This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
This Wednesday's Dakota Political Junkies conversation is returning to its roots. Lori Walsh brings a variety of political headlines and stories from around the state.
Mike Card is a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota.
He joins to explain, analyze and contextualize what's happening in South Dakota's political environment.
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Lori Walsh:
Welcome back to In the Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. I'm Lori Walsh. We're going to kick it old school today for our Dakota Political Junkies conversation. We've pulled some headlines from across the state, and our analyst is here to help us contextualize them.
Mike Card is a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota, and he's with me in SDPB's Kirby Family Studio. Dr. Card, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Mike Card:
Well, thank you for having me. I trust it wasn't the old style that you chose me to be the commentator today, but we'll just go with that anyway.
Lori Walsh:
We used to do this rapid fire like, "And the Rapid City Journal printed this and the Argus Leader printed this," and then we'd go to the next story and we'd go to the next story and we kind of go. We've gotten into this nice more in-depth stuff.
But today it feels like there's lots happening across the state that we need to catch people up with.
So, expanded parental leave for state employees. I'm looking at SDPB reporting from Jordan Rusche talking about the governor and what came out of this last legislative session. That's 100% paid time off up to 12 weeks for both births and adoptions. Governor Noem has to feel that this is a big win for her.
Mike Card:
I think it is. It really fits with one of her stated priorities, which is families first for South Dakota. That it's a great place to raise your family. One of the challenges that we have in the workforce is providing for both childcare, as well as an extended maternity leave.
I can certainly speak from my own family's experience and what it was like when maternity leave just didn't really exist in state government. My wife gave birth to one of our sons and got a call the next day, "We need you to handle this particular project." That kept going through what would've been her unpaid maternity leave. She didn't really get one.
Lori Walsh:
Geez.
Mike Card:
And I think that's common in most of South Dakota. And that's why the governor put forward what I thought was an innovative proposal to try to fund a pool from which the earnings would be available for grants to private sector.
It didn't make it through the legislature. That was a big loss for her. Not a big political loss, necessarily, but it's something to keep trying again because it's a good idea if we have the funds available to create the pool from which we can withdraw the earnings from that. Mike Card says it's a good idea. That doesn't mean it's a good idea, but it sure seems like a good idea to me.
Lori Walsh:
Mothers, fathers, parents of all, adopted children, as well. Including adoptions is a big step, too. This is a flag planted saying adoption matters.
Mike Card:
Yeah, adoption matters, birthing matters. Critics will probably bring up something about America First policies and Caucasians only, but I think as long as we fit it for everybody, those criticisms are a little weak.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. All right.
We're going to bounce to mineral claims and what's happening out in the Black Hills with this idea of withdrawing. This is a little complicated because this is about federal land and mining claims have skyrocketed. Lee Strubinger's reporting is what I'm referencing to here. They're encouraging the public to say, "Tell the Forest Service you want this land withdrawn."
Mike Card:
Well, yeah. Most of the mining in South Dakota, other than gravel mining, occurs in the Black Hills region. And most of that involves federal land. The federal laws are very open to mining and development.
Yet the individuals are looking at, well, this is an area, specifically the one that brought this up, is an area surrounding Pactola Lake, which provides most of the water supply for Rapid City. So there's this risk, what are the tailings going to be like and are we just really risking ourselves?
In addition to the environmental damage, many of the mining companies, not all, have a habit of exposing the ground and exposing the leachate and not cleaning up after they're done and they're short-term. "Let's go in, get the minerals out and then leave" or have this particular corporation declare bankruptcy, and then it becomes a superfund site and it's just a mess. So I understand it.
Also, it leads into one of the other stories that you mentioned. So I'll let you do the lead in, and I'll pretend I'm the guest.
Lori Walsh:
This has to do with Summit Carbon Solutions and eminent domain and lawsuits that are saying, "Hey, we have eminent domain to come onto landowners' property." I'm referencing Argus Leader reporting from Dominik Dausch. Sorry, Dominik, I don't know how to say your last name. That's my guess.
Mike Card:
Yeah, I mean, South Dakota has a history of what many people call radical politics. It's really populist in the sense that it's fighting against large corporations. If it's left-leaning populism, it fights against large corporations and environmental damage. That's been our history. We had a well-founded populist movement back in the 19th century that led to the creation of the initiative and referendum and farmer cooperatives and the like.
This particular issue does deal with eminent domain, which is the taking of property rights, certain property rights, because you can split property rights up, for public purposes. I think many people are just looking at, "Wait, they're a pipeline that's only for private purposes?" That they're going to take this carbon, move it up into North Dakota where the public purpose might be is we're not using petrochemicals to pull petrochemicals out of the ground, but we're also going to store the carbon underground so that we can do an environmentally good thing.
But yet, part of what's going on is the company seems a little belligerent. As this particular article noted that Mr. Dausch, Dausch, I'm sorry I don't-
Lori Walsh:
D-A-U-S-H. There we go.
Mike Card:
Daush noted that the copy that he got of the company's paperwork informing him that they were going to try to exercise eminent domain was at the same time that he had guests on his property, from the same company, who were trying to talk nice to him to get him to agree to the easements on the land. That's one of the strips of eminent domain of the property rights that they were trying to seize.
It seems a lot like DAPL, the Dakota Access Pipeline is, "We're going to do what we're going to do and we have the right to do this because this is a public conveyance." Yet, people are looking at carbon is a public conveyance, a carbon pipeline? And the method in which they're doing it.
