Good morning and welcome to Monday. The Super Bowl is over, and it’s time for a new work week. Let’s start with the Digest.
1.Lawyers for Washington state and Minnesota have told a federal appellate court that restoring President Trump’s ban on refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries would “unleash chaos again.” The filing with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco came early Monday after the White House said it expected the federal courts to reinstate the ban. Washington and Minnesota said their underlying lawsuit was strong and a nationwide temporary restraining order was appropriate. (AP via MPR News)
2.The Minnesota State Arts Board is the primary distributor of state funds to artists and arts organizations. Each year it gives out several million dollars. But some artists say there are flaws in the board’s review process.Executive Director Sue Gens said the Minnesota State Arts Board doesn’t have the resources to thoroughly examine the more than 1,400 grant applications it receives in a year. It funds approximately 40 percent of those proposals. Gens said she believes, on the whole, the process is working. (MPR News)
3. Many state lawmakers augment their salaries by claiming expenses. They haven’t had a raise in a couple decades, and a new panel is looking at their compensation. No one has claimed more in expenses in recent years than Senate DFL leader Tom Bakk of Cook. (Star Tribune)
4. Republican elected officials took issue with President Trump’s comments about Vladimir Putin that he made in a interview with bill O’Reilly of Fox News."Putin's a killer," O'Reilly said. "You got a lot of killers," Trump replied. "What, you think our country's so innocent?"Three Republican senators and several other conservatives were quick to condemn or distance themselves from the president seeming to equate Putin and the United States when it comes to killing. (Politico)
5. In that pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News Trump said coming up with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act will take until the end of the year or until 2018. That’s longer than what the president and the Republican-led Congress promised during campaign season."It statutorily takes awhile to get," Trump said. "We're going to be putting it in fairly soon, I think that, yes, I would like to say by the end of the year at least the rudiments but we should have something within the year and the following year." (New York Times)
