Hot Dish 05.24.24

By Rochelle Olson

I don’t need to tell you that it’s the Friday before a three-day weekend. I’m here in my pajamas in my living room chanting, “U.S.A.” like Sen. Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael, in a sparkly jacket on Sunday night.

Let’s take it back to last Friday night when I returned home from former President Trump’s speech at the RiverCentre. The hour was late and I was still confounded by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s walk-out music: AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.” Sample lyric (I’m a rolling thunder, pouring rain. I’m coming on like a hurricane. White lightning’s flashing across the sky. You’re only young, but you’re gonna die.) Despite the tough-guy music, I tried to talk to Emmer, introducing myself along with AP reporter Steve Karnowski. Emmer mumbled and his handler promptly pushed him forward (after he’d done his requisite TV interviews slamming President Joe Biden). No time, the handler said. Second time I’ve met Emmer. Second time he refused questions.

Those Republicans love AC/DC as Sen. John Jasinski of Faribault walked out to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and noted the choice in his remarks in advance of Trump’s speech. (Rode down the highway. Broke the limit, we hit the town) Jasinski was one of two legislators I saw at the event. Rep. Joe McDonald, R-Delano, was there as well, but he said he was on duty, working a paid gig as a photographer. In introducing Trump, Jasinski said he was bringing a **warm welcome on behalf of Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, who couldn’t attend.

The Senate GOP, of course, has seized many opporitunities in the past month to deride the DFL and Sen. Nicole Mitchell, of Woodbury, because she faces one felony burglary charge. (Her next court date is in early June.) And yet Trump faces so many felony charges in so many jurisdictions that Politico offers an extensive tracker.

Ok, but that’s all a digression. Let’s get back to the beavers. I flipped on the Senate floor session après Trump and they were talking about a ban on eating beavers in the Department of Natural Resources conference committee report.

Sen. Foung Hawj, DFL-St. Paul, whose first language is not English, told fellow senators that he had learned a new expression, “eager beaver” during discussion of the bill. (Idiomatic expressions do not come easily to him in foreign languages, he said.)

The bill banned the consumption of beaver, which is a long way from where it started with Sen. Heather Gustafson, DFL-Vadnais Heights. Gustafson said she was trying to help a constituent who has beavers on his property in White Bear Lake and sought to manage them by non-lethal (to the beavers) means. The initial plan was to allow for the trapping and moving of beavers.

Wesenberg successfully amended the bill to limit the no-kill beaver provisions to the 7-county Twin Cities metro. Then Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, amended make it legal to kill, trap and keep the beavers. Alas, by the time the bill returned from the conference committee to the Senate last Friday, the lone remaining beaver provision banned their consumption. Beavers, it turns out, have a constituency. BeaverCon 2024 is set for October in Boulder, Colo.

The end result didn’t do much for Gustafson’s constituent who just wanted to keep them off his property. In summation on a phone call Thursday, Hawj said the 2024 beaver battle was but a beginning. “The bottom line is that the legislative beaver war is to be continued,” he said.

The debate also yielded talks of a Squirrel Stew Summit with Hawj and Wesenberg. Hawj has not eaten beaver, but he has eaten squirrel and said it’s a “little gamey.” For the summit, Hawj suggested he and Wesenberg each prepare the dish per their own traditions. This would not be Hawj’s first squirrel summit.

HOUSING ACTION: Colleague Josie Albertson-Grove looks at the scorecard for housing measures in the recent session. The Legislature passed smaller measures but failed to adopt a new statewide zoning law or ban Section 8 discrimination. Sen. Lucero said he wanted to see less stringent energy efficiency standards approved to cut costs for builders. “We need to take some serious steps to decrease the cost and increase the supply,” Lucero said.

MITCHELL TWEETS: The aforementioned Sen. Mitchell hasn’t spoken but a few administrative words since she returned after her burglary arrest. But she tweeted on Thursday about legislation that grew out of talks with community members and in another thread talked child care and anaerobic digesters. Those were her first Tweets since before her arrest on April 22.

I had a session wrap chat with Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, who is staying with the plan to allow for the due process through the GOP’s Senate ethics complaint and the Becker County criminal case. Mitchell was dismissed from the caucus after he arrest.

“I will add that when we have seen other members of the Legislature find themselves at odds with the law, that we have made space for those members to go through due process and reconciliation,” Murphy said.

Murphy said Mitchell faces a serious set of issues and faces hard conversations with her constituents.

SIX YEARS: Our Ag reporter Christopher Vondracek checked in early to report that the U.S. House Ag committee endorsed a $1.5 trillion Farm Bill (six years after the last one and roughly six months since a 1-year extension). Swing-district DFL Rep. Angie Craig voted no, citing what she called the deprioritization of “midwestern crops” and cuts to nutrition programs. Republican Rep. Brad Finstad voted for it, saying the bill was written for farmers, “not a bunch of D.C. bureacrats.” (My Q: How did bureacrats become the go-to bogeyman?) Vondracek says it’s mostly a food/nutrition bill. The bill is probably D.O.A. in the Senate where Ag Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.,, which advanced out of committee with only 4 Democrats in support, is probably dead-on-arrival in the Senate, where Sen. Stabenow, D-Mich., chairs the Senate Ag committee. Stabenow has said the House bill crosses red lines, including a cap on anti-hunger (SNAP) dollars.

WHERE’S WALZ:

NOON: Set your radio dials because he’s on MPR’s Politics Friday with my favorite former Associated Press colleague and legend-in-the-making Brian Bakst.

12:30 PM: Interviewing candidates for a vacancy in the First Judicial District.

On Thursday, Walz called on the National Guard to aid in the search for two missing Boundary Waters canoeists. The governor said his family was intimately familiar with the pain of their families. The governor lost his younger brother Craig Walz in a freak accident on a Father’s Day trip in June 2016.

Walz also went to Hoyt Lakes Thursday to sign a bill with Hauschild that directs $30 million to rural emergency medical services. “When Minnesotans are faced with a medical emergency, they should expect that help will come – whether they live in Minneapolis or on the Iron Range,” Walz said.

READING LIST

Keep us posted at hotdish@startribune.com.