Legislative Update - May 15, 2019

Now that the House and Senate have each passed their budgets, we're in negotiations to reconcile differences between our bills and theirs. As a member of the joint House/Senate Jobs and Energy conference committee, I will fight to pass a budget that supports all Minnesotans and advances our economy. 

The House passed an inclusive budget that will increase access to affordable housing, protect and expand access to affordable health care, address climate change, invest in our schools, provide for common-sense gun safety measures, fix our roads and bridges, and lift up our communities.
 

So far, the Republican-led Senate has refused to protect health care coverage, they are going to force teacher layoffs, they voted down two common-sense gun safety measures, and they even walked out of a meeting on paid family leave. Minnesotans didn’t send us here to do nothing. As the Star Tribune wrote in an editorial last week, we did not get elected to "pit sick people against schoolchildren" by sacrificing health coverage to pay for our schools. I urge you to contact Senate Republicans and ask them to come to the negotiating table. 

Housing
We also passed a Housing Policy bill on the floor. We are listening to your concerns about the growing crisis Minnesota is facing and in our budget we invest in everything from homelessness, rental assistance programs, housing preservation, new development and affordable homeownership. 

There are a lot of landlords on the House Republican side. Here's a clip from our debate about renters' rights on the House Floor. 

We are here at the legislature to make sure we take the best care of all Minnesotans. Yet American Indian women face murder rates that are more than 10 times the national average. In fact, it's the third-leading cause of death for Native women. Nobody knows exactly how many are victims of violence, and nobody knows exactly how many women go missing across the nation. This week my colleagues unanimously passed a bill to create a state task force to address the endemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Minnesota. 

I'm proud to co-author this bill - no one should wonder if their loved ones will return when they walk out the door.