Hot dish 5-9-24

By Briana Bierschbach

We’ve hit that part of the Minnesota legislative session where it feels like there’s a positive correlation between how beautiful it is outside and how long lawmakers are willing to spend on the floor debating bills. I keep reminding myself that daylight hours are getting longer while the number of days left in session are rapidly ticking down.

On a related note, we haven’t yet unpacked in this newsletter the concept of legislative days.

State law dictates not only the general timeframe legislators meet during the year, it also says the Senate and House must meet in regular session each biennium for a total “not exceeding 120 legislative days.” Usually, that’s plenty of time for lawmakers to get through their agenda, but Democrats in control burned more of those days than usual last spring to push their massive agenda through the process.

Now, legislative days are running short. The Legislature has a dozen calendar days before their May 20 deadline to adjourn, but only half as many legislative days, meaning the days they spend in session on the House or Senate floors passing bills.

It’s important because it means they’ll have to carefully plan days they are in session over the next week to give them enough time to pass all the bills they want to this year. Reminder: it’s not a budget year, so technically they could go home today without creating any kind of a constitutional crisis.

ETHICS UPDATE: The Senate ethics committee returned on Wednesday and voted that Sen. Glenn Gruenhagen should receive instruction by Republican leaders on how to appropriately email his Senate colleagues, Rochelle Olson reported.

The bipartisan ethics subcommittee unanimously agreed on the resolution requiring instruction for Gruenhagen on how to “appropriately deliver email messages” to colleagues. Once he’s been instructed, the complaint will be dismissed, according to the resolution proposed by Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.

Before the four-person panel voted, Sen. Andrew Mathews, R-Princeton, said that he believes there was no probable cause for an ethics violation. He made a motion to that effect Wednesday night, but it failed on a tie. The compromise resolution now goes to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

The committee is expected to meet again June 12 to discuss an ethics complaint against Sen. Nicole Mitchell, DFL-Woodbury, who faces a first-degree burglary charge in Becker County.

GOP: Leaving that decision until after the 2024 legislative session adjourns on May 20 has frustrated Republicans in the Senate, whose votes will be needed if Democrats want to pass a package of bonding projects this year.

Republican Senate Leader Mark Johnson said Wednesday that they’d hoped to move ahead with the bonding bill and strike some deals around bipartisan policy measures, but Democrats seem to be moving ahead with “very controversial bills” with Mitchell as the deciding vote.

JOHNSON: Our new D.C. correspondent Sydney Kashiwagi was watching yesterday as the House voted overwhelmingly 359-43 Wednesday to kill an effort led by far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. Kashiwagi reports that all of Minnesota’s congressional delegation voted to table Green’s motion to vacate the speaker, with the exception of Rep. Ilhan Omar, who voted “present.”

“Today’s vote demonstrates the dysfunction within the House GOP Conference. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate is a vanity campaign to gain more clout within the MAGA extremist base. I voted ‘present’ because I could not in good conscience vote to waste more time and energy to elect a new Speaker of the House,” Omar said in a statement explaining her vote.

By voting present, Omar broke from other members of the progressive “Squad,” which includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who voted against tabling Greene’s motion.

MNLEG: The House and Senate are both in session today burning one of those legislative days to move bills along. Senate Democrats plan to take up a bill to increase penalties on straw purchasers, one of three gun-related bills already passed by the DFL-led House. It’s unclear if the Senate has the votes to pass the safe storage proposal and the bill to require reporting of lost or stolen firearms.

The House is debating the health, agriculture, commerce, and energy supplemental budget bills, as well as a proposal to replace a statue of Henry Mower Rice now on display in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. You can read all about that in this Josie Albertson-Grove story.

8:00 a.m.: Gov. Tim Walz plans to interview candidates for two vacancies in the Second Judicial District.

11:00 a.m.: Walz will attend the funeral for Sammy McDowell.

2:00 p.m.: The governor will lead a briefing to discuss the state’s summer air quality forecast.

READING LIST

That’s all for now. Keep us posted at hotdish@startribune.com.