ST. PAUL, Minn. -- State Senator Gretchen Hoffman has issued an apology for a Twitter message she posted about a fellow lawmaker.
The Senate Ethics subcommittee voted Monday to dismiss an ethics complaint against Senator Hoffman, R- Vargas, if she apologized for the message and removed it from the social media news site.
Sen. Hoffman's tweet took a line in a speech by Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL - Columbia Heights, out of context.
"Sen Goodwin just called people with mental illness - imbeciles and imbeciles - while debating HHS bill," Hoffman wrote in a posting to Twitter during the floor debate on the Human Services financing bill on May 18.
Sen. Goodwin at the time was delivering a floor speech which included a history lesson about the strides state government has made in how it regards persons with mental illness and developmental disabilities.
"This is how far we've come," Goodwin told her colleagues. "The way state institutions used to be, they were called 'institutions for idiots, imbeciles and the insane.' And that's what it said, right on the hospital; 'idiots, imbeciles and the insane'."
The overall point of the speech was to defend community based mental health spending and warn fellow senators about the dangers of returning to the past mistreatment of that population.
Thursday Susan Closmore of the Senate Republican Caucus said that Senator Hoffman has complied with all the demands of the Senate Ethics committee.
The tweet was removed from Twitter. However, the tweet still remained on Sen. Hoffman's website as of 8pm Thursday evening.
Hoffman sent a letter to Goodwin to apologize. That letter read:
"This letter is intended to be the written apology from me to you indicated by the Minnesota State Subcommittee on Ethical Conduct on its resolution of June 13, 2011.
I am certainly sorry for my own misunderstanding of what was said and how I subsequently handled it.
I am sure you share my unhappiness that this matter was not resolved between us on the floor on May 18, 2011, when the underlying incident occurred."
(Copyright 2011 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)