This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Our Dakota Political Junkies discuss the bills from the 2025 session that surprised them, including one that removed the felony for the ingestion of controlled substances.
Plus, was this session a true "reset"?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen is co-host of the Dakota Town Hall podcast. Kevin Woster is a long-time South Dakota journalist who's reported for the Argus Leader, the Rapid City Journal, KELO and SDPB.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Kevin Woster:
First of all, I was struck by the fact that they actually took the ingestion felony away from meth.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Yeah. Did not see that on my bingo card.
Kevin Woster:
Isn't that amazing?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Yeah. Did not see it then. Didn't see it even being signed without a fight. Really. That's a good point.
Kevin Woster:
And yeah, it went to Rhoden, and Rhoden signed it. I mean, it was stunning. And I think it was wise. Not everything they did this session was wise, of course. But that I didn't see coming.
I was extremely happy, as you might imagine, that they put the vindictive destruction of the SDPB budget back in, you know, salvaged it.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Pay full price for my equipment now.
Kevin Woster:
Yeah. Somebody that for some reason just decided it was time to wreck SDPB.
Lori Walsh:
SDPB funding fully restored. Thank you listeners.
Kevin Woster:
Good job, legislators. Good job people that got involved. And you know, I think Tony Venhuizen was talking about a perfect example of how that system works out there when people show up and legislators listen and do the right thing. So that was good. And the library funding came back.
Lori Walsh:
Not all of it. Not all of it, but most of it.
Kevin Woster:
Yeah, most of it. And they did a lot better than it looked like they might do initially.
And I was very happy that we decided we're not going to put librarians in prison because a stray copy of "Catcher in the Rye" ends up in the wrong hands. That was exciting.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Exciting. It was so exciting
Kevin Woster:
Well, it's odd. And here I'm a Catholic school dad. My kids went to Catholic school at O'Gorman and, hey, how about the girls over the weekend? And I'm always happy when the vouchers go down because I was thrilled to send my kids to Catholic school and pay the tuition. And I was thrilled to keep paying my property taxes for public education. Because guess what? I'm a citizen. Amazing, huh? What a thought.
Lori Walsh:
So you're referring to the education savings accounts. It's what we heard a lot about at the beginning of the session. And those were defeated. They did not make it through to the end.
Kevin Woster:
Which was again, a really wise thing. Could you call this session, the session of the big "No," in a lot of ways, I suppose?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
It's getting advertised as the reset.
Kevin Woster:
Is that the same thing?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I see that on the executive level, but I think that's the only way it applies. There were 20 bills killed on the House floor. That's a lot of bills. That tells a listening audience that there is no harmony between the committee, committee leadership, and the floor. That's a hostile way to run a House even for the House.
Kevin Woster:
Yeah. That's saying a lot.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
And that being said, the House was the calming voice of reason this year compared to the Senate. I don't even know how that works.
Lori Walsh:
So let's go back to what you said about that's not the way to. It means there's probably more than one way of looking at that. The bills killed on the House floor could indicate a lack of coordination between the committees leadership and the House proper.
Also, someone could argue more things got heard, more things got discussed, more things were sent to the full body, and there's something good about that, or what the heck is a committee for. So there's more than one way to look at it. And you're pointing out that that's highly unusual, at the very least.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I mean, I hear you that more issues might get heard on the floor in theory, but there's so much room for committee, that's where you prep a bill for primetime. And I see a lot of leadership going back home and bragging about some issues. But I'm not trying to pick on Scott Odenbach, but I don't know what bill did he prime sponsor that got passed? They dropped the ball on education on their voucher deal. We're celebrating it as wins, but I look at it as they just couldn't get it home.
Lori Walsh:
So they had to contend, Kevin, with a new governor and a change over then. And then the budget address or the budget proposal that Kristi Noem had, Larry Rhoden said, "We're going to go forward with the same budget proposal." So they had to work with a whole bunch of new lawmakers, a new governor, the outgoing governor's budget going forward as is. There was a lot to contend with in a really short period of time.
How do you define reset, Kevin? What does it mean to reset? Or does it just mean that nothing happened? We can't say nothing happened. I don't think that would be fair.
