Democrats, with their crippling energy utility mandates, are the proximate cause of high electricity prices. But we are only days before an election, so state Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) put in an appearance before the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) bemoaning high prices.
That’s Ellison seated at the far right. Our man Darren Nelson was in attendance and took the above photo. He reports that Ellison arrived, delivered his cameo performance, and quickly departed.
Ellison is running for a third term as state Attorney General. He has places to go, voters to persuade.
Ellison commemorated the event with a press release posted on his official, taxpayer-funded website. The headline,
Attorney General Ellison addresses Public Utilities Commission hearing on affordability
The press release reprints Ellison’s prepared remarks. He talks about the downsides of high prices, but offers neither solutions nor even a diagnosis on how we got here.
But he’s a Democrat, running for re-election. So, the Democratic-dominated PUC duitifully livestreamed the event on their taxpayer-paid website and promoted the event on the their official Twitter (X) page:
Your tax dollars at work. At one point, Ellison remarks to the PUC,
[T]he Legislature has tasked the Attorney General with representing the interests of small business and residential customers of investor-owned gas and electric utilities.
True enough, but it also means that Ellison has been doing this for the past eight years and has been completely ineffective in the role. As for businesses, Ellison says,
But unlike businesses of any size, residential customers can’t pass on these cost increases to anyone.
If businesses, great or small, can’t pass along these costs, they will go out of business or move, costing residential customers jobs by the dozens/hundreds/thousands. What Ellison describes is a zero-sum game: robbing Peter to pay Paul can only work if Peter sticks around to stand for the abuse.
But there is an election to be won.