Readers Write: Council Member Jeremiah Ellison, progressive politics, gun control

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison’s claim that he can continue to perform his duties by flying in for a couple of council meetings a month is an insult to his constituents and to all of us who took the job seriously (“Council member splitting time in Mass. on fellowship,” Sep. 5). If attendance at a few meetings is all that is required to earn a council salary of $110,000 per year, the council is clearly overpaid. Council leadership is hiding behind City Clerk Casey Carl’s false conclusion that Ellison “isn’t breaking any rules or laws with his current arrangement,” according to the article.

Section 15.60 of the city’s ordinances provides that “a local official or employee shall not accept employment or enter a contract that interferes with the proper discharge of the local official’s or employee’s public duty.” Another section of the Code of Ethics requires that a local official must “provide notification before accepting outside employment” (a fellowship with a nice stipend of $57,000 is a pretty good gig). Ellison appears to have violated this provision by accepting this position prior to notifying the council.

“Nonfeasance” is defined as “the willful failure to perform a specific act which is a required part of the duties of the public official.” The City Council is empowered to remove Ellison for nonfeasance so long as it has the integrity to do so. Failure to do so risks severe harm to the institution of the City Council.

I call on the council president, my council member, to put political alliances aside and to do the right thing.

Paul Ostrow, Minneapolis

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Dear Council Member Ellison,

It’s a busy time for you trying to balance being a Minneapolis City Council member and a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard School of Design. Perhaps you were in a hurry to complete your Loeb Fellowship application and missed the fellowship requirements, which appear in the expectations section of the Harvard Graduate School of Design Loeb Fellowship website. Let me point out the first requirement: “Fellows must agree to step away from any significant roles with their employers and other employment responsibilities.”

While you may not consider your elected position and its responsibilities to be significant, let me assure you that Minneapolis voters and taxpayers like me do. Congratulations on winning the fellowship — now resign your City Council position, and enjoy your year at Harvard.

Elizabeth Buckingham, Minneapolis

The goals of the DSA sound lofty and noble, but DSA implementation of those goals is highly unpopular with the electorate. “Community-controlled alternatives to punitive policing” is defunding the police. “Affordable housing” and “renter protections” is rent control. “Using democratic institutions to serve working people, not corporate profit” is inserting government in wage negotiations between private businesses and employees or contractors (see the ride-share driver debacle). “Municipal grocery stores to combat corporate food apartheid” is government competing with private businesses.

No, thank you, Hanson. You can keep your brand of progressivism. Even though it’s not perfect, I’m sticking with the DFL as is.

Steve Millikan, Minneapolis

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In a letter to the editor on Tuesday, a reader proposes that “the extreme left of Minneapolis” — presumably meaning the leading challenger to Mayor Jacob Frey, the majority of the City Council and all their supporters — no longer be labeled as “progressives” but only as “socialists,” which is said to be “concise and accurate” (“Socialists and progressives. That’s all”).

Otherwise one might easily conclude that the purpose of throwing the word “socialism” around is mere scaremongering, not honest debate.

Jason McGrath, Minneapolis

The writer of the featured letter in Thursday’s Readers Write (“Prohibition will fail. Then what?”) analogized “gun control” to Prohibition in the U.S., arguing that because that ill-conceived policy led to increased crime, so would gun laws. He then proceeds to describe the imagined horror of gun confiscation as the ultimate result of such prohibition. What the writer fails to see is that the absolute prohibition created the problem in the 1920s, not alcohol regulation, and that alcohol is still very highly regulated today without those side effects.

A better analogy is to present-day alcohol regulation, which aims to allow responsible adults to enjoy a few drinks while limiting its availability to vulnerable adolescents and reducing harm from intoxication. Although it is not a perfect solution, regulation has had an ameliorating effect. The same would be true of proposed gun regulations, like universal background checks, red-flag laws, magazine limitations and banning civilian possession of some high-powered, rapid-fire weaponry. None of these would lead to the scenario pictured in the letter but would ameliorate the problem of increasing gun deaths while still allowing responsible use of firearms for things like hunting and self-protection.

On a side note, the prohibition argument actually applies to our current drug laws, but that’s a discussion for another time.

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When I was learning about parenting a teenager, a wise old soul cautioned me that nothing good ever happened after midnight on weekends, so curfews should be in order. Years far removed from this cautionary warning have found me asking: What possible good might come from someone age 25 and below being able to purchase an assault rifle? Let’s start the legislative process related to gun control by looking at what age should be mandated for purchasing these high-powered weapons.

Is there any good reason anyone 25 and under should have access to assault weapons? I am not sure what age group causes the most deaths with them, but my best guess is that keeping assault weapons out of the hands of the 25-and-under crowd would be a step in the right direction. At least this way the debate over gun registration would have a starting point that has the merit of bringing some significant and relevant data to the table.