Daily Digest for February 8, 2021 Posted at 10:22 a.m. by Michael Olson |
Good morning,
Sorry for the delay today, we had a publishing problem. I think the polar vortex froze the internet.
DFL Gov. Tim Walz and top Republican lawmakers are at odds over their approaches on two pressing matters: COVID-19 and public safety planning for the trials around George Floyd’s death.
Friction between Walz and Republicans who are in charge of the Minnesota Senate isn’t new, but the disagreements are especially apparent in the two areas with political potency.
Walz is more than halfway into a term that will be marked by the pandemic and the fallout from Floyd’s killing. He'll be judged on how he handled them should he run again, which looks likely.If more people lose patience with his coronavirus response or if there’s another bout of riots, that’s a big problem for the governor. Both he and his rivals know that.
“I’m starting to see a pattern here: If I end up having to do it myself and it works out well, everybody is happy that they were part of that,” Walz said in almost offhand fashion last week when discussing a public safety proposal “If it doesn’t work out well — well, the governor did it because he didn’t include us.” [Read More]
After record 2020 turnout, state Republicans weigh making it harder to vote After an election that saw record voter turnout, with many of those voters casting their ballots early and by mail, some Republican state lawmakers are proposing a wave of new voting laws that would effectively make it more difficult to vote in future elections.
The proposals come in the aftermath of the unprecedented onslaught of disinformation about the conduct of the 2020 election by former President Donald Trump and some of his allies in the Republican Party.
"Some folks bring these proposals forward and say, 'Well, we just need to address confidence in our election systems,' when it's some of those very same people, or at least their allies and enablers, [who] have denigrated our election system by either telling lies or at least leveraging or relying on other people's lies to justify some of these policies," said Steve Simon, Minnesota's Democratic secretary of state, at a news conference organized last week by the Voter Protection Program. [Read More]
MPR News will have live coverage of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump starting tomorrow and for the rest of the week.
Got story ideas or a question for us? Let me know. molson@mpr.org or DM me on Twitter @publicmic.
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