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Welcome to this week’s edition of the D.C. Memo. This week from Washington, the ongoing Iowa Caucus, the end of impeachment, and a bit of Boundary Waters legislation. Let’s get on with this.
Iowa, delayed
What happened to the Iowa Caucus results?
We didn’t know the night of. Reporting delays caused by problems with a new app and busy phone lines, in addition to the state party’s desire to re-check the results, pushed candidates to end their night without conclusive results. ProPublica reports that there were also serious potential security problems with the app.
So who won? We still don’t know. The Iowa Democratic Party has been releasing the results sparingly throughout the last few days.
And even then, we may not know for a while. Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez is calling for a “recanvass” or an audit of the results. A recanvass is a hand audit of the all of the caucus math worksheets and reporting forms.
All we know for now is that Sen. Bernie Sanders leads the popular vote and the race for state delegate equivalents (or SDE’s) is tight between Sanders and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Impeachment update
President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate on Wednesday, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) being the only Republican to break ranks and vote with Democrats on one of the two articles of impeachment brought forward by the House.
Sen. Tina Smith said that Romney’s speech prior to the vote brought tears to her eyes. “Tears came to my eyes and it gave me some hope in what has been a dark couple of weeks,” she said on MSNBC.
The State of the Union
The State of the Union was a rorschach test for at least two Minnesotans in Congress: Rep. Pete Stauber and Rep. Angie Craig. Depending on which freshman you spoke with, the speech was either a bipartisan show of good faith or a deeply partisan diatribe that’s bad for the country.
Boundary Waters bill
Rep. Betty McCollum’s new bill would ban mining on hundreds of thousands acres of Federally owned wilderness near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
“One mistake. One failure. One flaw, means an environmental disaster for this pristine and highly-sensitive wilderness ecosystem could happen,” McCollum said at the bill’s first hearing on Wednesday. “That would mean the death of this federally-protected wilderness.”
Rep. Pete Stauber, who represents the district and has been a consistent proponent of new mining projects, countered.
“The communities on the Iron Range are in desperate need of economic revitalization,” he said. “There needs to be quality jobs for folks to stick around after high school.”
You can read more about the hearing here, in the Mesabi Daily News.
Walz watch
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is in D.C. this week for the National Governors Association (NGA) Winter Meeting in Washington. He also has planned visits with the Minnesota congressional delegation, Reps. Mark Takano (D-CA), Steven Palazzo (D-MS), Tim Ryan (D-OH), Adam Smith (D-WA), and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
By the numbers
- $205,421.81: The total amount of expenditures for Midwest Values PAC, former Sen. Al Franken’s leadership PAC. Franken is paying communications consultants, as well as former staff, for unspecified purposes.
- 32: The number of Iowans that showed up to the satellite Iowa caucus in St. Paul. Read more at MinnPost.
- 5: The number of days until the New Hampshire primary.
The president next door
Beyond Iowa, Sen. Amy Klobuchar is now making her way to New Hampshire, where she’ll be fighting an uphill battle. For now, she’s been kept afloat with an almost certain fifth place finish in Iowa.
Groups in Minneapolis, like the local NAACP chapter, are still calling for Klobuchar to suspend her campaign, amid new reports that the evidence Klobuchar’s office used to put a 16 year old boy in prison was questionable.
Of any cable network, Chris Wallace at Fox News seemed to push Klobuchar the most to address whether or not she made a mistake in prosecuting Burrel.
Wallace cut Klobuchar’s off when she didn’t answer his question: “Did you know? And if you didn’t, shouldn’t you have known?”
Klobuchar said she didn’t know about the questionable evidence.
At the same time, another story about Klobuchar’s interactions with the black community in Minneapolis. Klobuchar defended prosecutions for possession of khat, an herbal stimulant grown in Northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula that’s commonly used for social gatherings.
Klobuchar also had to file her end-of-year campaign finance forms at the end of last month. If you’re interested in seeing how Klobuchar has been fundraising, MinnPost’s Greta Kaul breaks down the report here.
Finally, a new New Hampshire poll from Monmouth has Sen. Bernie Sanders still in the lead, followed by former Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
- Sen. Bernie Sanders: 24%
- Pete Buttigieg: 20%
- Joe Biden: 17%
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren: 13%
- Sen. Amy Klobuchar: 9%
In other news
- Buttigieg campaign removes fundraiser co-host tied to ICE contracts, after being prompted by a reporter.
- Minnesota DFL lawmakers push for requiring sprinklers in high-rises, reports the Star Tribune.
- Nearly 100 years later, Tulsa finally decides to address the 1921 race massacre with search for mass grave.
Quote of the week
“Rush Limbaugh, thank you for your decades of tireless devotion to our country,” the President Trump said at the State of the Union, awarding Limbaugh a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
What I’m reading
Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Why is Jeanine Cummins’s ‘American Dirt’ a Thriller?
A fantastically written piece on narratives and why steering away from reality can be harmful, if you’re writing about other people’s experiences. “Border stories are complicated. They necessarily intersect with systemic oppression, racism, and the effects of the U.S. empire. But in American Dirt none of these things affect Lydia. She worries instead about one bad man,” Contreras writes. “By reducing migration to interpersonal conflict, Cummins erases the border’s political context; the end result is a lighter, more digestible story.”
Elana Schneider (No relation… I think) for Politico: Buttigieg camp invites more super PAC help
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign appears to be inviting PACs to help their campaign via Twitter. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign isn’t mincing words about how they feel about that: “Was this meant to be a [direct message] or did you mean to tweet out this instruction to your super PAC?” tweeted Roger Lau, Warren’s campaign manager, quoting a Buttigieg staff member’s tweet. “Fun fact about how some campaigns exploit our broken campaign finance laws: if it was a DM it would be illegal.”
That’s all for this week. Thanks for sticking around. Until next week, feel free to send tips, suggestions, and sound advice to: gschneider@minnpost.com. Follow at @gabemschneider. And don’t forget to become a MinnPost member.