Kevin Woster:
And I wasn't close enough to do anything other than talk to some people that were and get an impression. But the new members, a lot of whom got beat, and you probably discussed this before in part because of that eminent domain issue in the carbon pipeline, the new members seemed to align themselves pretty quickly with what you would call the hard right.
And so if there was a mainstream Republican body left there, it seemed to leave the building. And as Murdoc says that things got a little chaotic and things tend to get a little mean-spirited sometimes out there. And I think that's a good point about the committee system. I mean, my wife just wrote something for Searchlight on a bill passed, removing the law, preventing concealed weapons in bars. Needless to say, she was not a big fan of that.
Lori Walsh:
Because she does work with Moms Demand...?
Kevin Woster:
She does work with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Yeah. So she's got a side on that fight. But that came through and it was one of those bills. And that's not the new bills end up at you got two-thirds can do anything in any time pretty much out there. And no committee hearings. Getting me back to what Murdoc said, just at the end, here it goes, it's passed and kind of a big issue. Some bar owners might want to weigh in on it, some people might want to weigh in on it. You've got two-thirds, you can do anything you want to, pretty much. And there should have been, and a lot of times there should have been. I'm getting back to what Murdoc said. That's a process that really needs to be followed. Everything except a legitimate emergency.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
It only works if it works, you've got to use it.
Kevin Woster:
Yeah. And were the people there now, you probably know better than I do. Are they the kind of people that could make that work?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I mean, I guess that's left to be said when you see them enter their second year. And this isn't just the hard right. This is any first time. Usually, the first time legislators kind of learn the ropes and learn in committee, and this is how a committee works. And now a lot of them come loaded with 10 or 12 more bills. And the committee hearings are a meandering process, an obstruction, if anything.
Lori Walsh:
So the second year you think will be different for them as they get their feet under?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
I mean, I heard that a lot, that there was a lot of throughout interviews and conversation in the hallway in Pierre, there was a lot of, "Well, we just need to slow down and see what the process is. We need to talk about it a little." There was a lack of understanding of what the process was because so many people were new and there was a new education piece that had to happen, which is not out of the ordinary. It would be very hard to get that many people spun up into how everything works and then hit the ground running on day one with every lawmaker who came in, especially if they primaried somebody on one issue that was very important to them.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
But even leadership had some tread off the tires. And I would remember speaking with Senator Duhamel early in the session, because senators were waiting for committee hearings. Just week after week, they weren't getting processed out. That was for the first time in, I guess, I don't know how long.
Kevin Woster:
And she didn't get a leadership spot, right?
Lori Walsh:
No.
Kevin Woster:
Duhamel didn't get it. Which tells you something, because I thought surely she would get something. She's a hardworking, smart, reasonable Republican.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Conundrums all around, Kevin.
Kevin Woster:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
But let's go back to that one issue because a lot of people had campaigned during a primary on the carbon capture pipeline legislation, what became shorthanded as the landowner bill of rights, and this idea of eminent domain.
Now last week on the program, I asked Lt. Gov. Venhuizen about that, and he said something on the line of is that people weren't really opposed to pipelines with eminent domain in general. They just didn't like this carbon capture pipeline because they didn't think it fit that parameters of a public utility, what have you. Very astute listener emailed and said, "You really should have followed up Lori," on that question because Keystone XL, NoDAPL, clearly this state is very engaged in eminent domain going forward.
So my question to you is, do you think that the eminent domain bill was unique to the carbon capture pipeline project? Or do you think that we will continue to have more robust conversations in the public space and in the Statehouse on concepts of projects and how they're built in people's backyards?
Kevin Woster:
Eminent domain has always been somewhat controversial, depending on the individual pipeline or whatever. But I think carbon, it makes me a little more nervous than some of the other ones do.
Keystone XL was controversial in part because it was the sands, the tar sands type stuff, and it had to travel at such a heated temperature and all that kind of stuff.
But this stuff is great if it doesn't leak and if something doesn't happen, and it's a great idea to sequester it. And I think all of that's wonderful, but I think everybody's kind of spooked about that.