Lori Walsh:
And the company says, "This is good for the planet. Go ahead and oppose an oil pipeline, but don't oppose us because this is an environmental solution for carbon net-zero." We're seeing landowners and citizens and people say, "Not so fast because we still have some questions."
Mike Card:
Well, and it's not clear. We know that pipelines eventually leak, it is a guarantee. Our hoses sometimes leak if we're having a lawn. It's a little bit more substantial pipeline than our garden hoses, but they all leak.
What does it mean if the carbon leaks? I don't think there are good answers to that that we know about. So then it's a matter of, "You're just taking my land, and I don't know what the consequences are."
Lori Walsh:
What does it mean if big projects like this are continually blocked by public effort? No pipelines, no mining, no...
Mike Card:
Storage of uranium tailings.
Lori Walsh:
No storage... right.
When people get together and say, "We don't want this," and I think the NODAPL example is an excellent one. People learned from that protest that success can happen and with the intersection of politics and who goes in the White House and out of the White House, it's a whiplash effect. It can be really difficult to get one of these projects off the ground.
Mike Card:
Well, the protest movements are what I would say are populist left. They're more populism is a rage against large corporations over the individual, and so they're trying to stop large corporations.
Well, we also like economic development in our state and that usually involves both small businesses and large businesses and corporations. So if we stop corporations from doing things, will South Dakota get the label as being bad for business? We certainly know that many of our past governors, at least starting with Joe Foss in the 1950s, is South Dakota's open for business.
Lori Walsh:
Interesting to watch going forward.
All right, let's take a broader lens, too, although that I guess is pretty broad, and talk about some of the dialogue about China, trade, and the pressures and information coming to people like Congressman Dusty Johnson about agriculture and the balance between who we do business with, who we have to do business with, who we don't want to do business with, what the Governor says don't do business with and then the reality on the ground for South Dakota farmers.
Mike Card:
Well, this is a story of competing values and politics constitutes competing values all of the time. In this particular case, it's not so much partisan politics, but it's politics about who gets to decide.
When we're looking at the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, they're not the most friendly to America groups on the face of the earth. They're quite antagonistic towards us. They're certainly siding with Russia in terms of its authoritarian activities to seize part of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. They're hiding as José... Excuse me, the president of Dakota State, because I can't pronounce her name either...
Lori Walsh:
José-Marie Griffiths? Yeah.
Mike Card:
Thank you. She noted that they're hiding their businesses that they're buying in America, keeping the previous name, but showing ownership by the government of China, which is an authoritarian government. There is little difference between the state and the government and the politicians and the private corporations. So they're hiding what properties they are buying from us. That certainly is a political activity.
On the other hand, we don't want to do business with them, but they have a claim to Taiwan, which is producing a number of the most sophisticated computer chips available on the Earth, and they want to use those for their technical machinery, as well as we do. But if they take over Taiwan, then they will have sole access to those, so we're fighting that particular front.
We can keep going with this because they consume 3% of the milk products according to the head of Valley Cheese up in Milbank. Jerry Schmitz, a Vermillion native, who's the executive director of the South Dakota Soybean Council, noted that in the COVID days, our decision not to play nice in terms of trade with the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government cost South Dakota farmers on average, soybean farmers, $50,000 in cash. We got lucky because Brazil, the other party to whom they could go for large soybean purchases, had a drought and they had to buy South Dakota and US soybeans.
So there's lots of different parties, and yet it's easy to raise money because most of us don't like China. Right now, most of us aren't liking Russia very much either. But with China particularly, it's easy to raise campaign money, but it hurts our own merchants because they work in a worldwide market.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, interesting. One more headline, this one's from the New York Times.
I was referencing Annie Todd's reporting from the Argus Leader on that last bit.
So this one's New York Times, and this is immigration, Title 42 is going to expire, so these are emergency measures that were during the pandemic.
President Biden doesn't want a surge of migrants coming across the border and then really feeling blamed for it.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the House are trying their own attempted immigration reform, which is very different than how Democrats define immigration reform. I'm just cringing at the kind of a mess that we're going to be talking about all summer long, perhaps.
Mike Card:
It is clearly a mess. Yet, I hope that your listeners were tuning in yesterday as you had a South Dakotan who was down at the border who was describing that these are people facing terrible personal risks in order to try to come to America, the land of opportunity. Yet at the same time, we have a large portion of our population that doesn't want any more immigration and so we're trying to stop this.
But what we've got is at least a 20-year history of the inability to have an immigration policy that can be agreeable by a majority of Congress. Under President George W. Bush, he proposed an immigration reform bill that he couldn't get through the Congress when both parties were under the control of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party hasn't been able to produce anything. Until we start talking with each other, as opposed to at each other, which is what we're doing now, we're not going to have an immigration policy that allows us to bring skilled people in, accept the refugees of the world who are seeking opportunity and have lower levels of crime than Americans have, than people who are residents and citizens, and yet bring something to share, and that is largely their labor, because we have a labor shortage in America.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Refugee is not a synonym for terrorist.
Mike Card:
It is not.
Lori Walsh:
Or criminal.
Let's leave it there. That was our rapid fire. Dr. Mike Card, USD professor emeritus, political scientist, it is always a delight to have you in the office and have you help explain things for people who are busy listeners and want a quick update and then also provide some insight and analysis.
Thanks so much, we'll see you next time.
Mike Card:
You're very kind. Thanks for having me.
