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Capitol View®
Bill Wareham

Daily Digest: The dust settles on the special session

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Welcome back from to your Daily Digest after the long holiday weekend. Let's see how lawmakers spent it.

1. Budget bills pass, finally head to governor for signatures. Gov. Tim Walz will act as soon as Tuesday on a set of state budget bills the Legislature sent him over the weekend. There is every indication he’ll sign the package he helped negotiate ahead of the one-day special session that followed a five-month regular session. Members of the Legislature quickly dispersed after adopting a two-year, $48 billion budget. It was messy, testy and, of course, tardy. Still, Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka said he’s proud that even with a divided Legislature and governor of a different party, lawmakers made big strides. “A new governor, a new speaker of the House and we were able to work together to pass very difficult budgets” Gazelka said after an all-nighter lawmakers needed to cross the finish line. “We were worlds apart but we figured out how to take care of the fundamentals.” Walz praised the budget as delivering on promises of investments in health care, education and community prosperity. "Minnesota is showing the rest of the nation that Republicans and Democrats can still find compromise and work together to get things done,” said Walz, a former congressman who pledged to cut through the gridlock so common in Washington when he took over the state’s top job in January. Never mind that the Legislature blew a week beyond a deadline for finishing up or that state leaders forged much of the agreement in private. (MPR News)

2. Is tapping reserve funds a good idea? Minnesota lawmakers put the final touches this weekend on a $48.3 billion two-year budget that relies on spending surplus tax collections and state savings. Over the next two years, lawmakers plan to tap a projected $1 billion budget surplus and take $412 million from accounts dedicated to health care programs. By 2023, they plan to have spent $514 million more from the health care funds and $491 million from the state rainy day fund. Essentially, Minnesota Republicans and Democrats are betting the economy keeps booming. Is that a good idea? Simply put, if tax collections continue to come in above expectations — they were up $480 million in April — it will look like sound fiscal management.“We are riding the economy,” said Mark Haveman of the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence, a government spending watchdog. “From the standpoint of fiscal responsibility, we have weakened our foundation a little bit.” But if economic clouds gather, tapping the savings could make future budgets much tougher to craft. When revenues fall and savings run out lawmakers have to cut spending back to keep the budget balanced. (Pioneer Press)

3. Omar becomes a leading voice on foreign policy among congressional newcomers. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar has aggressively pursued a foreign policy legacy in her first five months in office, drawing sharp blowback from the Trump administration as she seeks to be a prominent voice on world affairs. The Somali-born Minnesota Democrat, saying she brings “the perspective of a foreigner” to her new role, believes that American foreign policy needs to be changed in fundamental ways. “When I think about foreign policy, we need something equivalent to the Green New Deal,” Omar said in an interview, drawing a parallel to the sweeping climate change plan from New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another high-profile member of the Democratic freshman class of 2018. From her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and with a growing international reputation, the former refugee is wading into debates over various global hot spots and controversies — turmoil in Venezuela, a brutal penal code in Brunei, U.S. tensions with Iran. Already accustomed to controversy thanks to comments critical of Israel’s political influence, which prompted rebukes from many fellow Democrats, Omar has ambitions for nothing less than a comprehensive reset of U.S. foreign policy. (Star Tribune)

4. Supreme Court malpractice decision eyed warily by doctors and their lawyers. In a ruling that is causing a stir in Minnesota’s medical and legal communities, the state Supreme Court has said that a doctor can be sued for malpractice even in the absence of a traditional physician-patient relationship. Medical groups say the opinion could subject physicians to more lawsuits, even in cases when they are simply giving informal advice to colleagues. The expansion of liability, they say, could also increase malpractice insurance premiums and have a chilling effect on consultations. The court said its decision was aimed at doctors whose decisions have consequences. It arises from a case on the Iron Range, when a hospital doctor allegedly refused to admit a patient who was being treated by a nurse practitioner. The doctor did not see the patient and based his decision on a 10-minute telephone conversation, the details of which are in dispute. The patient died three days later. Both the district court and the appeals court dismissed the original lawsuit, filed by the patient’s family in 2016, because the doctor was not directly treating the patient. But the Supreme Court, in a decision last month, said the lower courts erred and had ignored precedents going back 100 years. (Star Tribune)

5. Bickering across the border. Wisconsin’s new Democratic governor and the Republicans who control the Legislature are having such a hard time getting along that even the signing of a seemingly innocuous, unanimously approved bill morphed into a partisan fight. It’s only been months since Tony Evers took over as governor, yet there have already been lawsuits, claims of sexism and accusations from Republican leaders that Evers is “out of touch.” Evers, who spent a lifetime in public education, first as a teacher and finally as the state superintendent of schools, has dismissed much of the back and forth as “huffing and puffing.” However, there is no escaping that there is a pall over the Statehouse. The governor and Republican legislative leaders are barely talking and the Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader told hundreds of party faithful at the state GOP convention this month that Evers is “out of touch” with “wacky ideas.” Evers’ spokeswoman responded by saying the male Republican leaders refuse to talk with Evers’ chief of staff and other top aides because they are women — an accusation Republicans derided as “completely asinine,” calling Evers’ staff “clueless.” Evers didn’t back down, calling on people to “connect the dots” to determine if Republicans were sexist. (Associated Press)