Good morning, and happy Monday. Time to get caught up to some Minnesota political stories you may have missed over the Thanksgiving weekend. Here’s the Digest.
1. Work underway on a bonding bill, but how big will it be? One of the main jobs of the Minnesota Legislature in 2020 will be to put together a public construction plan. It will borrow money to pay for repairs at colleges, to pay for roads and wastewater treatment plants along with other projects. There’s bipartisan agreement that what’s known as a bonding bill is needed, but the size of the bill is in dispute. The House and Senate committees that craft bonding bills have spent the past few months traveling the state to learn about the local projects that could get state assistance. One difference this year is that DFL Gov. Tim Walz, who will make bonding recommendations in January, has been on a tour of his own. “Every community I’m going to, the chamber of commerce is there, the mayors, the local folks, and they’re looping in the legislators,” Walz said. “I think us doing one too just reinforces what the House and the Senate does. It just gives a little different perspective. So, the need is out there.” In fact, the need far exceeds what lawmakers can realistically provide. After last session’s inaction on a large bonding bill, the requests from state agencies and local government officials for 2020 have topped $5 billion. MPR News
2. Klobuchar says inquiry has uncovered ‘global Watergate.’ Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Sunday that Congress has an obligation to move forward with impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump regardless of public opinion, arguing that the House inquiry has uncovered a “global Watergate.” In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," the Democratic presidential candidate said the evidence unveiled thus far fits the definition of what the nation's founders envisioned for impeachable offenses. “James Madison said that the reason we needed impeachment provisions is that he feared that a president would betray the trust of the American people to a foreign power,” she said. “I see it simply as a global Watergate. Back then, you had a president in Richard Nixon who was paranoid and he delegated to some people to go break into the headquarters and get into a file cabinet to get dirt on a political opponent. That's basically what this president has done on a global basis,” she said. NBC News
3. College savings plans benefit those with higher incomes. In 2011, as part of the deal to end a state government shutdown, Minnesota lawmakers eliminated a little-used matching grant that helped low- and moderate-income families save for college. Six years later, the Legislature enacted a new set of college-savings incentives that are among the most generous in the nation — and which overwhelmingly benefit the affluent. At an annual cost to the state of about $10 million, the incentives promote investing in a 529 plan, a federally authorized investment vehicle that allows families to grow their college-savings accounts tax-free. Still unknown to most Americans, 529s largely benefit the wealthy because they’re the ones with substantial money to save for college, and because investment income is taxed differently from earned income: For federal income tax purposes, a 529 plan doesn’t benefit a married couple making less than about $100,000 because they can invest for their kid’s education tax-free in a regular brokerage account. The Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, called 529s a “handout to the affluent” and “a strong contender for the prize of most absurd tax break of all.” State tax incentives like the ones Minnesota passed in 2017 are similarly “wasteful” and “regressive,” according to their 2017 report, “A tax break for ‘Dream Hoarders.’ ”Although Minnesota’s 529 plan tax incentives can help lower-income people who don’t benefit from the federal tax provisions, those families aren’t taking advantage the way higher earners are. Pioneer Press
4. Even before presidential bid, Bloomberg has been spending. Long before he launched a late-stage presidential bid with an ad blitz across Minnesota and other battleground states, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put his vast fortune to work around the state. He funded pushes to legalize same-sex marriage in the state in 2013 and, more recently, helped fill DFL coffers in the 2018 bid to flip two U.S. House districts in Minnesota won by Democrats Angie Craig and Dean Phillips. Last year, Bloomberg’s American Cities Climate Challenge added Minneapolis and St. Paul alongside 23 other cities in a project to improve energy efficiency in city buildings and promote clean transportation alternatives such as electric vehicles and mass transit. Along the way, Bloomberg’s initiative to increase the number of low-income students on college campuses has reached Minnesota higher-education institutions like the University of St. Thomas and the University of Minnesota. Bloomberg is also linked to the hiring this year of a new lawyer focused on environmental issues at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office — a move that prompted a data practices lawsuit from Energy Policy Advocates, a group with ties to the fossil fuel industry. Star Tribune
5. Twitter shuts down Omar opponent. Twitter has shut down the accounts of Danielle Stella, one of the Republicans hoping to challenge Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in Omar’s bid for reelection, after Stella twice tweeted about hanging the congresswoman. The campaign account for Stella, a candidate in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, posted Tuesday that “If it is proven @IlhanMN passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged.” The account later tweeted a link to a blog post about her comment and added an image of a stick-figure being hanged. Stella’s remark about Omar’s supposedly giving information to Iran is a reference to the baseless allegation that Qatari officials recruited the congresswoman to give intelligence to Qatar and Iran. No evidence has been offered to support that claim. Twitter spokeswoman Aly Pavela said Stella’s campaign and personal accounts were permanently closed for “repeated violations of the Twitter rules.” Pavela did not respond to a question about whether Stella’s tweets about hanging Omar factored into the company’s decision. In a Facebook post on Friday, Stella said she did not threaten anyone but had said, “If it is proven ____ passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged,” referring to the unsubstantiated claims about Omar and Qatar. “You are making this into something it’s not. You are making it about race, about religion, about anything but the truth,” she said. Omar tweeted Friday that Stella’s comments about hanging were “the natural result of a political environment where anti-Muslim dogwhistles and dehumanization are normalized by an entire political party and its media outlets. Violent rhetoric inevitably leads to violent threats, and ultimately, violent acts.” Washington Post |
