Say Anything Blog

I noted an interesting charge from North Dakota worker’s compensation attorney Mark Schneider - who is also Democrat insurance commissioner candidate Jasper Schneider’s uncle - in a recent article where he was criticizing Republican handling of the Workforce Safety & Insurance issue.  It seems as though Mr. Schneider has a problem with a legislative staff lawyer who happens to be married to a lawyer working at WSI:

Schneider also says legislative staff lawyer John Bjornson should remove himself from working on W-S-I matters.

John Bjornson is married to W-S-I’s general counsel Jodi Bjornson. John Bjornson is the staff lawyer for the Legislature’s interim Industry, Business and Labor Committee. Berg is chairman of the committee.

Of course, Schneider and his fellow Democrats have no problem what-so-ever with the fact that prominent Bismarck Democrat and outspoken WSI critic Chad Nodland is married to Jeniffer S.N. Clark who is legislative counsel to the state legislature’s worker’s compensation oversight committee.  Nodland, it seems, has near instantaneous access to all sorts of inside documents and scuttlebutt at WSI which is undoubtedly (in my opinion) being given to him by his wife under the table.

Nodland, next to perhaps only Mark Schneider himself, is the Democrats’ #1 trouble maker on worker’s compensation issue, and his wife continues to hold her position as legislative counsel despite a pretty serious conflict of interest between her day job and his politics.  If Schneider is going to complain of conflicts of interest, perhaps he’d better review those that exist on his own side.