An election that matters

Up here, we know the difference between a squall and a storm. A squall may kick up whitecaps on Big Bay, rattle the dock, but is replaced by sunshine 20 minutes later. A storm takes the roof. For two years now, the country has been living through a storm, and on Nov. 3, Minnesota voters will decide whether they want two more years of an unchecked gale.
Here’s the reality: Minnesotans cannot afford to send Republicans to Congress this year. Not because they are bad people, though we often question their political policies on this page. We cannot afford to return Republicans to Washington because, as currently constituted, the party has shown it will do nothing to check a president who recognizes no limits but the ones forced on him.
We acknowledge that American voters should have known what they were getting with President Trump, a convicted felon who unleashed a mob on the Capitol to hold onto power in 2021. But voters looked beyond all that with the expectation that he would fulfill his promises to bring down prices, bolster domestic manufacturing, and keep us out of foreign wars.
We’re not surprised that he has done the exact opposite.
His policies are one thing. His criminality and his relentless attempts to undermine the laws and norms that have helped the U.S. maintain a semblance of democracy, are another. Almost every day brings another shocking revelation, any one of which would have brought down a previous president. Trump’s relentless lying, his acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gold, cash, aircraft, and other gifts from foreign interests, and his efforts to raid the U.S. Treasury to line the pockets of himself and his allies, are simply unprecedented in American history.
When he isn’t engaged in criminal acts, he’s creating chaos. He runs an administration where staff is hired and then fired within days, where tariffs are set one day, changed the next, repealed, then imposed again. One day, he signs a bill enacting tough sanctions on Russia for their invasion of Ukraine. Two weeks later, he strikes a deal to send billions of dollars to his puppet master, Vladimir Putin.
Ordinarily, the courts would be an important backstop. But in July 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Trump v. United States, ruling 6-3 that a president enjoys broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. It was a disastrous and faulty ruling that Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in dissent would turn the president into a king above the law. Two years on, that warning reads less like hyperbole and more like an unadorned explanation of our current reality.
When the courts step back, the Constitution leaves one check standing: Congress. The power of the purse. The power to investigate. The power to impeach. Those powers mean nothing if the people holding them refuse to act, and this Republican-led Congress has been utterly derelict.
We understand why that is. For a Republican officeholder, there are two choices: back Trump or retire. That dynamic isn’t going to change.
The Congress we elect this year will preside over what is likely to be one of the most perilous periods in our history, the final two years of what should be Trump’s final term. Yet no one can claim to be unaware of Trump’s desire to continue to hold power. If given a GOP-controlled Congress, there may well be no branch of government willing to challenge’s Trump’s corruption or his will to cling to his office and the immunity it provides. The Trump administration has made no secret of its efforts to reshape the U.S. military as an institution beholden to the president, not the Constitution. And Trump has repeatedly signaled his eagerness to use U.S. troops to stifle political opposition. No one should underestimate Trump’s mendacity.
Frankly, a Democratic-led Congress may not be enough. The next two years will be fraught regardless of who we send to Washington. But we know that Republicans will do nothing to check our wannabe king.
We know Republicans now tend to win up here by talking about wolves, guns, pronouns, or whatever silly outrage is trending in right-wing media in the lead-up to the election. These are issues designed to bypass the part of us that thinks critically and go straight to the part that flinches. But no one’s deer rifle is on the ballot this year. What’s on the ballot is whether any branch of government will be left standing to tell this president no.
So, this fall, let’s put away the small things. We’re in the middle of a storm and the damage will only get worse if we fail to act responsibly. What remains of America’s democratic institutions cannot survive two more years of a Congress that won’t do its job.