US House

The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed the U.S. House Wednesday afternoon by a vote of 249 to 175. The bill, which extends existing hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation, gender identity and disability, passed mainly along party lines with Republicans in opposition and Democrats supporting the bill.
Among Minnesota’s Congressional delegation, Rep. [...]

Minnesota’s most outspoken member of Congress, Republican Michele Bachmann, took to the House floor Monday evening to lambaste Democrats on everything from gay marriage and abortion to taxes, immigration and Mountain Dew. At one point she said the State Childrens Health Insurance Program, recently reauthorized by Congress, would be a “magnet” for “illegal aliens.”

Rep. Keith Ellison is among a slew of Democrats who founded a new populist caucus in the U.S. House of Representatvies, the Iowa Independent reports. The caucus was the brainchild of Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democrat from Iowa.
“As someone who has been out holding town hall meetings and getting a faceful of that populist rage, [...]

Minnesota’s U.S. Representative-elect for the Third District, Republican Erik Paulsen, ran one of the best five House campaigns in the country, according to the Washington Post blog The Fix. Paulsen “beat back the anti-Republican trend,” writes Chris Cillizza, “by focusing on his own accomplishments in the state legislature.” The Fix tracked the Third District contest closely throughout the campaign season as one of the nation’s most competitive congressional contests. But in several ways Cillizza’s summary this morning doesn’t exactly square with how home-state observers might recall the race.

Newspaper election endorsements are out — some packing a wallop as bracing as a stiff winter wind in October, others playing it as safe as pre-Halloween trick-or-treating at a local strip mall. Here’s a roundup of candidate preferences for the U.S. Senate and House that Minnesota papers have so far put in print. The recession sees the major dailies’ editorialists cutting back on costly opinions — either picking favorites without naming the issues they like them for, as both the PiPress and Star Tribune have done in the U.S. Senate race, or beating a wholesale retreat from making a pick at all, as the St. Paul Pioneer Press has done in the presidential contest.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza places Minnesota’s two hottest congressional contests back to back in his list of the 26th–50th U.S. House seats most likely to swap parties — a category consisting of 24 seats currently occupied by Republicans and exactly one held by a Democrat. The Top 25 he released last week had only [...]

On WCCO-TV Sunday, State Rep. Erik Paulsen spoke for the first time on Republican claims that DFLer Ashwin Madia is less qualified for the state’s 3rd district U.S. House seat because he’s not a father, rents, and doesn’t fit the district’s “demographic.” Asked if he would condemn the line of attack, Paulsen dodged the question — without acknowledging his campaign’s role in rolling out the personal slams. More after the jump, including videos of WCCO’s interviews with all three candidates.

The media have fallen out of love with the longstanding pretense that Hillary Clinton still has a chance to win the Democratic nomination. The morning-after ledes by Jackie Calmes in the Wall Street Journal and Dana Milbank in the Washington Post say it all.

Calmes, “Clinton’s Win Brings Little Reward”: “Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama in [...]

Props to Minnesota’s own Blue Stem Prairie for noticing that the House Republican caucus’s campaign slogan for the fall — The Change You Deserve — also happens to be a trademarked marketing slogan for the anti-depressant Effexor.

Incidentally, the drug’s manufacturer, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, reports that “In clinical studies, the most common side effects with EFFEXOR XR [...]

In this video excerpt of a US House floor debate from Tuesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann spends nearly five minutes discoursing on the Second Amendment. The occasion was a bill that included the prohibition of guns in facilities owned by the federal Public Housing Authority. With Bachmann playing point, GOP firearm enthusiasts forced Democratic leaders to [...]