Radical right-wing Freedom Caucus member and Representative Tina Mulally (R-35/Rapid City) made a farewell speech on the House floor on Tuesday, March 10. (Rep. Mulally’s speech begins at 23:20 in the video; I’d embed it here, but South Dakota Public Broadcasting has disabled that convenient public feature.) Mulally’s speech served mostly to demonstrate speechthe Freedom Caucus’s inability to make a clear, consistent point.
Rep. Mulally’s four minutes of weeping and moaning included a claim that “55 years ago, I was living on the streets, eating out of garbage cans with an eight-month-old on my hip and an extremely bad drug addiction. The authorities were always getting after me: ‘Get out of my garbage. Don’t you have an ID? Do you have permission to be here?'”
Funny, I guess, that Rep. Mulally this year voted against House Bill 1082, which would help pay for school meals for low-income kids. Funny, I guess, that Mulally this year voted for Senate Bill 175, which demands that voters present ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote. Funny, I guess, that Mulally was House prime sponsor of 2024 Senate Bill 90, which made it easier for landlords like Mulally to throw tenants out onto the street. Funny, I guess, that Mulally opposed this year’s House Bill 1113, which would have loaned low-income South Dakotans $10,000 for down payments on manufactured homes.
Funny, I guess, that Mulally has spent her House career in cahoots with the Freedom Caucus just waving the flag and opposing practical public programs to help people in need. But as Dana Hess wrote earlier this month, the Freedom Caucus is more about theater than results.
Continuing her weepy theatrics, Mulally said that in her fourth year, she comforted a freshman legislator who “looked as lost as I did my first year, and I knew I had to reach out and answer any questions I could.” Hmmm… Mulally’s fourth year, so the freshman’s second year, so (a) the freshman legislator wasn’t a fast learner, and (b) Mulally didn’t feel this impulse to reach out for the freshman’s entire first year in Pierre.
Mulally’s reaching out involved giving the poor rookie some senseless advice:
And during that conversation, I made a comment: God doesn’t want us to be nice, he wants us to be kind. Not knowing where I had heard that or what it truly meant, a day or so later I found a little sticky note on my desk with an explanation of what I had said [Rep. Tina Mulally, floor speech, South Dakota House of Representatives, 2026.03.10; transcribed from SDPB video by CAH/DFP].
So Mulally’s concept of mentorship involves spouting coffee-cup platitudes that, if her mentee had asked on the spot, “What do you mean by that?” Mulally would have had to reply, “I dunno.”
And anyone listening to Mulally’s farewell speech still dunno. I held on, expecting Mulally to explain what that little platitude meant—and come on, it couldn’t mean much, since the explanation fit on a sticky note. Mulally said she had placed on each House member’s desk a koozie with that explanation printed on it (ah, so not coffee-cup wisdom, but beer-can advice), but she didn’t clarify for the rest of us what that explanation was. The speech itself simply veered to some other advice pretending to thesis-dom:
In about nine months, the election is going to give birth to a brand new Legislature. I would like you who are honored enough to return to remember this: every individual elected will come to this body with very unique experiences and unique individual perspectives. So don’t be nice. Be kind. Truth is always kind. Thank you [Mulally, 2026.03.10].
Everybody’s different, so don’t be nice, but be kind—that so is utterly misplaced. Mulally tries to join with a meager conjunction two concepts that aren’t related. Niceness/kindness isn’t contingent on individual differences and diversity (wait—is a Freedom Caucus member telling us to respect diversity?); niceness/kindness is what we do to recognize equal human dignity and to make society work.
And Mulally closed there without explaining the difference she divined and then learned from a sticky note between niceness and kindness. Does her final line imply that kindness means telling hard truths while niceness is just smarmy lying to avoid hurting feelings or to trick people? That’s an awful lot to read into one line. If this is Mulally’s final Legislative speech (please, let it be so), she ought to make it stick, to pick her thesis and make it clear rather than tossing some vague, unrelated platitudes on the record and leaving it to some liberal blogger to say, “Ah, here’s how we might plausibly piece these statements together into nominal logical coherence.” That’s the speaker’s job, not the listeners’.
What is the difference between being nice and being kind? Why do we refer to “Minnesota Nice” rather than “Minnesota Kind”? One NPR report says Minnesota Nice is “a stereotype born from a culture of kindness and politeness“. If a distinction lies in that characterization, it sounds like we should be not only kind but also nice, as it subsumes kindness and adds politeness, something about which South Dakota legislators regularly make a bigger honkin’ deal.
But there I go again, trying to frame a thesis for a legislator who failed to frame one and instead simply engaged in weepy theatrics that contradicted the speaker’s own voting record. If you want to get all weepy about your own unique experiences and exhort legislators to respect those experiences, you should have spent eight years in the Legislature translating those experiences into nice, kind, compassionate legislation. Contrary to Todd Epp’s characterization of the speech as forceful, Mulally left her colleagues with just another example of the Freedom Caucus’s inability to turn pious claims into truly Christian action or even a simple coherent argument.
Legislators, be nice and kind to your colleagues and to your constituents: don’t waste floor time with stupid speeches.
They should be kinda nice.