A Spilled Milk Saga: The Amanda Marsh Files Pt. 2 - "No Lactation Without Representation!"

​RECAP: A Spilled Milk Saga: The Amanda Marsh Files Pt. 1 attempted to untangle a web of connections in the Pierre State Capitol during the 2021, 2022, and 2023 legislative sessions involving current Internship Coordinator Amanda Marsh, then-Senate President Lee Schoenbeck, and former Legislative Research Council Executive Director Reed Holwegner. ​

The Three Amigos of Podcasting

As discussed in Part 1; during the 2022 session, multiple complaints were allegedly brought to Marsh's attention within her formal capacity as the internship coordinator. The events that transpired over the course of the 2022 session were dysfunctional enough to require immediate intervention from the legislature's Executive Board, which began holding regular secret meetings with Holwegner to discuss poor working conditions and personnel issues within the LRC. In late 2023, the Exec. Board declined to comment on the reasons behind Holwegner's forced resignation.​

Back by popular demand, A Spilled Milk Saga has a lot of moving parts and players, so Part 2 will be organized into sub-chapters:
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Chapter I: Holwegner's Background

​But how exactly did the LRC get to such a place of organizational dysfunction in the first place? First, let's back up and see what state statute defines misconduct as: carelessness or negligence of such a degree or recurrence as to manifest equal culpability or wrongful intent. Marsh's alleged actions in her role as the Internship Coordinator, for example, would constitute a breach in her professional duty of care and is allegedly a recurrent theme in her tenure as the program's coordinator.

​But what about Holwegner? He has an extensive background as an experienced bureaucrat in both Kansas' Legislative Research Department and in South Dakota's Legislative Research Council over the course of several decades starting in 1998. After getting the boot from Schoenbeck, Holwegner has since settled in the Black Hills (Good choice, Reed!), and now does freelance policy analysis out of Hermosa. Judging from his new LinkedIn profile picture, he looks much happier working for himself than he did while working for the LRC. Was an NDA part of the severance deal?

Chapter II: Four Rules and the Audit

During the fever dream of 2020, the leaked authoritarian Four Rules document sent out to LRC staff was one of Holwegner's first official acts in the capacity of his new office. But was this Four Rules policy actually Holwegner's own idea and initiative, or was he instructed to implement this policy? The LRC's problems did not begin with Holwegner, nor could the LRC's problems have ended with his resignation. It remains to be seen how long his future replacement can handle sticking around, the interim director was appointed to Executive Director in 2024.

​Marsh has been the hiring manager for the internship program since at least as early as 2019, which is longer than Holwegner's three year stint as Executive Director. Holwegner's predecessor only stuck around for five years. And before that was Jim Fry (unrelated to Sen. Julie Frye-Mueller) who, after thirteen long years, was forced out after a 2013 audit by the National Conference of State Legislature's staff "regarding the performance and management" of SD's LRC. So the LRC's problems didn't begin with Marsh either; regardless of her compliance with, and alleged enforcement of, the Four Rules.

​Chapter III: Marsh's Background
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After all, the LRC has been having problems since before Marsh graduated from high school, back when she was still known as Amanda Jacobs. According to her still public LinkedIn profile, Jacobs interned for Democratic Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin in 2009, Dakota Rural Action in 2010, and then as a research assistant at South Dakota State University where she was "responsible for maintaining and studying the constituent casework files" of Democratic U.S. Senator Daschle in 2011. Jacobs first gig in GOP politics began when she interned for Governor Daugaard later that same year. In 2018, she married into the Marsh family. Her new father-in-law was James Marsh, from the state's Department of Labor. During the 2022 session, Marsh was the staffer assigned to the Senate State Affairs committee.

Chapter IV: Selective Enforcement

There seems to be a discrepancy, and allegedly favoritism at play, when deciding which complaints within the LRC get buried and which get elevated. Former Senator Julie Frye-Mueller's 2022 complaint to Marsh, for example, was allegedly buried along with a multitude of other complaints. Meanwhile, Marsh's complaint against Frye-Mueller in 2023 was turned into a spectacle for the mass media, who lapped it up like a herd of cats drinking milk from a saucer.

​During the committee hearing for the Select Committee on Discipline and Expulsion, Marsh declined to answer when asked whether or not she "appreciated the Senate's handling of this matter to date." Right before that, the committee chairman prevented Frye-Mueller's council from asking Marsh if she knew "who made the decision to make the conversation between you and Senator Frye-Mueller a public spectacle?"​ And a spectacle it has certainly become.

Chapter V: A Public Spectacle

During a university appearance in late 2023, at the front of a lecture hall full of undergraduate students looking on in bewilderment, Schoenbeck physically acted out Marsh's allegations against Frye-Mueller. The Senate President (Pro Tempore) proceeded to pantomime grabbing his own chest and performed an exaggerated milking gesture for several seconds. It's worth mentioning that he voted Nay earlier that same year with HB 1116 bill banning the use of public resources in hosting lewd and lascivious content. These weren't just any allegations he performed in front of Board of Regents students though, but the allegations of his own committee's staff-member, who he worked with closely on a day-to-day basis during legislative sessions. When the public (and taxpayer-funded) performance of Marsh's allegations occurred, during the off-season between the 2023 and 2024 sessions, Schoenbeck was then a sitting member of the Senate State Affairs committee. This same staffer had worked alongside him in this committee since 2021. 

