Minnesota just got billions of dollars in federal aid under the American Rescue Plan — and Gov. Tim Walz might get to decide how to spend it all. A 1943 law lets the governor decide how federal money received in between legislative sessions is spent. It was originally intended for pushing disaster relief and other relatively small-scale assistance, but it still applies to the far bigger cash pots of this year's stimulus. The Legislature could put this money into its budget this year, but if they can't strike an agreement, Walz gets to direct the money — which unsurprisingly has legislative Republicans upset. [ Read more from MinnPost's Peter Callaghan]
One bit of pandemic-funding the Legislature is working on passing is money to support summer school programs to help mitigate learning loss during the disrupted 2020-21 school year. The DFL-controlled House passed a $107 million package on a nearly party-line vote Tuesday, with Republicans objecting that the funding formula was too generous for Minneapolis, and the need to spend state money on this at all given the federal stimulus. A Senate bill to the same effect hasn't passed committee yet, but Senate Republicans "have expressed willingness to provide some aid to help districts deal with learning loss." [ Read more from Brian Bakst]
The family of a Stillwater prison guard who was killed by an inmate in 2018 was offered a $3 million settlement by the state — but the Legislature has yet to approve it. Now the family says that if it doesn't get passed this session, they'll sue. [Read more from Fox 9's Courtney Godfrey]
Israel held its fourth national election since 2019 Tuesday, and the results appear just as inconclusive as the last three. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition appears to have 59 seats, more than the opposition bloc's 56, but two short of the 61 seats needed for a majority in the Knesset. The balance of power could be held by an Arab political party. [Read more from BBC News' Yolande Knell]
Dive deeper: What's behind the gridlock and instability in Israel's politics? Analyst David Beard argues that Israel's multi-party system boils down to a pro-Netanyahu coalition and an anti-Netanyahu coalition, but "the anti-Netanyahu coalition can't govern because parts of the coalition refuse to go into government with the Arab parties." [Read more]
Most of the attention has gone to the $1,400 stimulus checks, but another component of the massive stimulus bill is a pot of money to fix a criticized part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. That law set up public subsidies for people buying health insurance on the individual marketplace — much as people with insurance through their jobs get subsidies from their employer — but it cut off those subsidies for people earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty line. That didn't matter too much for younger adults — when I bought unsubsidized ACA coverage in 2018, in my early 30s, I paid less than $300 per month. But adults in their 50s, who have much higher health costs, can get socked with massive bills. Now a lot of those bills will get slashed — a 60-year-old couple earning $75,000 per year might see their monthly premium drop from $1,920 to $531. Of course, this extra funding is temporary — for now. The total cost of this two-year subsidy? About $34 billion. [Read more from the Bulwark's Daniel McGraw]
He took his shot: With the Senate battling over the filibuster, do you know who you can credit/blame for the creation of the Senate parliamentary tactic? None other than Founding bad boy Aaron Burr. The U.S. Senate's rules had the ability to cut off debate in the 1790s, but it was so seldom used that Burr — who was President of the Senate in his role as vice-president from 1801 to 1805 — recommended that the Senate just eliminate that motion from their rules since it was clearly unnecessary. [ Read more from historian Peter Shulman]
Something completely different: Call it the mother of all traffic jams. A 220,000-ton cargo ship has become wedged in Egypt's Suez Canal, block all traffic in one of the world's most important waterways. Ordinarily an average of 50 ships per day cross the canal, so with liberating the ship expected to take days, that's a lot of goods backed up on the route between Europe and Asia. [Read more from the Associated Press]
Listen: Everyone knows the Barenaked Ladies' hit "One Week," but take a listen to this underrated deep cut from their less successful 2003 album Everything to Everyone, "War on Drugs" — a somber track (fair warning: the lyrics discuss suicide) that features a pop version of a Rossini crescendo. [Listen]
