Erik Paulsen

Don’t let health care reform put a new tax on med-tech companies. That was the message of a letter sent last week by a bipartisan group of Minnesota members of Congress to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee that takes up a reform bill today. But somehow the letter failed to [...]

The U.S. House voted to suspend all federal funding for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on Thursday afternoon by a vote of 345 to 75. Now the measure heads to the Senate, which passed a bill banning federal housing monies from going to the embattled nonprofit.

There are a thousand stories in Minnesota’s 850 cities — and in most of them, it seems, City Hall is laying someone off. Winona is cutting its library director along with the school liaison officer and 10 others. Fergus Falls is firing Ranger, the police dog. Austin already cut its crossing guards but now is hiring them [...]

Rep. Tim Walz is adding to the flurry of health care town halls surrounding President Obama’s Saturday visit to Minneapolis to talk about health care. Walz announced Wednesday that he has scheduled a town hall on Saturday at the John Marshall High School Auditorium in Rochester from 12 to 2 pm. Rep. Erik Paulsen also [...]

From the outset, the long-running legal dispute over the radio station now known as Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current featured intimacies and conflicts that verged on the familial. Some of the people upset by St. Olaf College’s sale of the former WCAL-FM to MPR are St. Olaf alums (also known as Oles), and some of [...]

Terri Bonoff is not running for Congress — yet. But the Democratic state senator, who lost a tough endorsement battle to Ashwin Madia in 2008, is seriously considering a challenge to freshman Republican Rep. Erik Paulsen. “I’m certainly not being lighthearted about it,” Bonoff says. “I love public service and I have a lot of work to do, whether it be for this state or at the national level.”

Minnesota’s members of the House of Representatives are back in their home districts gauging how constituents feel about federal issues. That feedback will also include town hall meetings for a number of Congress members including Reps. Tim Walz, Collin Peterson and Michele Bachmann. Will Minnesota’s town halls get as rowdy as ones around the nation? Time will tell. Here’s what Minnesota Congressional delegation was up to this week.

The plight of Minnesota’s dairy farmers occupied the time of Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Reps. Tim Walz, Collin Peterson and James Oberstar, who worked this week to find relief for farmers hard hit by economic and natural disaster. That and other highlights from Minnesota’s congressional delegation inside.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Friday it’s produced an ad campaign taking aim at seven vulnerable Republican House members over health care reform. Radio ads in Minnesota, the only state where the DCCC is targeting more than one district, will criticize Reps. Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen for accepting campaign contributions from the health [...]

Only two of Minnesota’s House contests are likely to be competitive in 2010, according to the latest analysis from CQ Politics. Republican Reps. Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen potentially face the most challenging races in this election cycle.