Now, does that ring across society in South Dakota? I don't think it does. I think it's mostly a landowner issue on certain landowners and some environmental advocates. But it's not going away, that's for sure.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
It's not going anywhere. I think all of that is right. I think if you look at it on a primary election level, I think it gets sweeped into a lot of other issues that it gets to be covered. This is a real West River perspective of it. Not one of these pipelines is going to be out West River yet. Look at all these Facebook groups talking about pipelines and eminent domain and it has nothing to do with it, but it gets used as the tugboat for the rest of the nonsense.
Lori Walsh:
Okay, let's go back a little bit on that because if you were advising the pipeline company and you're sitting around saying, "What went wrong?" What went wrong here for them, for the people who were trying to build, where did they misstep?
Kevin Woster:
I didn't watch this, but some people that I know who were involved in it said that even the proponents of the pipeline thought the company handled it poorly.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I agree.
Kevin Woster:
And I think they would tell you that.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
They'd take a mulligan if you give it to them now. I think too, if you looked at them in the mirror, right?
Kevin Woster:
Yeah. You talk about legislators coming back in a second year, maybe they've learned something. I would think those folks that want to build that thing would say, "We didn't do that very well."
Lori Walsh:
Anybody who wants to build anything is going to have a lesson from how they appeared in the press with the number of landowners that were coming forward and saying we were not treated respectfully.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Hindsight being 2020. I mean, because it's easy for us to sit there and go, "Oh yeah, they'd like a mulligan." But it's just the issue of the moment. There was a land swell of presidential voters that were, you got to Narcan Ohio every four years to pick a president as I've heard a comedian say once.
Lori Walsh:
You got to what?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
You got to Narcan Ohio to pick a president every year. So again, pipeline was the tugboat. There was a bunch of people who aren't really that politically engaged while the session is on all of a sudden being forced to be engaged through the social media. It builds a lot of false narrative of what is actually driving the conversation.
It could have just as easily been a packing plant or a tiff for a district or a local community municipal county race, they're all the same. Nobody can catch up to the 40-person Facebook group that has a six-month head start of misinformation.
You can't outspend it.
Lori Walsh:
Misinformation aside, we just said engagement is a good thing. Engagement is how things get done.
Kevin Woster:
It's important, I'm assuming in this case that the horrible behavior of the company has been exaggerated in some cases. I mean, I read some of those stories and said, "Really? They actually did that?" And maybe they did.
Lori Walsh:
I guess one of my points here is that you can pick and choose the issues that you like and say, "Well, we're so happy that everybody called in, wrote in, had coffee with their legislators," and then there's an issue that maybe is something that you might dislike. And then you say it's crazy people on Facebook.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Yeah, sure. Well that's super fair. But pick the topic. Prison, pipeline, school education. It's hard to find the divining rod of accuracy through all of those issues though right now.
Lori Walsh:
The divining rod of accuracy. Say that again. Wow, that was heartfelt.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Well, it's tough to find.
Kevin Woster:
I've got my pen. I've got my pen.
Lori Walsh:
Kevin Woster came in the room and Murdoc got poetic.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I had to be on my toes.
Lori Walsh:
It's like an audition for a new pair.
Kevin Woster:
His IQ also went down. I can lower a room's IQ by about 15%.
Lori Walsh:
Brad, was there a piece of legislation that you, or a debate that came out that you thought was particularly worth talking about now that you know this is going to have a real impact in South Dakota?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
The library bill. I know everyone's tired of talking about it.
Lori Walsh:
Which one?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
That's good. The librarian lockup bill.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Let's call it what it is. What exactly is it? We're not going to call it the librarian lockup bill.
Kevin Woster:
Come on.
Lori Walsh:
What's a fair way to describe it?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I mean, I suppose you're going to make me be the lawyer.
Lori Walsh:
I'm looking it up.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
The topic of safety in libraries. It was the librarian lockup bill.
Lori Walsh:
All right, I'm looking it up so I can get the language right. You keep talking,
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
You handle the accuracy. I'll handle the jokes.
