The Minnesota Senate budget proposal is quite a deal

Here’s a look, for example, at what they have in mind for Health and Human Services. And the environment.

One area of specific note is education. From Education Minnesota:

The education budget proposals by Gov. Tim Walz and the House DFL represent strong first steps toward fully funding our schools. They include:

3 and 2 percent formula increases

Special education funding increase

Dedicated $ for more support staff

$ for paraprofessional training

Full-service community schools funding

Senate Republicans? Not so much:

.5 percent formula increases

ZERO dedicated $ for more support staff

ZERO $ for paraprofessional training

ZERO full-service community schools

Never has the phrase “Minnesota Party of Trump” been more apropos, because there is a suspiciously marked ideological resemblance here to the White House budget plan. Which might seem odd, given Traitor Trump’s job approval ratings here. About the lowest in the upper Midwest, along with Illinois, though the numbers aren't good for him anywhere in our region except in the Dakotas.

Objective, rational people would not produce something like the MN Senate plan. But diehard right-wingers are anything but objective and rational. On the contrary, they strongly tend to reality-bereft cognitive rigidity in the extreme. They also tend to extreme authoritarianism, which will make picking off the two votes that would be needed in the state Senate to pass DFL proposals very challenging. I expect that Minnesota’s next budget will end up looking a lot like the current one. Not awful, but not what it should be. We need the trifecta, beginning in 2021, for that.

MN lege: On Trust Fund $, Republicans don't ever learn

That title is actually misleading, because Republicans did in fact “learn,” last year, that they could get away with this.

Recall last year that the Republican-controlled Legislature approved in its last hours and without public input a bill allowing the state to use about $8 million annually in lottery money from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund to pay interest on appropriations bonds to fund wastewater treatment plants and other infrastructure projects…

Much-less-expensive general obligation bonds typically fund projects such as these…

…this session (Sen. Torrey Westrom (R-Elbow Lake)) included about $10 million of the $61 million the Senate trust fund bill spends to pay for wastewater treatment plants. Moreover, another Senate Republican bill eliminates 18 LCCMR-recommended projects and replaces them, in part, with $10 million in funding for state parks and trails operations and maintenance. - Dennis Anderson/Star Tribune

Part of this is the GOP positioning itself for now fairly imminent end-of-session showdowns. And part is legislative right-wingers just fucking up everything they touch, same as always. In any case, I don’t presume to know how hard-core Minnesota Senate Republicans plan to be, as far as potentially forcing a special session, with or without a shutdown. I’m sure not putting it beyond them.