This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
The nation's Capitol building came alive last night during President Joe Biden's State of the Union address. Seth Tupper joins In the Moment to analyze the raucous affair.
We'll recap the address and take a close look at who's sitting in the crowd. Representative Dusty Johnson showed up several times on video as the cameras pivoted to Representative Marjorie Taylor Green. Tupper breaks down the differences in their reactions.
Tupper is editor-in-chief for South Dakota Searchlight.
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Lori Walsh:
You're listening to In The Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. I'm your host, Lori Walsh, and you can watch us today, as well. Go to sd.net right now, the SDPB News Facebook page. You can stream it on your Smart TV or your device at sdpb.org/watch. Well speaking of watching, last night's State of the Union address was something of a raucous affair. We're going to begin there for today's Dakota Political Junkies conversation. Seth Tupper is editor-in-chief for South Dakota Searchlight, and he's with us now via Zoom. Hey, Seth, welcome back.
Seth Tupper:
Hey, Lori, thanks for having me.
Lori Walsh:
I want to start out with a clip from the State of the Union address for a little context. President Joe Biden is talking about the debt ceiling and kind of accusing Republicans of holding the nation's fiscal sovereignty hostage because of what they want to do with the budget. So let's listen in to this clip, and then we'll talk a little bit about what you can see in the clip. If you're listening to the radio, there's a little bit of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Dusty Johnson, and Seth and I will pick up there in a minute. But first, listen up.
Joe Biden:
Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security sunset. I'm not saying it's a majority. Let me give you... Anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I'll give you a copy. I'll give you a copy of the proposal. That means Congress doesn't vote. Well I'm glad you see. No, I'll tell you, I enjoy conversion. It means if Congress doesn't keep the programs the way they are, they'd go away. Other Republicans say... I'm not saying it's a majority of you. I don't even think it's even a significant... But it's being proposed by individuals. I'm politely not naming them, but it's being proposed by some of you. Look, folks, the idea is that we're not going to be moved into being threatened to default on the debt if we don't respond.
Lori Walsh:
All right, a little bit from the presidential State of the Union address last night. If you're just tuning in, you're listening to In The Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting for the Dakota Political Junkies analysis. Today, we have Seth Tupper, who is editor-in-chief for South Dakota Searchlight, and, of course, a good friend of SDPB, as well. Seth, that's raucous. I thought I was watching Parliament for a minute there with the amount of feedback and interaction between the president and congressional members. What did you hear in that address?
Seth Tupper:
Well exactly. I thought of questions for the Prime Minister that you watch on C-SPAN, and I thought of, if you go back to, I had to look this up to remember the particulars, but in 2009 the then President Barack Obama was giving an address to a joint session of Congress and a congressman Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina yelled out, "You lie." And if you remember that, that was shocking to the nation. People on both sides of the aisle and Congress condemned that and called it a terrible breach of decorum. But boy, it really opened the floodgates and that kind of thing has continued when the President speaks to Congress.
And of course we had four years of the Trump administration when whatever side of the fence you're on, I think you'd have to admit the political discourse got a lot more crude during those years. And now we have this last night, which I think was unlike any other presidential address to Congress that I've ever seen, where it essentially became a back and forth a discussion more than it was a speech at certain points. And I don't know that that's necessarily all bad. It was really interesting to see the back and forth and the President responding to things.
But there's a difference obviously between below your breath or saying, no, that's not true, or just kind of blurting out reactions. And then there's a difference between that and standing up and pointing at the President and saying, "Liar, liar" like Marjorie Taylor Greene did, which led to some really interesting photos online if you search around social media.
Now you referenced Representative Dusty Johnson. Our staff was commenting on that last night watching the speech. Photos appeared on social media, our own Dusty Johnson, representative Republican from South Dakota seated right in front of Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there are some iconic shots of her standing up and pointing and yelling at the president as he sits stoically in the bottom of the frame right in front of her. And a very symbolic photo obviously of sort of the two factions of the Republican Party right now. One that is interested in standing up and yelling and screaming and during presidential addresses and the other that's not interested in doing that I guess.
Lori Walsh:
And he has spoken out before about people needing their stage makeup on before every event. He's called himself a workhorse, not a show horse. So I have not spoken to him about the State of the Union address, but based on what he has said before and based on some of his expressions. But Seth, there was a moment where he had his hand over his mouth and I thought he muttered a little something too. Now we don't know who he was muttering too, but he maybe has a few things to say about what the President was saying, but he expressed himself in a very different way. Or maybe he had some things to say about Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's no way of knowing.
Seth Tupper:
Well I'd love to ask him and next time you have him on, I'd love to hear his response. And you also wonder how did he end up seated there? I've never known Representative Johnson to do anything that wasn't really thought out ahead of time. So I don't know if it was an accident that he was seated in front of Marjorie Taylor Greene or if that was by design. I'd be really interested to hear his response on that.
But you're right, some of the photos and some of the video does show him also muttering something in response to something President Biden said, which goes to show those kind of responses just have become sort of normalized during these speeches and it doesn't look like we're ever going back. But I would say it kind of backfired on Republicans a little bit. In that clip you played a little later in the speech, President Biden ad libbed that appeared a little bit saying that, hey, it appears we're all in agreement, we're not going to have a problem fully funding social security and Medicare and keeping it going. And so he was able to turn that to his benefit. And really, that kind of goes against the narrative that a lot of Republicans would rather put out there that President Biden is old and not able to think on his feet. And so that kind of backfired a little bit I thought last night.
