Endorsement: Schultz promises stronger leadership for 8th District
Opinion by FCC Editorial Advisory Board October 12, 2024
Jen Schultz’s eight-year record of success in the Minnesota Legislature — helping everyday Minnesotans facing addiction, mental health challenges, difficulties affording their prescriptions, homelessness and more — is impressive on its own.
But consider, too, that before a career in public service, Schultz worked in the private sector, analyzing and improving access to health care and affordable medicines, working for a pharmaceutical company and as a consultant in health care, and offering input to Fortune 500 companies eager to provide the best health care plans they could at the best cost.
A professor of economics and co-director of the health care management program at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Schultz is making her second run to represent Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District. She’s the proven, responsive, constituents-focused choice for eligible voters in the massive district, which stretches more than halfway across the state’s northeast, from the Canadian border to the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities. The district includes the Iron Range, Duluth, Brainerd, Aitkin, all seven of Minnesota’s Anishinaabe reservations and more.
Perhaps nothing she did as a four-term legislator was bigger than the 2019 law to begin the state licensing of assisted-living facilities. Schultz helped carry the cause in the DFL House while Republican Sen. Karin Housley of Stillwater led the way in the Senate, producing a bill that created needed oversight and helped end years of horrific reports of abuse and inadequate care at far too many senior homes.
In a politically divided Legislature, Schultz, a DFLer, also worked behind the scenes and across the aisle to help pass a bipartisan omnibus bill that directed $700 million in federal relief for things like public health, drug abuse, mental health, homelessness, and public safety. Urgency demonstrated by Schultz and other lawmakers made Minnesota one of the first states to successfully allocate the federal funding.
She was also key in passing a bipartisan human services and policy bill that included investments to help those with mental health challenges and drug addictions. And she pushed for the passage of a bipartisan mental health standalone bill that included $100 million in badly needed spending.
“We’re at a point where we need to put our country and our democracy above our party. I’m going to be representing working families in the 8th District, older adults, people who rely on Social Security and Medicare,” Schultz said in an exclusive interview with Forum Communications this fall. “I have a track record of getting things done and solving big, big problems and helping working families.”
In D.C., that same hustle, effectiveness, and willingness to work with others, regardless of party, promises to benefit Minnesotans back home.
“The people in the 8th District deserve a better and stronger leader,” Schultz said.
Instead, they have Rep. Pete Stauber, who, for years now, has increasingly seemed more interested in furthering the political aspirations of his Republican Party and former President Donald Trump than in representing constituents.
In a statement this year — despite knowing better how criminal justice works due to his work as a Duluth police officer for 23 years — Stauber referred to the trial that found Trump guilty of duping banks and others in fraudulent business dealings as “rigged” and a “sham.” Perhaps even more disqualifying, Stauber signed on to the lawsuit that sought to overturn the will of the voters following the 2020 presidential election, making him part of the same coup that led to the violent and deadly Jan. 6, 2021, overrun of the U.S. Capitol.
Yes, Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District deserves better. In the Nov. 5 election, its voters can opt for a stronger, more-accessible leader in Schultz.
ABOUT THIS ENDORSEMENT
This Forum Communications Co. editorial represents the views of Forum Communications Co., this newspaper's parent company. It was written by the FCC Editorial Advisory Board.
