Daily Digest: Opioids, addiction, trespassing
Good Monday morning. Get the week started with some politics news courtesy of your Daily Digest.
1. Fees an issue in reaching opioid compromise. Plans passed by the House and Senate to respond to Minnesota’s epidemic of opioid abuse overlap in many areas. Both contain a menu of requirements for painkiller prescribers as well as grants for addiction prevention, intervention and programs addressing the epidemic's fallout. And to pay for it, each would generate roughly $20 million annually from licensing fees at various levels of the opiate distribution network. But as public deliberations resume Monday with a House-Senate conference committee, a key sticking point remains. Lawmakers are struggling with involves how the fees are structured. (MPR News)
2. Father's alcoholism central to Klobuchar's story. It was a painful father-daughter confrontation over alcohol, years in the making, that both Jim Klobuchar and Amy Klobuchar would describe as a defining moment in their respective memoirs. In 1993, Jim Klobuchar was the star columnist for the Star Tribune, a Minnesota celebrity who’d just been arrested a third time for drinking and driving. His daughter Amy, now a U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate, was a young lawyer in Minneapolis who joined him at a meeting with counselors evaluating his addiction. She recounted a missed birthday party, followed by a drunken tumble in the living room. His intoxication at her high school and college graduations. The time she saw him covertly sip from a bottle stashed in the trunk of his car. “She was fundamentally there as a prosecutor,” Jim Klobuchar wrote in “Pursued by Grace,” his book about his alcoholism and recovery. “That arrest and all of its consequences marked the turning point in his long battle with alcohol,” Amy Klobuchar wrote in “The Senator Next Door.” A quarter of a century later, fighting to break through in the Democratic presidential contest, Amy Klobuchar has made her father’s battle with drinking a central part of the story she’s telling voters around the country. She’s shared it live on CNN, in other TV appearances and interviews, and to party activists in the early voting states. “It’s part of my life. And when you’re running for president, everything about your life comes out,” Klobuchar said in an interview. On Friday, Klobuchar proposed $100 billion in new federal spending to fight substance abuse and improve mental health resources. (Star Tribune)
3. Lawmaker arrested for trespassing. Minnesota state lawmaker Matt Grossell was arrested after he refused to leave a St. Paul hospital where he was taken after allegedly causing a ruckus at a hotel bar, police said Sunday. A release from police Sgt. Mike Ernster said that officers were called to the Best Western Plus Capitol Ridge hotel about 1 a.m. Saturday after hotel security complained that an intoxicated man was acting disorderly in the bar area. Grossell, a Republican representative from Clearbrook, had been escorted to his room when officers arrived. Police said officers checked on Grossell and they found that he could not answer basic questions and didn’t believe he could care for himself. Officers called paramedics, who decided to transport Grossell to a hospital. (Associated Press)
4. Rocky start to budget negotiations. House and Senate negotiations on some key budget bills got off to a bumpy start Friday at the Minnesota Capitol. The Republican Senate chair of the jobs and energy conference committee informed his DFL counterpart by letter a day earlier that his side would not be showing up for the afternoon meeting. Sen. Eric Pratt, R-Prior Lake, criticized Rep. Tim Mahoney, DFL-St. Paul, for scheduling the hearing and witnesses before Senate conference committee members were even named. He also said the senators who were put on the committee had previous commitments in their districts and could not make it to a Friday meeting. “Informing me that you are scheduling a conference committee meeting before the Senate conferees were assigned disrespects our chamber, disrespects our members and is the wrong way to begin effective negotiations,” Pratt wrote. Ultimately, Pratt showed up at the hearing without other senators to share his objections directly with Mahoney. (MPR News)
5. Noor trial raises questions for BCA. The state agency that investigates officer-involved shootings across Minnesota is facing intense new scrutiny for alleged missteps in its investigation into the killing of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, calling its reputation into question as critics ranging from activists to the governor demand answers. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s handling of previous cases and activists’ concerns highlight longstanding issues that went publicly unrecognized until former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was convicted last week of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Damond’s death. “I have concerns about the work of the BCA in every case they touch,” said Kimberly Handy-Jones, whose son, Cordale Handy, was killed by St. Paul police in 2017. “Between leading questions in interviews with the officers, mishandling evidence … these so-called investigations are consistently designed to clear police officers who kill members of the community.” Several law enforcement officials reached for comment had few answers about how to build public trust in such investigations and in the BCA’s operations. (Star Tribune)
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