Editorial by Dana Hess,
South Dakota Searchlight
What’s the last week of the legislative session without a little controversy? This year’s wasn’t about sales taxes or teacher pay or free school lunches. It was about pancake syrup.
It started with House Commemoration 8031, recognizing the “true American success story” of Nancy Green, known as the trademark for Aunt Jemima. The commemoration honored Green “whose story has been sadly erased by politics.” That’s a reference to the decision by PepsiCo in 2021 to rebrand the Aunt Jemima products amid criticism that using the image of a matronly Black woman to sell breakfast products was racially insensitive.
Commemorations do not have the weight of law and opposition by a single member can keep it from being read on the House or Senate floor. That’s what happened in the case of HC 8031 when Rep. Kristin Conzet, a Rapid City Republican, blocked it citing Joint Rule 6H-4.
The rule isn’t invoked often, but it is used. In 2024 it was also used to block HC 8002 commemorating the LBGTQ+ and Two Spirit community in South Dakota.
Conzet’s objection could have been the end of a rather odd, small story if not for the actions of Sen. Tom Pischke, one of the co-sponsors of HC 8031. Later claiming it was just a gift for a friend, Pischke, a Republican from Dell Rapids, placed a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup on Conzet’s desk on the House floor.
A complaint about that action was filed with House Speaker Hugh Bartels. Not having too many options available for punishing a member of the other chamber, Bartels decided on a good, old fashioned Amish shunning, barring Pischke from the House floor and the House lobby for the last week of the session. Bartels, a Watertown Republican, said Pischke’s action was a violation of the Legislature’s ethical standards.
A search of news stories about the dust-up — one news outlet called it Syrup-gate — didn’t find any comments from Conzet about why she blocked the commemoration, if she was the one who lodged the complaint with Bartels or what she thought of Pischke’s “gift.”
Maybe she stopped HC 8031 because she just doesn’t like breakfast. Or maybe she could see the commemoration for what it was: a subtle way for Pischke and his co-sponsor to lecture their colleagues about the “woke” nature of a culture that retires advertising icons like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben due to complaints about the racial insensitivity of using Black caricatures to sell corporate products.
The commemoration bemoans that Green’s success story has been “erased from history.” Pischke should look further than the grocery shelves for his history lessons. A KELO story went to some lengths to track Green’s story and found it chronicled in such diverse places as the Jim Crow Museum, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, AppalachianHistory.net and the African American Registry.
Perhaps the real question here isn’t about Pischke’s intentions when he sought to commemorate the life of Nancy Green or Conzet’s reasons for blocking that commemoration. The real question is why the Legislature wastes its time with commemorations in the first place.
Lacking the weight of law, commemorations are the fluff of the Legislature, symbolic gestures usually drafted to make a lawmaker’s constituents feel good about themselves. In 2024, House commemorations lauded the Chester Lady Flyers for winning the 2023 State B volleyball championship, belatedly congratulated the De Smet Bulldogs on winning the Class B boys’ basketball championships in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and honored victims of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. Like the Green commemoration, these are not pressing legislative matters.
The 2024 session featured 49 commemorations, 31 in the House and 18 in the Senate. Commemorations aren’t subject to committee hearings or floor debate. Still, it takes someone’s time to get them in the right form so that every “whereas” is in the right place, and it takes time to read them on the floor.
The 2024 session was known for its quick start and fast pace. It was refreshing to see a sense of urgency throughout the session. Perhaps legislative leaders can maintain that pace by cutting out commemorations or limiting them to praise for the folks back home. If Syrup-gate tells us anything, it’s that a legislative commemoration is not the place to try to deliver a back-handed lecture on this nation’s culture wars.
