Former vice president says debate, hearings should have been held

By Dan Linehan

MANKATO — Only a dysfunctional Congress would allow a U.S. Senator to quietly alter legislation to allow a former employer an opportunity to collect a $2.3 billion federal loan, former Vice President Walter Mondale argued Friday at a public forum.

Mondale, also a former senator, said it was “absolutely stunning” that a loan of this size could find its way into a transportation bill without weeks of congressional debate. But he adds that even public dialogue wouldn’t have been enough for the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad.

“I can’t imagine it would have passed,” Mondale said.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a former DM&E lobbyist, inserted an amendment into the transportation bill that, among other changes, increased the amount of loans from $3.5 billion to $35 billion and emphasized regional railroads like DM&E.

Mondale joined a Mayo Clinic administrator, local community activist and — notably — Taxpayers League of Minnesota President David Strom, a conservative who has been critical of Mondale in the past, at the Minnesota State University event.

“I think it’s fair to say that over the years we’ve had fairly substantial policy differences,” Strom said after the forum, which was attended by about 115 people. It was organized by the Rochester Coalition’s Track the Truth campaign.

But Strom said there could be “no debate” that the loan was the product of a “broken political process.”

Mondale compared the DM&E loan to the Chrysler bailout loan of 1980, saying the car maker’s subsidy was scrutinized far more than the railroad’s.

But one of the railroad’s supporters and documents provided by the railroad paint a different picture.

Randy Rieke, general manager of the Farmer’s Cooperative of Hanska, attended the forum and said the participants “just kinda repeated a lot of the same rhetoric that they’ve been talking about.”

He also had a different perspective on Thune’s amendment.

“As I was driving home, I thought to myself, ‘I should have gotten up and asked (Mondale): You can honestly tell me that you have never hid something in a bill?’” Rieke said. “That’s American politics. That’s been going on forever.”

Records of the loan program provided by DM&E and letters from railroad trade groups indicate that such groups have for years been lobbying the government to make changes similar to Thune’s. Those documents present the perspective that Thune’s amendment wasn’t the work of a rogue lobbyist-turned-Senator, but the continuation of the industry’s longtime requests.