As some of you may or may not remember, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlently vetoed a transportation bill raising the gas tax by 8 1/2 cents over five years.

This bill will provide 6.6 billion dollars to fund the state's transportation needs in the wake of the I-35W bridge collapse last year.

Six House Republicans legislators were stripped of their leadership positions in retaliation for voting with the mostly Democratic legislature to override the Governor's veto.

Rep. Jim Ramstad from my district, and a Republican, thought that 'two of these state legislators should not have been punished for parting company with Republican Party powers over a transportation bill'.

Here is the article in the local news website:

http://www.mnsun.com/articles/2008/04/10/news/fw10ramstadtown.txt

I'm with Rep. Ramstad on this one.

This is the way party politics works in the U.S. As sick as it is, it's perfectly legal, and both parties do it all the time.

Be thankful you don't live in Europe, as the penalty would be even harsher--you wouldn't be allowed to run for a seat next time.

It might be legal, but that doesn't mean it's fair.

No, but it's not fair either that the Federal Government commits an act of terrorism upon every American every April 15th either. The last thing the people of our government are concerned with is being fair.

I don't get it. How is paying taxes an act of terrorism?

Do you know what the government does to you if you don't give them 30% of the money you made through your own labor, which is in fact, private property? They destroy lives and families every year because people refuse to give into that kind of tyranny.

EDIT: The reason this country exists is because of the fundamental sin of taxation. All the founders agreed upon the subject of taxation, there is no debate that the income tax is as unjust as it gets.

WarElephant,

Well that's one way of looking at it, I suppose.

Unfair as it may be, it is generally understood, or the status quo, that people pay their taxes to the government on April 15 each year.

My beef is not with the fact that we pay taxes, but the basic unfairness of how much taxes the middle class pays in proportion to their incomes.

It is a fact that many people making under $100,000 a year pay more taxes as a percentage of their incomes than people making over $100,000 a year, who often pay no taxes at all!

It's time to reform the tax system so that this imbalance can be corrected.

But now back to the transportation bill.

What riles me is that this bill was passed in a spirit of bipartisanship.

Isn't that when democracy works best, when our elected representatives can actually agree on something?

But for someone to be punished for not following the party line is just wrong.

This would be wrong even if those legislators were Democrats stripped of their leadership positions by the party elite by the way they voted.

I don't often come to the defense of Republicans, but, in this case, I have to defend their decision.

They had the best interests of their constituents in mind (gee, when does THAT ever happen?) and should not have been punished.