Stop me if you've heard this before: the DFL-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate are advancing very different bills on a key issue of the day. Today the topic is election law, where Republicans want to limit Election Day voter registration, while Democrats are pushing for automatic voter registration and restoring the voting rights of released felons. The big differences may make any major changes impossible this year. [Read more from Tim Pugmire]
Broader context: At least in public-facing arguments, the dominant paradigm in U.S. debates over election law is that some people are allowed to vote, some people are not, and we want to maximize the number of legal voters and minimize the number of illegal voters. (Even people who don't actually believe this — more on that later — often use this language.) But the problem is that this tends to involve tradeoffs. Adding more restrictions to prevent illegal voting necessarily makes it harder for legal voters to cast ballots. Making it easier for legal voters to vote could also make it easier for illegal voters to do so. So in practice, the debates come down to preferences: Democrats tend to say the priority should be making legal voting as easy as possible (and that illegal voting isn't a common problem); Republicans say the priority should be making illegal voting as hard as possible (and that deterred legal voters aren't a common problem).
But not everyone agrees with this paradigm. Today the National Review's Kevin Williamson published a provocative piece arguing that "the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters." [Read more]
You don't hear this argument out in the open much these days, but it used to be quite common — 200 years ago. Immediately following the American Revolution, most states imposed a requirement that voters had to own a certain amount of property or pay a certain amount in taxes in order to vote . Delaware, for example, required voters to own either 50 acres of land or £40 of personal property. These restrictions were generally abolished, severely scaled back or simply not enforced in the decades after the Revolution, but by 1792 up to 20 percent of adult white male citizens were ineligible to vote. (Women and non-whites often faced wholesale and more persistent restrictions on voting, of course.) Even into the 19th Century, as most states adopted universal manhood suffrage, many states retained an exception denying the vote to so-called "paupers," or people receiving welfare. The rationale behind all these restrictions, historian Donald Ratcliffe writes, was "the assumption that the poor, the idle, and the profligate had to be prevented from corrupting the electoral process." [Read more from Ratcliffe, if you have JSTOR access]
The pandemic has severely hurt transit ridership everywhere, and especially harmed was Minnesota's Northstar commuter rail line, which had anemic ridership even before COVID-19. Now Republican Rep. Jon Koznick, R-Lakeville, has a bill to shut down Northstar and redirect its budget to help businesses harmed by last summer's civil unrest. Supporters of the line, such as Rep. Dan Wolgamott, DFL-St. Cloud, say the problem with the Northstar line is that it only runs to Big Lake, rather than extending 25 more miles to connect St. Cloud and Minneapolis. [ Read more from Kirsti Marohn]
President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan includes $20 billion to "reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments" — that is, where freeways were cut through neighborhoods like St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood. [Read more from NPR's Noel King]
Local angle: Efforts were already underway to try to build a land bridge over I-94 in St. Paul, reconnecting Rondo with parkland or more buildings. Rep. Ruth Richardson, DFL-Mendota Heights, has a bill seeking state funding for the land bridge, and says federal funding would be welcomed, too.
Wisconsin held an election yesterday for the statewide office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, an officially nonpartisan race that in practice saw a Democrat-backed candidate, Jill Underly, beat a Republican-backed candidate, Deborah Kerr. [Read more from Wisconsin Public Radio]
Going streaking: While Republicans win plenty of elections in Wisconsin, voters there keep electing Democrats to oversee public schools. It looks like the last time a conservative-backed candidate won this race was 1973. [Read more from FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich]
An appeals court on Tuesday struck down a part of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which gave Native American families preference in adopting Native American children. The complicated 325-page decision could wind up at the Supreme Court. [Read more from Indian Country Today's Joaqlin Estus]
Something completely different: The classic Daffy Duck short, "Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century," was nearly shown before every screening of the original "Star Wars" at the request of George Lucas. Star Mark Hamill said the intent was to "let the audience know what was coming was less than dead serious." (Both "Duck Dodgers" and "Star Wars" were also inspired by the old "Buck Rogers" serials.) But Lucas couldn't get the rights. [Watch the short ]
Listen: Sea shanties made quite a splash back in January, driven by mashups on TikTok. In that spirit, here's Stan Rogers with a modern shanty classic, "Barrett's Privateers." [Listen]
