillips. You might have questions, and Dean and his campaign team were happy to shed light on the truth:

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Dean Phillips is running a people-powered campaign because he believes that our politics are broken — and these kind of ads are part of the problem. Dean has taken $0 from PACs, lobbyists or members of Congress; instead, 64,000 individuals have contributed to the campaign, at an average donation of us $32. Change is coming, and everyone’s invited!