BISMARCK — The North Dakota Senate struck down a bill on Thursday regarding parent or guardian access to the medical examination room of minors after an extensive and emotional floor debate.

House Bill 1450 would have clarified that a parent or guardian had “full and complete access” to the examination room of a minor in their care, and would have required health care facilities to post this information prominently for parents and guardians to see.

The bill would also have required that a health care provider give written notice to the parent or guardian of a minor before they ask the minor any questions. The notice would have informed parents and guardians of their right, and the minor’s right, to opt out of questions; whether the minor’s answers to questions will be shared with other people or recorded in any capacity; and a list of the topics of the questions that may be asked.

HB1450’s primary sponsor, Rep. SuAnn Olson, R-Baldwin, said a parent or guardian’s right to be in a medical examination room with their child already exists, but the bill sought to clarify it and ensured that health care providers informed parents and guardians of the right.

The measure garnered extensive opposition testimony in the Senate Human Services Committee from medical professionals, including representatives from Central Dakota Forensic Nurse Examiners, Rolette County Public Health, the North Dakota Hospital Association and the North Dakota Medical Association.

They said they were concerned the bill would “reinforce the power dynamics that perpetuate abuses,” and potentially conflict with North Dakota laws that allow minors to consent to their own health care in limited circumstances, such as instances of sexual assault, or when consent is implied due to a life-threatening situation that requires emergency examination and treatment.

According to the National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused by the age of 18 and of those, over 60% will be abused by a family member.

“How can a child be honest if the person sitting next to them may be the biggest part of the problem?” The bill’s carrier Sen. Judy Lee, R-West Fargo, said. “Passing this bill will cripple the ability of health care providers to do what is right for their child and adolescent patients.”

The discussion on the Senate floor, which took over an hour, brought multiple senators to tears and prompted some to allude to their own experiences with abuse at home that they said would have prevented them from answering questions from medical professionals honestly had a parent or guardian been in the medical examination room.

“I stood on the doorstep in one of my early campaigns, I heard a child crying loudly in the house. Then I heard a male voice shout, ‘You quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,’” Sen. Dick Dever, R-Bismarck, said on the floor of the Senate.

“I knocked on the door. Immediately I heard only silence. I knocked again, there was no answer. Those sounds were familiar from my own childhood. I don’t know whether I am heaven-bound because my mother shared the love of Christ with my three brothers and me or because my father beat the hell out of us. Both were true … If I had been questioned in this kind of circumstance (in a medical examination room), my responses would have been different with my father in the room than without him.”

The bill does specify that it does not apply to legally emancipated minors or in instances of suspected physical or sexual abuse when a provider has documented the concern and notified the appropriate authorities. However, Sen. Kristin Roers, R-Fargo, said this is not specific enough and leaves a grey area for medical professionals to have to navigate.

“I am a mandated reporter as a nurse,” Roers said. “When do we consider something a suspected case of abuse? Is it when I saw a bruise, or once I’ve had a chance to find out that it wasn’t from falling off the jungle gym, but because their dad hit them? When? Where’s the line? This doesn’t define that. How can I ask the questions and actually get at the root of that?”

“I was one of those girls who was abused,” she continued. “Not by my parents, really, and I never told my parents until I was an adult. And I just wonder, would I be in a different situation if someone had asked me the right questions? I never would have answered them correctly if my parents were in the room. But would I have, if I had been there alone?”

Sen. Janne Myrdal, R-Edinburg, said she respected those who shared their stories in the chamber but, “sometimes a sad story makes for bad law.”

She said there were stories on both sides of the issue and shared a story she said was from a constituent about their 12-year-old daughter being “pushed” by a nurse practitioner to get on the birth control pill during a sports physical. She said the nurse practitioner had attempted to speak with her constituent’s daughter privately but the constituent refused to let them, and when the nurse practitioner continued to push on the topic of birth control, the constituent took their daughter and left the medical examination.

