Off we go.
The Minnesota Senate has started discussion of the agreed upon budget bill.
Senate finance committee chair Dick Cohen, DFL-St. Paul, began his talk to colleagues by explaining changes from the budget bill lawmakers sent to Gov. Tim Pawlenty in the pre-dawn hours Sunday. But, he couldn't quite tell which day that bill was passed.
"I think it was two days ago but I'm not quite sure," Cohen said. With several all nighters in a row, with one day sliding into the next, he -- like many Capitol denizens, particularly staffers who've had almost no sleep for days -- was a little disconnected from the flipping of the calendar. He called the time shift kind of "surreal."
And like many, he wasn't quite crazy about the result of the negotiation.
"We needed to balance the budget and get out of here…and this seemed the best way to get out of a bad situation," Cohen said. "This is not a very good bill."
The voting actually has to start in the Minnesota House, which started meeting just before 9:30 a.m., to take up the bill. The Senate has taken a break while it waits for the House to give the bill final approval and then will come back to take its own vote.