Lori Walsh:
He brings a lot of experience to that statement, and it did seem to me too, he was ready for that kind of response. It didn't take him aback or surprise him, at least not very much. It'll be curious to see presidents in the future and if this pattern continues or increases.
I want to pivot back to South Dakota and we can circle back to the State of the Union later if there's more that you'd like to add. But when we talk about lawmakers or elected officials gaining attention for their behavior, when we see Marjorie Taylor Greene sort of pointing her finger and flipping her hair and waving her arms around, back at home someone just asked me this morning, whatever happened with the Julie Frye Mueller investigation or situation and we had to provide an update. So for our folks, let's talk about Julie Frye Mueller and some of your experiences with her for context. Where do you want to begin with that?
Seth Tupper:
There are some similarities aren't there, between Julie Frye Mueller and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and in our sort of scandal, every minute crisis, every second news cycle, it already seems like this was forever ago. But the South Dakota Senate did just recently censure Julie Frye Mueller, censured from Rapid City for some things that she said in conversation with a legislative research council staffer, allegedly harassing statements. And it was just interesting to me, Senator Frye Mueller is from Rapid City, I formerly worked at the Rapid City Journal, of course, and worked for STPB in Rapid City. I still live in Rapid City, but I've had the experience of covering her over the years, and her husband. And I had a particular experience with her in the hallway at a public meeting once during an executive session where the board was inside with the door closed and she was out outside waiting and I was there and she took it upon herself to really take me to task over some reporting and a story that was going on at the time.
There was a county commissioner in Pennington County named George Ferabee who had decided that the county septic tank clause were an example of tyranny. And he was not going to have his septic tank pumped out because that was government over each and tyranny. And he took this to court and he lost. And we had done reporting on that at the journal. And of course, Julie Frye Mueller was an ally of George Ferebee and really spent about a half hour in a hallway just really consistently trying to convince me that the judge who decided this septic tank case was corrupt. And it was an example of everything that's wrong with our country and et cetera, et cetera. And against my better judgment, I argued back a little bit that actually rule of law, a judge deciding something and everybody having to live with it, isn't that kind of exactly what America is and isn't that rule of law.
And so it was just, when I heard about these allegations, it really brought that back to mind because in covering Senator Frye Miller, she's always been that kind of person in my experience with her, that she has this kind of insistent need to bring you over to her side against all odds and just not willing to ever stop and give up on that. And that sort of came through in some of these interactions that she's had in the Senate. And the fact only one senator voted against her censure was pretty telling, I think, in as far as the relationships that she has with the other people in the Senate.
Lori Walsh:
That was my experience and my very limited time of meeting her was that while I was talking to her, there were literally people almost whispering behind her back about her. It was palpable how much she was not listened to, disliked, had bad relationships, however you want to phrase that, and how much she knew, that she knew that and sort of leaned into that. It's very interesting. Let's close our conversation here. We're going to talk education in a few moments, but I wanted to bring up with you, Seth, you mentioned this abortion bill House Bill 1169, which was tabled by the request of the sponsor at the Health and Human Services Committee. Unless something is hog housed, we are not going to see any kind of legislation coming out of Pierre this session that would change our current abortion stance in any major way that I can tell. Give us an update on what's happening with the abortion conversation in Pierre.
Seth Tupper:
Well, our reporter, Mackenzie Huber did a great story on this yesterday. You can find on our website, southdakotasearchlight.com, but basically Taylor Rehfeldt, who's a Republican representative from Sioux Falls and is assistant majority leader in the House brought a bill that would've further defined the only exception in our current law to the abortion ban, which is an exception for the life of the mother.
And it was her contention and she said a lot of people have contacted her about this, she's a registered nurse by the way, about the fact that this is a pretty vague exception and what does it actually mean in practice if a woman has who's pregnant has a serious health condition, and what can the doctor do and what can't the doctor do, and when can they do that, et cetera. So she was trying to further define that, and she gave, I would encourage anybody, you can follow the link in our story to the audio testimony provided by SDPB of course, which is great, but very emotional, very personal testimony in a way, similar to your discussion with Cameron Nelson about his very intimate personal testimony that he offered.
She offered some very intimate personal testimony about an unplanned pregnancy that she said she's currently experiencing, some health problems she has that makes that a high risk pregnancy. She'd come into information that basically this bill was not going to pass. She didn't have support and she didn't want to take it through the process if she didn't think it had a good chance of passing. So she asked for it to be tabled and it was.
But I thought the broader takeaway from this was really interesting that I think going forward, there's going to be a lot more camps than just the two sides on the abortion debate. A lot more than just people who are strictly anti-abortion and a lot more than people who are just strictly calling themselves pro-choice. Because here, it's kind of extraordinary, here is a Republican in leadership standing up in the legislature and saying, there are times when abortion should be legal in South Dakota, and let's define that. So I think it also shows that on the anti-abortion side, maybe the unity isn't going to be there that there was previously, and there may be a splinter there with some people saying, hey, we need some exceptions or greater exceptions that we currently have in the law.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Well, for listeners, House Bill 1169, that's the Abortion Exception Legislation has been tabled. That's failed for the year. That House Bill 1080 is continuing to move on today as well. Seth Tupper is Editor in Chief of South Dakota Searchlight, and he's been joining us today for our Dakota Political Junkies update. By the way, if you want all politics all the time, you can download the Dakota Political Junkies podcast wherever you get your podcast, and it just carves out our political coverage from the full show for you.
Seth, thank you so much for being here. We'll see you next time.
Seth Tupper:
You're welcome.
