Price tag? A grand-standing Iowa state senator is proposing that Iowa buy Minnesota’s southern tier of counties. How much to pay he hasn’t figured out yet. Although fuzzy on details, Mike Bousselot says he soon will have a bill in the hopper in the Iowa Legislature. The nine Minnesota counties, all largely Republican, together have 180,000 people — a quarter of Minnesota’s First Congressional District. MN-1 is bounded on the map in dark blue.
Iowa’s “Manifest Destiny”? Gobble northward
ANKENY, Iowa – An Iowa state senator wants Iowa to annex southern Minnesota. Mike Bousselot, a Republican from Ankeny, north of Des Moines, announced he will introduce legislation to purchase Minnesota’s nine southern-most counties. “Make Minnesota Iowa again,” Bousselot said – an historically wrong reference to the fact that some of southeast Minnesota was part of Iowa Territory before 1845. His facts, however, are jumbled. The 1845 boundaries don’t coincide with the present-day Minnesota counties he’s eyeing.
How Bousselot sees future
“Our new Iowans, former Minnesota residents, will have lower income, sales, business taxes. A more farm friendly state. And a better managed state,” Bousselot said. There is a get-even streak in his motivation. He quoted Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s jest as once calling Iowa “just rocks and cows.” Bousselot misread the self-deprecating Walz quip, seemingly forgetting that Walz grew up in Iowa. Whatever. Bousselot said: “We see opportunity.”
Historical dead-ends
> Western Minnesota. Bousselot’s scheme smacks of a similar proposal by a former Minnesota legislator, Jeremy Munson, also a Republican, for western Minnesota to secede and join South Dakota. People disagreed whether Munson, a publicity hound, was serious or tongue in cheek. He got a lot of mocking in the press. In any event, nothing came of the idea. Munson eventually left the Legislature to focus on growing vines of hops on a farm near Lake Crystal,
> Greenland. A sick joke making the rounds among Democrats is that Republicans somehow have become especially vulnerable a highly contagious disease — imperialistic bug. Indeed, the Bousselot plan has shades of Trumpism to return to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine of imperialism and bullying. In recent days Trump has proposed taking Greenland from Denmark, annexing Canada as a 51st state, and re-occupying the Panama Canal. The thinking of both Trump and Bousselot rings of Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” in 1907 although minus Teddy’s “speak softly” corollary.
> Congressional hurdle. Only Congress can redraw state boundaries. Secession and annexation schemes don’t go over well in Washington. Just think about the failed 1861 confederacy. Other dead-end ideas have been to fold the Idaho Panhandle into Washington state, to divide California into separate northern and southern states, to move Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Wisconsin, and to make downstate Illinois a separate state. For Iowa to subsume even one square foot of Minnesota also would require approval from the Minnesota and Iowa legislatures.
Bousselot. In first term in Iowa Senate. Earlier in House. A Republican.
His New Iowa
Bousselot’s expansion would move these Minnesota counties to Iowa:
> Faribault (whose county seat is Blue Earth).
> Fillmore (Preston).
> Freeborn (Albert Lea).
> Jackson (Jackson).
> Martin (Fairmount).
> Mower (Austin).
> Nobles (Worthington).
> Houston (Caledonia).
> Rock (Luverne).
Not included are these major population centers: Mankato, Rochester and Winona
Transformative title. The best-selling 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, “The Ugly American,” detailed how arrogance, incompetence and corruption inevitably accompany imperialism. The book marked a fall from grace for the Manifest Destiny of the mid-1800s. The book’s message is that that expansionism creates enmity and enemies and eventually backfires. Despite some hiccups, like Vietnam, diplomacy, has emerged as the consensus approach to U.S. international relations and helping to make the world a better place — not bullying.