Kevin Woster:
We're not in the the accuracy business out here.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I think it is a wonderful example of a social issue where, I think, the issue is swappable, but an issue that the Freedom Caucus or the hard right wants. . And again, I don't think they're the devil. I think they're doing what they think is right, but they couldn't find their car keys this year to get a bill passed. And that's not going to hold next year and they'll swap the issue. Gay marriage, school voucher. Here it comes everybody.
Lori Walsh:
Okay, I'm going to go with Lee Strubinger's headline, which is "House lawmakers advance bill removing protections for librarians." So the bill that argued that defense protections for librarians should be removed.
Basically, if you haven't been following this, if you've been living under a rock, if obscene material ended up in the hands of minors, that was a bill to remove protecting librarians at educational institutions. If that obscene material, thank you Lee Strubinger for writing that sentence, ends up in the hands of minors. So that's what we're talking about. That's how we're framing it.
Kevin Woster:
That's how you're framing it.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Well, you know, you call it that. Call it the Titles don't Make Leaders Bill. I think you can call it whatever you like.
Lori Walsh:
All right. And you think, basically you're making the argument here, Murdoc, that this is not going away. This is going to come back because people again and again, are challenged by books that are available in public libraries. We're not done talking about it.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
It's how you drive primary turnout at a level where you can win next June, simply put.
Kevin Woster:
National issue, and it's here and it's staying here.
Lori Walsh:
Kevin, another bill that you think might be worth talking about at this point so that I can quickly look up. I have no idea what you're going to say next so my fingers are ready.
Kevin Woster:
It's not huge, but the bill that would appropriate $3 million for restoration work on the Capitol. That's no big deal. It's not controversial, but people that spend time with it, and I don't spend time like I used to with it, say it needs it. You know, in the year when they were pinching pennies, I'm kind of glad they found some money for that.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
As someone who just spent a week in DC admiring our monuments and museums, I agree with you. It's important.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Before I let you gentlemen go ask you about some of the reporting in The Dakota Scout and what you're following about former Governor Kristi Noem's credit card expenses. There's a lot to be unpacked with that.
I don't expect you to speak for the Scout's reporting, but are there key takeaways? Are you hearing people talking about this? Do citizens of South Dakota care and are they tuned in to the debate?
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
This is such a yes and no. Sometimes, yeah. Right? And I'm a tough one on this one.
Lori Walsh:
It's not a debate. I shouldn't say tuned into the debate, right. Tune into that investigative reporting. Yeah.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
I'm an unlikely supporter of Noem in this instance. Not of Noem necessarily, but of the executive office. Because the governor can't stay at the normal Motel 6. So sometimes that costs money. And right now there's such a gotcha on everybody's bar napkin to get economic development done. It's a dangerous precedent. That being said, it was way more than two grand. Okay. I don't know what the high peak was, but it wasn't $2,000.
Lori Walsh:
So we're asking the question about what's reasonable, so it's not unreasonable at some point for us to ask as taxpayers, what's reasonable here?
Kevin Woster:
Yeah. It's reasonable for us to ask and it's really important for us to have access to that, to raise these questions.
Lori Walsh:
Talk about that Kevin a little bit, the transparency, because that was quite a fight to have anything made public.
Kevin Woster:
Yeah. And I'm just grateful that The Dakota Scout stayed with it and that they continue to push it because in a year and a time when we don't have quite as many journalism resources we used to, it's good, it's imperative that somebody is still trying to do that kind of stuff. So I give them all kind of praise for that and we can argue back and forth about whether a Starbucks bill is too much or she should have stayed at Motel 6.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
Instead of where? The Salamander?
Kevin Woster:
The Five Star. But what we can argue, I wouldn't think, is that the public, through the media news, has a right to see this stuff.
Brad "Murdoc" Jurgensen:
And I would add, and it's so hard nowadays to discern wheat from chaff of local journalism and community media. But I mean, this thing was kind of settled in and at bed at the state media level, and it was a Fox News reporter who I don't even know has ever been to South Dakota that turned the rock upside down that all of a sudden put a megaphone on it.
Community media, well, I'm not saying The Dakota Scout is right or wrong by the way, but I am saying community media needs to be from the community and people need to be able to trust that again.
Kevin Woster:
True.
