Good evening,
The final domino remaining between Minnesota lawmakers and a budget fell over the weekend when leaders announced a deal on a public safety budget.
The deal includes a host of significant policy changes, including limitations on no-knock warrants and civil asset forfeiture, the closure of the "mentally incapacitated" sexual assault loophole exposed earlier this year and limits on the use of informants. [Read more]
But the deal falls short of what DFL lawmakers had been pushing for in the wake of high-profile police killings. Now members of the House People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus say they'll try to amend the bill on the floor to add other provisions such as a limit on pretextual stops or extending the statute of limitations for wrongful death lawsuits.
What remains unclear is whether the POCI caucus will vote against the final bill, which could leave the bill needing votes from the Republican minority to pass the House.
Meanwhile Gov. Tim Walz announced executive orders implementing some policies Democrats were unable to write into law, including early release of body camera footage from state agencies after police shootings. [Read more from Tim Pugmire]
Walz has also signed five budget bills into law.
Here's where bills stand now:
| Budget bill | Negotiated? | House status | Senate status | Governor status | | Agriculture | Yes | Passed | Passed | Signed | | Capital Investment | No |
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| | Commerce & Energy | Yes | Passed | Passed
| Signed | | E-12 Education | Yes |
| Passed |
| | Environment | Yes | Passed | Passed
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| | HHS | Yes | Passed | Passed |
| | Higher Education | Yes | Passed | Passed | Signed | | Housing | Yes | Passed | Passed |
| | Jobs & Economic Growth | Yes | Amended | Passed |
| | Judiciary & Public Safety | Yes |
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| | Legacy Finance | Yes | Passed | Passed | Signed | | State Government, Elections & Veterans | Yes |
| Amended |
| | Taxes | Yes |
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| | Transportation | Yes | Passed | Passed | Signed |
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The remainders: The jobs and economic growth budget is on path to being resolved. The Senate amended the state government budget to insert language ending Walz's COVID-19 emergency powers [Read more from Tim Pugmire]. There's a good chance that bill is going to be the last one passed. The tax bill could also be a final-day bill. And finally, the public safety budget will start seeing floor votes tomorrow.
The big picture: Lawmakers have until Wednesday at midnight to pass all parts of the budget to prevent a government shutdown, and at this point there's no reason they won't do that. There's an open question if POCI caucus objections can derail the public safety bill, but leaders are still optimistic about getting that passed on time. That mostly just leaves the ongoing scuffle over Walz's emergency powers, which has looked like the final item for a long time now. Lawmakers are cutting things close, as they are wont to do, but all parties have insisted they'll get things done by the deadline, and it looks like that's going to happen.
Civil liberties activists hope the Minnesota Supreme Court will grant the vote to felons on probation or parole. The lawsuit, which lost at the appellate level, is the latest tactic after legislative bills went down in the face of Republican opposition. [Read more from Peter Cox]
Diving deeper: There seems to be an assumption on both sides that felons, if given the right to vote, will predominantly back Democrats. But available data and historical precedent doesn't necessarily back that up. Let's look at the demographics of Minnesota's 55,000 felons on parole or probation. Estimates from the Sentencing Project suggest around 18 percent of Minnesota felons in this category are Black, and another 6 percent Hispanic, with most of the rest white. Given prior studies that suggest most felons are men and lack higher education, it seems likely to expect that a plurality at least of people who would be enfranchised if these measures passed would be white men without college degrees — a group that has leaned heavily Republican in recent elections. [Read more from Bill Scher in the Washington Monthly]
How do you measure how liberal or conservative a lawmaker is? Political scientists have for years tried different measures, such as quantitative analysis of voting patterns or examining who gives them money . Now Dan Hopkins and Hans Noel have a new technique: They polled activists in both parties and asked them about how liberal or conservative they thought various figures were. The results largely track with more conventional measures, but the exceptions are interesting. For example, in a 2016 survey, Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse racked up extremely conservative voting records, but were seen by activists as being relatively moderate, compared to someone like Ted Cruz with a similar vote history. On the Democratic side, then-Sen. Al Franken only voted a little bit more liberally than did Sen. Amy Klobuchar, but activists saw him as much further to the left. [Read more from Dan Hopkins and Hans Noel in FiveThirtyEight] | |
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Have we gone from "infrastructure week" to "infrastructure quarter"? Endless negotiations in Washington, D.C. over a bill to spend money on roads, bridges, broadband and a host of other topics hit a breakthrough last week when a bipartisan group of senators agreed on an infrastructure package that might be able to get 60 votes in the Senate . But Democrats' willingness to pass a much smaller bill than they want is linked to the simultaneous package of a Democrat-only infrastructure package using "reconciliation" rules to bypass a filibuster, and Republicans are balking at voting for a compromise bill if Democrats are going to then go ahead and pass provisions the Republicans don't want on their own. [Read more from The Associated Press]
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a legal challenge to the authority of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) that seems to have backfired spectacularly on the plaintiffs. The lawsuit, building on a 2020 decision holding that presidents had absolute firing power over directors of federal agencies, argued that since the 2008 law authorizing the FHFA gave the director (now unconstitutional) protection against dismissal, everything past directors had done was null and void. Crucially for the plaintiffs, who were shareholders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that included the transfer over the years of more than $100 billion in mortgage profits to the U.S. government. Undo that transfer and the shareholders profit! Except the Supreme Court, while confirming that the president is capable of firing the FHFA director, declined to nullify his past decisions. And the twist: Once the Supreme Court ruled the president could fire the FHFA director, President Joe Biden immediately did exactly that, removing the Trump-appointed director who was unwinding the FHFA's regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replacing him with a liberal who intends to continue it. [Read more from Mark Joseph Stern in Slate]
Something completely different: Do you like cats? Then adopt my foster! Mama Trix, as she is provisionally known, is a sleek one-year-old calico who just saw her kittens move out, and is ready to be done with motherhood and start living for her. She is playful, affectionate once she gets to know you, has only a teensy little catnip addiction and gets on all right with other cats. If you're interested, check out her page at Feline Rescue and send them an adoption inquiry . (Don't contact me — I'm just the temporary caregiver.) Adoptions there are first come, first serve, so don't wait! | |
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| Listen: Whenever I'm having writer's block and need a burst of energy, I tend to turn to one particular album for that propulsive kick: Ramin Djawadi's soundtrack to the 2013 film "Pacific Rim" — and especially its driving title track. [ Listen] | | |
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