If Marsh was, as she claims, left feeling "violated" after conversing with Sen. Frye-Mueller; one must also conclude that this staffer must have been retraumatized when her own committee member, and the highest-ranking member of the Senate no less, gleefully reenacted these allegations in public for his own entertainment. If that isn't the definition of workplace sexual harassment, then I don't know what is. Describing the allegations would have sufficed, but with a smirk of Duper's Delight and the full knowledge that he was being recorded by multiple phones and other devices around the room, he seemed to revel in the public spectacle. Students, faculty members, local legislators, and community visitors who thought they were attending an educational and professional lecture were instead treated to being held hostage by a strange and unnecessarily graphic visual demonstration. 

Chapter VI: Three Amigos with a Podcast at the Sausage Factory
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The unnamed intern from Part 1, a familial-friend of the Schoenbeck family who had a complaint brought against him in 2022 by Sen. Frye-Mueller, took to Twitter the following year. In a rush to be the first one to spill the latest milk on Frye-Mueller by tweeting out the new "BREAKING" news, he accidently tripped over his own milk pail. And out spilled his own lengthy past of allegations. In the process, his milk pail also tipped over Marsh's along with it. The history of the allegations against him can be categorized into three distinct eras: middle and high school, college, and post-college. And each of those era groupings can be further narrowed down into sub-eras, like those which are campus-related or those from the statehouse which had been reported to Marsh. ​

After having been one of three founding co-hosts for a podcast relaunch in 2023, the unnamed intern quietly parted ways from the Senate President's son's project shortly thereafter. The inaugural episode of the podcast's relaunch was, unfortunately, titled "The Sausage Fest Turns On." Oops, that was a typo, meant Factory. Followed by "JFM Loses Miss Congeniality." And Episode 3, released on Feb. 3rd of 2023, was titled with a clever milk-themed pun, "No Lactation Without Representation." A title which, credit where it's due, is actually quite catchy and makes for a good phrase to borrow for Part 2 of the saga. Any trace of a third amigo has since been scrubbed from the podcast's public branding presence. And if you didn't already know better, at a glance it would seem as though he never even existed in the first place. Not even so much as a peep of an official farewell statement, a staple of basic public relations, wishing their amigo well on future professional solo ventures. Like launching a new clothing line, or becoming a SoundCloud artist or something, anything... nothing. (Ouch!)

​But as they say, a sausage party of three is a crowd. Any comment on whether the dos amigos didn't want a third amigo tainting the brand? Their amigo would go on to leave the state to pursue new opportunities, but no matter how many chances for repentance and a fresh start he's been given, the specter of old and new allegations continues to follow from one professional endeavor on to the next. One insider shared for public comment that the former amigo was later "separated from" a D.C. office in 2024. As the saying goes; it's not what you know, but who you know. And even then, no amount of connections can outrun a lack of discretion.

Chapter VII: New Executive Director Claims More Staff = Solution

The LRC, who apparently can't be trusted with the staff they already have, reportedly made the case in 2024 that hiring more staff is the solution to the well-documented and longstanding history of issues. But I for one am not yet convinced that more taxpayer-funded staff will automatically equal better results, if the underlying dysfunction continues to go unaddressed. Back in 2020, the LRC lost their Chief Code Counsel. Having initially accepted the position with the intention of building a career and retiring with the LRC, he left for greener pastures after only one year. The staffer reportedly stated before the legislature's Exec. Board that,

"At the end of the day it wasn’t worth it. Because of the treatment that this office is subjected to on a consistent basis by the members of this legislature and most notably this last session [2020] from the Senate. So, I decided at the end of session that I did not want to waste the best years of my career working for this body.” -LRC's Former Chief Code Council

Two months after his departure, the remaining staff were e-mailed the infamous Four Rules memo instructing staff to: be seen not heard, not speak unless spoken to, disappear in a crowd of two, and to cast no shadow. Maybe the Dept. of Labor should launch an immediate investigation into the longstanding dysfunction within the LRC, and investigate whether or not the internship program and its coordinator have broken federal Title IX laws, considering not everyone who files a complaint is as lucky as Amanda Marsh to have James Marsh as a father-in-law.

Marsh is now accepting applications for 2026 interns​, so if you or your young adult college student want to apply, please submit your application to the internship coordinator before the deadline on October 17th. Keep in mind that the application deadlines for the 2022 and 2023 sessions did get extended though, officially because of "continued interest." And we all saw how those two sessions turned out! But let's hope for the best that 2025's historic 100th session rebrand is more than cosmetic. Because the rumors you've heard are true: ANY major really is eligible for the internship program. Marsh is very serious when it comes to letting anyone in the program.

This investigation into the Amanda Marsh Files is an ongoing citizen journalism series powered by satire, coffee, and crowd-sourced tips. If you have any information to add, please reach out.  ☕