What's Up Bakk?

I have spent two days asking the question, 'what the heck is up with Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk?'  Let me get this down in print.

Background information:  Tom Bakk is a Senator from the north, the arrowhead region and the very northern part of the state including Ely and International Falls.  He IS a Democrat, supposedly, and he is the current Majority Leader in a Senate with a firm Democratic majority.

He is also either incompetent, only in it for his own personal interests, a weak DFL'er who is afraid to be a proud Dem, or, bluntly, a Republican hiding as a Democrat.

Let me run through the reasons I have to question him:

• He starts the legislative session by getting into a fight with Governor Dayton, from his own party, about pay raises for Dayton's administrators, raises his Senate approved the previous session, validating false outrage pushed forward by the GOP and informing everyone he doesn't like Governor Mark Dayton, whether he meant to or not.
• He seems to go out of his way to not take advantage of the clear power the DFL has placed at his feet.  He is the majority leader in the MN Senate, one house in the Legislative Branch, with a DFL Governor in the Executive Branch acting as his backup.  He should have sat down with Governor Dayton and hashed out a wish list for himself, the Senate and the Governor, two weeks before the session ended.  Instead, it sounds like he went out of his way to ignore Governor Dayton's repeated requests for language that needed to be in the bills for his signature to be guaranteed.  
• He has allowed a relative political rookie in Speaker Kurt Daudt, a Republican, to run circles around him in the later days of the session, getting played like a fiddle when it came to negotiations between the two houses.
• He allowed extremely anti-Democratic language to be written in the House and Senate 'compromises,' gutting environmental regulations and enforcement, allowing for gun silencers to become legal, re-writing the campaign finance laws of the state, passing educational laws which don't go nearly far enough to meet the needs of the state, and then goes out of his way to shut down the State Auditors office, Rebecca Otto, another Democrat, for what seems like a personal vendetta/pro corruption platform.  
• Let me repeat, there is no doubt the 'compromise' bills Senate Majority Leader Bakk passed favored the GOP, undermining his own party, and ignoring the Governor's wishes.
• The 'compromise' bills, when reintroduced into the Senate, were riddled with language which few Democratic Senators seemed privy too.  Many of them were dumbfounded by the undermining of their work done by Bakk to reach an agreement with Daudt.
• The Senate Democrats didn't support the 'compromise' bills, but the Senate Republicans LOVED them.  They were joined by a handful of Democrats, including Senator Bakk, in passing them.
• This 'compromise' allowed the GOP to take the high road by insisting they were the ones who were bipartisan, putting Governor Dayton on the defensive when it came to vetoes.
• In the negotiations for the special legislative session, Senator Bakk has decided to not be part of those negotiations, instead deferring to Daudt to be the sole negotiator for the Legislative branch, all while maintaining he will support the Governor at the end of the day.  This tactic has given Speaker Daudt FAR more power than he should have as leader of one house of the Legislative branch, and the minority party in state government, and has weakened the Governor's ability to get the Democratic platform passed.

Have I missed anything?  What the heck is Bakk doing?  Some of his actions seem to be directly linked to pro mining interests, and making sure the mine owners, most of them international mining conglomerates, are getting rewarded first and foremost.  The attack on the Auditors office, the removal of the citizens review board and the unbelievable give away to allow businesses that pollute to walk away without any penalties if they just say "oops" before anyone else does, boggles the mind.  And this guy says he's a Democrat???

When this is all over, Democrats of the Minnesota DFL need to think about making a leadership change in the Senate.  The best you can say is Bakk has horribly mismanaged the power he inherited coming into this session.  The worst...well, damage done.