The race for VP.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza has identified five people Donald Trump might tap for vice president. As a service to our readers (all half dozen), there follow minute biographies of these five, these crazed, these feckless.

Joni Ernst. Joni Kay (née Culver 7/1/70) was confirmed in Mamrelund Lutheran Church and still became valedictorian of her Stanton High School class. She went on to Iowa State (B.A., psychology) and the Iowa Army National Guard, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel and commanding the 185th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, Camp Dodge. She spent 14 months in Kuwait in 2003-04.

     She served as Montgomery Auditor 2004-11 and was elected to the Iowa State Senate in 2011. In 2013, Ernst announced for the Senate seat of Tom Harkin (D), who was retiring. She was endorsed by Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trailing in the race to Democrat Mark Jacobs, she took out an ad claiming she would cut pork in Washington the way she cut the balls of pigs back home. (Yet in Ernst’s short time in the senate, the budget has increased from 6.4 to 6.7 trillion, the deficit from 438 to 616 billion. And Iowans continue to reap more than they sow.)

     Jacobs countered by saying what she was best at cutting were votes in the Iowa state legislature, missing 117 of 184 in the previous session. Ernst said that didn’t mean she was AWOL, since she missed 12 of those votes when she was on military duty.

     The people bought it, and she became the first woman elected to represent the state in Congress.

Ernst opposes a federal minimum wage, the Clean Water Act, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage; she is pro-life – she voted for “a fetal personhood” amendment in the Iowa Senate in 2013 – and pro-death – she believes everyone has a right to pack and has an “A” rating from the NRA.
     Did I say she was a Lutheran? And, she has a nice smile.