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*May 12, 2024
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Legislative Update

Mothers Day

Friends and Neighbors,

 

I hope you have a happy Mother's Day on Sunday and that you're able to spend some time with your mothers and grandmas this weekend.

Here at the Legislature, we've officially entered the last week of the 2024 Session with only five session days left before adjournment on May 20. Most of the DFL's omnibus spending bills have already passed off of the House Floor after countless hours of debate and attempts to amend, but we'll likely need to pass many of these bills again after conference committees wrap up early next week.


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As you can see from the chart above, the Senate has their work cut out for them. This week the DFL passed their Human Services, Health, Ag/Commerce/Energy Finance, State Government, Public Safety, and Judiciary Omnibus Bills off of the House Floor and to the Senate.

One crucial development that we saw in the Senate yesterday is that *the firearm storage mandate and mandatory lost & stolen reporting gun control bills are dead, according to the Senate Majority Leader.*

This week House Republicans were also able to restore longstanding religious freedom protections back into the Human Rights Act. This is a huge win for our faith communities and Minnesotans all across the state, but looking ahead into the long term, the upcoming Equal Rights Amendment does not include similar protections, which is one reason that I'll be opposing that measure. More on that later.

Looking ahead to this weekend, Saturday is Statehood Day and the *new state flag* will officially replace the current flag on that date. Last night House Republicans attempted to declare an urgency and put the new flag up for a vote so that Minnesotans could vote on the flag that represents them, but the motion unfortunately failed on a party-line vote.

Finally, we currently have three bills scheduled for Monday - the most concerning of which being the* Equal Rights Amendment*. This ERA language is NOT the ERA of the 70's and goes far beyond the original intent to simply make men and women equal under the eyes of the law. For starters, this language includes NO religious exemptions and would make our religious institutions vulnerable to lawsuits for practicing their sincerely held religious beliefs. The bill was also fast-tracked in the final days of session and only made one committee stop, the Rules Committee, before being passed to the House Floor.

The bill on the House Floor Monday authorizes a vote on the 2026 General Election ballot to enshrine the language into the Minnesota Constitution. It's very concerning to me that a bill this serious was fast tracked and not given the same scrutiny as other bills by going through the committee process.

Senator Mitchell Ethics Hearing

Senator Mitchell has now been the deciding vote on several bills in the last week since her felony burglary arrest last month, including on controversial measures like gun control and a vote against expediting her own ethics hearing.

This week the ethics hearing finally happened, and it was a spectacle. The DFL scheduled a year-old ethics complaint against a Republican before Senator Mitchell's hearing, despite multiple previously scheduled hearings and opportunities to hear the complaint. Then, once they finally moved to Senator Mitchell's case, the real show began.

Senator Mitchell didn't speak a word during the entire hearing, instead having her lawyer plead the Fifth for her repeatedly. In fact, *her lawyer pleaded the Fifth to every question imaginable and went so far as to answer "probably" when Senator Miller asked if Senator Mitchell was even arrested!*

The lawyer then went on to deny or downplay extremely basic facts of the case like whether or not Senator Mitchell was booked into the Becker County Jail, or whether or not her AND her lawyer's public statements directly conflict with the criminal complaint and 911 transcript.

Further, Senator Bobby Joe Champion, who chairs the committee and was supposed to moderate the debate fairly, instead allowed the lawyer to cross-examine Sens. Lucero and Housley (who filed the complaint) on legal terminology and the process of admitting evidence into the Senate hearing. We're talking really minuscule stuff here like Sen. Housley saying that the stepmother "testified" to the press about her experience and the lawyer calling her out for that because the stepmother was never placed under oath.

The fact that this backwards questioning was allowed to go on as long as it did is a disgrace, but Senator Champion then went far beyond his role as the moderator to run cover for Senator Mitchell by engaging with Sens. Miller and Matthews, the Republican Senators on the committee charged with asking her questions, and trying to cut down on the questions that they were allowed to ask her! The other Democrat Senator on the committee, Sen. Kunesh, didn't ask Sen. Mitchell a single question despite participating in the first hearing against a Republican Senator just minutes before.

Finally, the most appalling thing Senator Champion did, in what I believe was the defining moment of the hearing, was strongly imply that Sen. Mitchell was never in the stepmother's house at all (despite saying that he couldn't know for sure) because she referred to a man in the 911 transcript, saying: "He was on the floor next to my bed" and "He ran downstairs into my basement," completely ignoring the fact that it was the dispatcher who first used a masculine pronoun by asking "did you get a good look at him at all?"

Through all of this, one thing is absolutely clear. Senator Mitchell can not continue to be the deciding vote on controversial pieces of legislation in the final days of session with all of this going on.

Further, regardless of whether Senator Mitchell is guilty of a felony or a gross misdemeanor as will be found in the criminal trial, I believe her conduct is clearly in violation of Senate Rules which hold Senators to the "highest ethical standard."

Discipline has been taken against Senators for such small infractions as tweets before, so it's extremely disappointing to see the Senate DFL put power over principles so clearly by obstructing the hearing and not finding probable cause for discipline this week.






Please Contact Me

I encourage you to please contact me with any questions or input by phone at 651-296-4231 or by email at [email protected].

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335 State Office Building
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Saint Paul, MN 55155
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