Forum Communications Editorial - Choice for Senate: Klobuchar

Talk about it

Editor’s note: A longer version of this editorial appeared in The Duluth News Tribune. The position was determined by its editorial board and Forum Communications. The Echo Press is also a Forum Communications newspaper.

For six years, Amy Klobuchar, the first Minnesota woman ever elected to the Senate, has stood strong with jobs-hungry Minnesotans and with jobs-producing Minnesota businesses.

On November 6, voters who are eager like she is for our nation to “move forward” again have the opportunity to send her back to Washington to continue to work and to fight on Minnesotans’ behalf.

Her first term in D.C. has been filled with working and fighting — and successes. Like bringing broadband to rural Minnesota. And curbing excessive price speculation in oil markets, something that artificially drives up gas prices. And encouraging international tourism by shortening the excessively long time it takes for foreign travelers to receive U.S. tourist vistas.

Klobuchar has worked effectively with Minnesota’s other representatives in Washington — namely fellow Democratic U.S. Sen. Al Franken and Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Cravaack — to make sure U.S.-made steel is the steel that gets used in federal and state transportation, public-works, bonding and other projects that receive public funding, as well as in the production of metal-armor plates for our military.

She has been on the front lines at the federal level in what has become a national struggle against dangerous synthetic drugs.

With Franken and Cravaack, she supported legislation to make sure deployed Minnesota guardsmen fighting overseas received days off and other benefits they were promised on their return; the benefits were threatened mid-deployment. And just this year, Klobuchar and others sponsored a bill to address security concerns in smaller, more-rural courthouses in response to a courthouse shooting in Grand Marais in December.

Klobuchar’s Republican opponent is Kurt Bills, a straight-talking city councilor and high school economics teacher from Rosemount.

“This isn’t an Amy vs. Kurt thing. This is an America vs. D.C. thing. Our country is so out of equilibrium right now,” Bills said at a candidate forum. “We have to send an independent voice [to Washington], somebody who has looked into the eyes of kids for 15 years and answered their questions.”

Like Klobuchar, Bills talks about a way forward. His includes an unspecified “great compromise.” Hers includes an educational system that fills the jobs of tomorrow. And it includes fiscal stability.

How? “You have to make sure you bring the debt down in a balanced way,” she said. “It’s going to take sacrifice from everybody. It’s going to take spending cuts, but it’s also going to take comprehensive tax reform and looking at it in a way where we actually bring the business rates down so we encourage business development in Minnesota… And it finally means looking at red tape, rules and regulations in a very thoughtful way.”

Tags: opinion, editorials