I fell for another tease. Remember Matt Grossell, the Minnesota state representative who was a sullen drunk picking fights in hotels and bars and hospitals when he got arrested for being falling down snockered? Here’s a non-update.
There was talk at the time about taking him off his committee assignments. Surprise: they did not. The Democrat in charge of that sort of thing is sill waffling. Worse yet, this bozo has a history of this sort of behavior.
Grossell had previously been arrested in 2019 on charges of disorderly conduct and trespassing after a drunken incident at a hotel bar in St. Paul.
The House Democratic leadership stripped Grossell of his committee assignments following his 2019 arrest. Part of the reason was that after he got out of jail he walked into St. Paul police headquarters and announced to officers that he was a state representative and that there would be “hell to pay.”
His committee assignments have since been reinstated. Grossell is a member of the public safety, judiciary and capital investment committees.
He’s done this before? He got a little temporary slap and was then reinstated? I think we can guess how this is going to go.
I did learn something in this non-update.
Alcohol is a factor in more than a quarter of Minnesota traffic deaths each year, according to state data, and drunk driving costs the state more than a quarter billion dollars annually. But neither the lawmakers getting arrested on alcohol-related charges, nor the voters who keep sending them back, seem to care a whole lot.
Yeah, you learn fast that going for a drive on these remote rural roads late on a Friday or Saturday night isn’t a great idea.
On the other hand finally a Democrat who doesn’t face the consequences of his actions, as opposed to multiple Republicans. Even though it is at the state level, I guess we have to start small to move up to national. Kind of like the minor leagues.
Republicans are as malign as expected, Democrats are as useless är expected.
The former serve their corporate masters and their lust for power, doing as much as they can get away with. The latter serve their corporate masters and lean back, doing as little as they can get away with.
Lightbulb moment! Encourage Gross Matt to “do his thing” until he wins the Darwin Award. He might kill a couple of others in the process, but fewer Republicans in power correlates directly to less harm. In the long run, it will be a net positive outcome.
@Ronald Couch,
Matt Grossell happens to be a republican.
@3 It’s not funny.
I was in high school when a drunk driver killed one of my classmates on my front lawn.
The drunk driver actually hit the 16 year old victim in my neighbor’s yard but was going so fast that the impact sent him into my yard. For some perspective, the homes in that neighborhood are built on lots that are approximately 0.75-1 acre lots. My classmate was riding his bike home after dark, on the wrong side of the road, because the road has a lot of blind curves and riding against traffic allows the bike rider to see headlights of oncoming cars and gives the bicyclist time to get off the road. The drunk driver crossed the double yellow line all the way over to the shoulder on the opposite side and hit the kid so hard that he was thrown from the initial point of impact in my neighbor’s yard into my yard. The initial impact was about at the midway point in my neighbor’s yard; the 16 year old landed about the midway point in my yard about 20-30 feet away from the edge of the road.
He died in the hospital a week later, in a coma, never regained consciousness.
His killer was out on bail two nights later, driving drunk again. (Wealthy parents who could afford expensive lawyers; also, drunk driving laws were lax to nonexistent at the time. I’m happy to say that the municipality where I used to live now has some of the toughest drunk driving laws in the US but they didn’t at the time.)
His death destroyed his parents, who, after the trial was over, sold their home and moved away with their one surviving son.
His mom came to thank my family and my neighbors for staying with her son until emergency services arrived and completely broke down halfway through saying thank you because the circumstances of her son’s death were so overwhelming and so horrific.
Drunk drivers so seldom seem to kill themselves, mostly they kill other people who had the bad luck to be on the road at the same time as some entitled drunk asshole who got behind the wheel and decided to drive drunk, NBD.
Do they still have baseball diamonds out next to rural liquor stores in Minnesota like when I was growing up? You think anyone drives home after downing brews while playing a few hours?
Silvrhalide @ 5
My apologies. I was trying for black humor.