Hot Dish 4.19.24

By Rochelle Olson

Not only is it Friday, it is a Friday before an extended Passover pause. The Legislature will be OOO until noon Wednesday.

Former President Donald Trump’s hush money jury has been seated in NYC but they still need more alternates. Former President Jimmy Carter is still alive. First Lady Jill Biden is in town tonight in Bloomington speaking at a Women for Biden-Harris event and to the teachers’ union. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, was arrested and suspended from Barnard for her participation in a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University in NYC.

Rep. Jim Nash spoke to editorial writer D.J. Tice about turning his painful childhood into legislation and you’ll want to give the Waconia Republican a bear hug after you read it (but ask permission before you do). “There were a lot of nights that I would pray for someone to come and save me,” Nash told Tice. “And no one came.”

In other Capitol developments, DFL leaders came into the session without stated plans to pass new gun safety bills. Now two bills are looking — in the cliched parlance of legislative coverage — poised for passage. You know I wanted to say locked and loaded and now I have. The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday endorsed two gun measures on partisan votes. Sen. Heather Gustafson, DFL-Vadnais Heights, sponsored the measures known as the safe storage and straw buyer bills. Republicans on the panel fought them, arguing they’d criminalize good gun owners and were unnecessary.

Except! Gustafson comes from a family of hunters and owns guns. “There’s a reason I’m carrying this bill,” she said. Her family has a hunting cabin in the middle of “nowhere Wisconsin,” she said. Things got chippy and Gustafson, now in her second session representing a swing district, responded sharply at times. She started by saying the safe storage bill would dramatically reduce the number of children killed by firearms. Sen. Torrey Westrom, R-Alexandria, spoke against the measures, first by expressing worries about farmers being criminalized if they set down a loaded gun and left it briefly unattended. (The bill says that when a gun isn’t in your possession, it needs to be secured and tamper resistant.) Westrom said farmers often carry firearms to protect their livestock and themselves.

In response, Gustafson said that if cows killed as many children as guns, the Legislature would be seeking safer storage for cows. At one point, Westrom blended topics, addressing Gustafson’s support for reproductive rights. “You talk about killing kids, your abortion legislation killed more kids last year than guns,” he said to her.

ANDOVER ACTION: Read about the Andover High School teacher who noticed students struggling with the written driver’s permit test and went to work. Amna Kiran’s five-year journey is culminating in passage of an easier-to-understand and more straightforward test. I went to her classroom Thursday and wow, she’s a force. Also, she has awesome red fingernails. Please see my photos with the story.

SALES TAXES: Legislators are considering guidelines for local-option sales taxes, Josie Albertson-Grove reports. “It seems kind of silly that municipalities have to come cap-in-hand to us, to ask permission to put something on their own ballot,” said Sen. Aric Putnam, DFL-St. Cloud. “It made more sense to me that we come up with rules.” Read all about it here.

HIRSI ARREST: The DFLer’s oldest daughter self-reported the suspension on X, according to Ryan Faircloth and Louis Krauss. She was among 108 arrested and among three suspended from Barnard. NYPD Patrol Chief John Chell said Columbia administrators, not the NYPD, identified the demonstration as a clear and present danger. “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” Chell said at a news conference, according to the Columbia Spectator.

TRUMP TIME: Over at the the New York Times, Jonathan Alter provides a dispatch with the headline “The Scent of a Struggling Campaign is Emerging from Trump’s Courtroom.”

I share this for the local angle from Alter, who has covered many presidential campaigns and wrote, “At least Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole and the other losers I’ve covered had members of their families with them when the trail turned rough. Not Trump.”

CHEMICAL CONGRESS: An effort to regulate toxic forever chemicals comes from U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. The proposed Forever Chemical Regulation and Accountability Act would create a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study to review the persistence, bioaccumulation, and human health risks of PFAS and document current uses. Meanwhile, Strib colleague Chloe Johnson reports about a plume of PFAS chemicals in the east metro.

GOP SATURDAY: The Minnesota GOP’s Elephant Club has an event at noon in Golden Valley. U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, is the featured speaker.

WHERE’S WALZ:

The state’s chief executive who does not read Hot Dish has no public events planned. But next week could be interesting. Hint. Hint.

READING LIST

Send me a scoop or something to make me laugh — rochelle.olson@startribune.com. Please.

Keep us posted at hotdish@startribune.com.