Good morning. Here’s your Digest to get your week started. 1. Minnesotans split on impeachment. Minnesota voters are evenly split on whether President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office, but clear majorities believe that he lies and abuses his power, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found. More than half of people even in reliably Republican parts of the state agree with the notion that he abuses power, the poll found. Views of his honesty were more striking: Six in 10 said he doesn’t generally tell the truth. Abuse of power could become a central element of impeachment proceedings against the president, which were triggered by a July phone call in which he pressed Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden and the Democratic former vice president’s son. The poll found that 48% of Minnesotans oppose impeachment while 47% support it. Because the difference is within the poll’s 3.5 percentage-point error margin, it amounts to a deadlock. Recent national polls have concluded that about 51% of Americans now back impeachment. Star Tribune
2. No insulin deal, but talks continue. Minnesota lawmakers still don’t have a deal on a bill to help people who can’t afford insulin, but they agreed Friday to keep talking. A day after DFL Gov. Tim Walz criticized Senate Republicans for inaction, he met privately with the House and Senate authors of competing insulin proposals, Rep. Mike Howard, DFL-Richfield, and Sen. Eric Pratt, R-Prior Lake. They offered few specifics afterward but said there is agreement on moving forward together to try to reach a compromise that could be passed in a special session. Walz was upbeat. “There’s no daylight between us on doing what’s right for Minnesota,” Walz said. The House passed an emergency insulin measure last session, but the issue remained unfinished when lawmakers went home. The Senate released a plan last month and interim hearings were held on both versions. Pratt said he is hopeful they now have a path to resolve the issue. MPR News
3. Prison staff putting in a lot of hours as openings remain unfilled. Minnesota prisons are coping with a chronic staff shortage by frequently asking — and often forcing — workers to pull double shifts. While prison officials say it’s necessary to cover vital posts, some officers say it contributes to burnout among the department’s ranks. The Minnesota Department of Corrections shelled out nearly $12.3 million for more than 262,000 hours of overtime in fiscal year 2019, according to DOC data. That’s a notable rise from the $6.9 million it spent for roughly 150,000 hours the year before. About 80 percent of the overtime hours and pay last fiscal year went to the nearly 2,000 corrections officers who guard the state’s 10 prisons. The DOC had 113 officer vacancies as of Sept. 17. State Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell said the agency ramped up its use of overtime after two officers died in the line of duty last year. Corrections officer Joseph Gomm was allegedly bludgeoned to death by an inmate at the Stillwater prison in July 2018. Two months later, officer Joe Parise died of a medical emergency after responding to an attack on a colleague at the Oak Park Heights facility. Pioneer Press 4. Klobuchar works Iowa. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was in New York, finishing a speech to nearly 26,000 people. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) was on TV, carrying on an unexpected feud with the Democrats' last nominee for president. And Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was getting a standing ovation from rural Democrats, an hour west of Des Moines, before sharing a story about a man she'd met in New Hampshire.“He goes up to me, and he whispers: 'Don't say anything, but I voted for Donald Trump,' “ Klobuchar recalled. “So I go: 'Don't worry, I won't say anything.' And he goes: 'I'm not going to do it again!' “ Seventy put-upon rural Democrats laughed and burst into applause. “I don't want to overemphasize this,” Klobuchar said. “You know a lot of those Trump voters aren't going to change. But there are a segment of them, nearly 10 percent of them, who voted for Barack Obama, then voted for Donald Trump. There are a bunch of them in this state. There are a bunch of counties in this state that voted for Obama, then for Trump. We don't want to leave those counties behind.” Klobuchar, who struggled for attention in the Democratic primary, says this week's debate helped her catch on at exactly the right time. Her town halls are crowded, with staffers running to get more chairs to pack breweries or event centers. She leads the field in local endorsements, especially state legislators, “with more to come,” she says. Washington Post 5. Lawsuit filed over Trump campaign’s texts. Three Minnesotans are suing President Trump’s reelection campaign for allegedly violating federal law and their privacy with mass text messages sent out ahead of his Minneapolis rally. Dan Pederson, Connor Olsen and Shell Wheeler, all registered Democrats, filed the lawsuit in federal court on Friday. They said they’ve never donated to Trump or consented to being sent text messages. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act bans auto-dialing text messages without user consent. “The transmission of an unsolicited text message to a cellular device is distracting and aggravating to the recipient; intrudes upon the recipient’s seclusion; wastes a quantifiable amount of available data on the recipient’s cellular device, thereby reducing its data storage capacity,” the lawsuit reads. MPR News
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