I am a lifelong, committed Democrat. I have voted for and donated to this party consistently, including to Gov. Tim Walz. It is precisely because of that loyalty that I am writing this — not out of partisan opportunism, but out of genuine anger.
On June 10, the Minnesota Board of Pardons — Gov. Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson — voted to erase the felony sexual assault conviction of Tou Lue Vang, a man who raped a 10-year-old child more than 20 years ago. Vang had admitted to sexually abusing the girl over roughly two years, and at one point tried to justify it by invoking cultural norms in Thailand, where he was born in a refugee camp. The pardon came only after Vang faced imminent deportation, having been detained by ICE during a recent enforcement operation. There is no immigration policy, no political calculation and no procedural justification that makes this acceptable.
What has disgusted me even more than the pardon itself is watching fellow Democrats rush to justify it — not as a hard call, but as an act of compassion, framing it as sparing a family from separation. I understand the emotional pull of that argument. Vang has a wife and six children. But a man does not get to invoke the family he built while free to argue his way out of the consequences of raping a child. That argument should never have carried the day, and it should not be carrying water for Democrats now.