Whelan most likely will gain seniority. The district is as it is, and anyone in her own party, even one presently on the county board who for one reason or another might challenge her, would face unlikely prospects. Were Abeler to decide to try for a stint on the county board it would be interesting with him there and Whelan in the legislature. Petersen being challenged from within his own party is equally unlikely, and if it happens, it is unlikely an insurgency would succeed.
Whelan has a legitimate education, without any fudging of the resume needed; not a Jungbauer that way and she clearly is a bright person. One can tell that immediately, from speaking to her.
She benefited from having a TA helping her financially while gaining her master's degree. Likely she will not forget that and will be attuned to needs and hopes at the Twin Cities campus.
While many including myself with a grounding in the hard sciences dislike the term "social science" and prefer the term used in my high school, "social studies," Whelan's degree in "political science" or "political studies" augers for her having a basis beyond work in the district for understanding the process of getting reelected, while at the same time having a broad notion of legislative function.
Trained where conflicting ideas gain attention and review, she is in a good position to show a bipartisan willingness to get actual problems fixed. She has a district, with its constituency, and must balance the mood of her electorate with other concerns.
The Twin Cities campus, its faculty, is the cream of the state's university system, and all effort to keep it continually funded and intact will benefit the training of future generations of innovators who will found the next 3M or the next Medtronic, moving on to where my generation will yield to Whelan's.
The hope is she is willing to face the work that keeping up the quality of the TC campus against budget-cutter hawkish dogma entails, and that she will not let any out-state vs. metro mentality within her party interfere with the work that way which matters.
Having favored Perovich in this election and when he ran opposite Petersen, always then and still believing Peter would have been an excellent person to send to the legislature, the vote was as it is and the election is over so that hoping for and anticipating responsible governing is today's task, not further electioneering.
___________UPDATE____________
Given that Whelan is defined in part this session by her bills for which she is chief author, and those which for whatever reasons she co-sponsors; that information is online respectively "chief author" here and "author" here. In part we can judge her by the company she keeps. However, this early in a freshman session, we should not be too hasty to judge. Either way.
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As one who premised part of a compaign on millenials' Angst issues, Whelan should hopefully be aware of this link.
Every coin has two sides. Peter Perovich most surely would not have gone anywhere near this kind of governmental overreaching and divisive intrusion into private decision making of people, into the bowels of personal privacy with interference of the worse kind imaginable between a person and her doctor and their decision making and conduct. Abortion is not the state's fucking business; it is a matter of personal, individual liberty. The Senate companion text does not have the string of co-sponsors this sorry, sorry intrusive thing has. And that speaks well of those in the Senate, each and every one of whom put liberty ahead of nanny state intrusion of the most dispicable kind in declining to join Sean Nienow and crew. The house zealots, each and every one of them, should be ashamed of themselves.
That kind of stuff should have "Liberty Republicans" up in arms. They instead carp over economic regulatory measures but when real personal liberties of the most basic and personal kind are involved they can be seen courageously taking a hike.
Until they face up to their cohorts pushing this intrusive agenda, they should not be taken for much beyond a pack of hypocrites.
__________FURTHER UPDATE_________
Here is a screen capture for HF 1047, showing the host of co-authors along with Ms. Whalen as chief author, and the apparent fast-tracking of the thing through Daudt-led committee structure:
Click the image and read the parade of names.
Strib recently has begun a series of reports on affordable housing, which is somewhat collateral in general to the question here, except for this from Strib's latest on the topic
According to the Met Council, 74 percent of applicants in the recent lottery were “single female heads of household.” Since the 1970s, two incomes have been the key to preserving middle-class lives for millions of American households. It’s not impolite to suggest that “domestic teamwork,” coupled with job training and two adequate paychecks, could reduce the daunting demand for affordable housing.
Getting the drift? These wicked busybodies wanting to interject the full power and will of the State between a pregnant unmarried female and her right to an abortion, (look at all those male co-authors - a story in itself), but those folks, with Ms. Whelan as lead author in the hunt against women, have no companion measure to alleviate the ongoing punishment they'd inflict upon such women in distress.
It truly is heartless. Demanding senseless suffering of others is not sound statewide policy.
I await Ms. Whelan's companion bill for relief of the anguish of impoverished single-mother families which involve actual real existing human children of those families being forced to suffer, because of some ill-reasoned will of a pack of prudes to deny abortion against a potential but not actual living sentient suffering human being.
Playing God that way in apportioning suffering is not a very decent thing to be doing.
I want to see that companion bill. Moreover, I most interestedly want to see the list of co-authors it might engender.
At this point, Whelan stands for the worse enemy of single female parent families - their worse suffering nightmare, and in posing as a compassionate Christian she needs to reexamine herself in light of the imbalance in her approach to responsible legislative norms. The decent thing is if you legislate a curb on a freedom that you legislate companion relief of the mischief you cause.
It is not the government's place to interfere in private reproductive decision making allowing a pregnan woman a full spectrum of available relief, while it is the government's responsibility to alleviate the sting and pain of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Particularly if forced there by government action. Private charity can participate, the option is there, but the responsibility is that of the State, since economic policy sets the winners and losers in our capitalist US of America.
Denying the right to exercise reproductive liberty while turning a blind eye to suffering attendant to such a denial is nothing short of heartless and wicked. Those fine Christians simply should reevaluate themselves in the light of reality instead of singing hosannas to varied mythologies perpetrated from some pulpit.
___________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Give Whelan and cohorts credit. At least they are not sneaks about it. Give them time perhaps, and they will reach the pinnacle of success in hiding Hyde Amendments, were it their goal to be other than strident, confrontational, and obnoxious in their ways. Feeding a frenzy among a segment of like-minded people is the purpose of the bill, as it will never be passed into law while Dayton remains Governor. They know that, but spiel on anyway because of who they are.