“The reason these bills are before us today is because of vaccinations,” Myrdal said. “Should a child be vaccinated without a parent’s permission? I certainly don’t think so. And also the transgender issue — I mean let’s be honest here, that’s why this bill is before us — where we read stories of teachers or … health providers taking a child and agreeing to help them (transition) and not tell their parents.”

Other senators who spoke in support of the bill said parents were responsible for the protection of their children and brought up stories about children being asked questions that they felt were inappropriate by medical professionals during examinations and about physicians abusing children under the guise of medical examinations.

Sen. Kent Weston, R-Sarles, read from a handout of stories that he said happened to North Dakota legislators.

“’My 13-year-old son went for a sports physical. The doctor asked him if he was sexually active and offered him condoms. What does that have to do with playing basketball?’” Weston said. “This was a personal friend of mine that, while she was 17, (she said) ‘While I was lying on the exam table, my doctor gave me — a teenager at the time — advice as what best placement for my hips during sex (was).’”

Weston said 99% of doctors were “fantastic” and that he was not bashing doctors, but that in all professions there were good and bad people. He said that the fundamental right belongs to the parents.

“We need to give parental rights and then get after the bad actors,” Weston said. “That’s how we deal with this.”

Multiple senators said the bill had them conflicted about which way to vote. An amendment was offered on the floor that some said would have moved the bill “in the right direction” but it was voted down in a narrow 26-21 vote.

The bill previously passed the House with a 72-15 vote but came out of the Senate Human Services Committee without a recommendation. The Senate voted the bill down in a 29-18 vote.

MINOT — Our nation is closing in on $37 trillion in debt, which represents almost 123% of our gross domestic product.

That’s a problem we have to fix, and spending cuts have to be part of the equation. Yet that immutable reality still doesn’t justify the approach President Donald Trump’s administration is taking to spending cuts.

Case in point, recently, the administration announced the cut of $20 million in grants that were headed to North Dakota infrastructure projects. Among the cuts was $7.1 million for a water intake project in Washburn, almost $8 million for a regional wastewater project in Lincoln, south of Bismarck, and nearly $2 million for a wastewater lagoon project in Fessenden.

These projects represent the boring but vital functions of government that most of us are oblivious to. We all want our waste to go away when we flush the toilet or rinse out the sink, and we take for granted that the waste is flowing through a system where it’s handled appropriately. But doing that takes planning and, perhaps most important, funding.

The sort of funding the Trump administration just cut for North Dakota projects.

What’s galling is that, when called on to defend these cuts, the Trump administration called the BRIC program, from which these funds derived, “wasteful” and “political.”

“The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters,”

read a statement from FEMA,

which is now under the control of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Political?

How in the world is a wastewater lagoon political?

We could have a debate about whether this sort of funding should come through FEMA, or the federal government at all. You could argue that the funding should be provided locally, except that the city of Fessenden has 425 citizens, and local officials estimate that raising the funds from local taxpayers would mean

a roughly $6,000 tax hike on every property owner in Wells County.

The state of North Dakota could step in and provide those funds, too, but there’s an upper limit on our capacity to do that. Like Wells County, the state of North Dakota has a relatively tiny tax base. Replacing the federal funding that flows into our state with state tax dollars would be fiscally devastating. Entering the current legislative session, roughly 30% of Gov. Kelly Armstrong’s executive budget was the appropriation of federal dollars.

Our liberal friends sometimes like to deride this state of affairs as evidence that North Dakota is a beggar state. The truth is more complicated. We have a lot of resources — energy, agriculture, etc. — that are vital to the rest of the country. Thus, it behooves federal taxpayers to fund infrastructure here, from roads to bridges to wastewater lagoons.

Without those federal dollars, North Dakota couldn’t function because we don’t have the tax base to support our infrastructure.

This is tough medicine for North Dakota’s pro-Trump electorate. The Trump administration is branding even valid infrastructure projects as “wasteful” and “political” and it’s left our congressional delegation scrambling to balance the stupidity of that with the unavoidable reality that this is precisely what North Dakota voters cast their ballots for.

Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak appeared

on a recent episode of the Plain Talk podcast,

and we asked her about the Trump administration’s approach to these cuts. Her answer was all over the map. She said she would “love” to talk about DOGE (special Trump adviser Elon Musk’s government efficiency initiative), but then said DOGE doesn’t work for her and that she won’t defend their approach, before circling back to say that it’s going to be a “really productive process.”

I think Fedorchak knows that DOGE is a mess, but can’t come out and say that because Republicans who register even modest criticisms of Trump are, as a practical political matter, walking out onto a dangerous limb.

It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.

Trump critics spend a lot of time wondering what it will take to break through the MAGA miasma and convince voters that they’ve made a mistake. My answer? It’s going to take some pain.

Voters will need to be impacted in some meaningful ways. The value of their retirement accounts will have to dwindle amid the trade war, or they’ll have to get slammed with massive property tax hikes as local officials try to fill in the gaps on infrastructure spending.

That’s what it will take, and DOGE may well be delivering.

BISMARCK, N.D. — Trucks and workers started cleaning up the Keystone oil pipeline spill in rural North Dakota, though its cause and the project timing is unclear.

The pipeline ruptured Tuesday morning in southeastern North Dakota and was shut down within two minutes by an employee who heard a mechanical bang. An aerial photo released Wednesday shows a black, pondlike pool of oil suspended in a partially snowy field that’s traversed by tire tracks.

A farmer told The Associated Press he could smell the scent of crude oil, carried by the wind.

South Bow, a liquid pipelines business that manages the pipeline, estimated the spill’s volume at 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons. Keystone’s entire system remains shut down.

That’s not yet known. The company is investigating what caused the spill and how long repairs might take, spokesperson Kristin Anderson said Wednesday.

The spill is not a minor one, said Paul Blackburn, a policy analyst with Bold Alliance, an environmental and landowners group that fought the pipeline’s extension, called Keystone XL.

The estimated volume of 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons of crude oil, is equal to 16 tanker trucks of oil, he said. That estimate could increase over time, he added.

Blackburn said the bigger picture is what he called the Keystone Pipeline’s history of spills at a higher rate than other pipelines. He compared Keystone to the Dakota Access oil pipeline since the latter came online in June 2017. In that period, Keystone’s system has spilled nearly 1.2 million gallons (4.5 million liters) of oil, while Dakota Access spilled 1,282 gallons (4,853 liters), Blackburn said.

In its update, the company said the pipeline “was operating within its design and regulatory approval requirements at the time of the incident.”

The 2,700-mile (4,350-kilometer) pipeline originates in Alberta, Canada, and carries heavy tar sands crude oil south across the Dakotas and Nebraska before splitting to carry oil both to refineries in Illinois and south to Oklahoma and Texas.

The $5.2 billion Keystone Pipeline was built in 2010. TC Energy built the pipeline which is operated by South Bow as of last year.

The spill is contained to an agricultural field. In an update Wednesday, South Bow said it has multiple on-site vacuum trucks beginning to recover the oil. Continuous air quality monitoring is underway. The pipeline’s affected segment is isolated, and the company said it’s evaluating plans for a return to service.

Phone messages and emails were left Wednesday with the state Department of Environmental Quality and the Ransom County sheriff about the spill and response.

Myron Hammer, an adjacent landowner who farms the land affected by the spill, said it hasn’t yet adversely affected him, aside from the smell of crude oil or sulfur carrying when the wind blows in a certain direction. The pipeline company appears to be doing its due diligence to fix the problem, he said.

There’s been a lot of truck traffic bringing equipment to the scene, he said. His house is about 1.75 miles (2.82 kilometers) away.

“It’s become a beehive of activity in the proximity there,” Hammer said. Some of his property is being used as a staging area for equipment.

The spill site is north of Fort Ransom, a tiny town in a hilly, forested area known for scenic views and outdoor recreation. A state park and hiking trails are nearby.

They very well might, though energy experts have different outlooks.

The pipeline’s shutdown could quickly raise gas prices in the Midwest and could have more effects on diesel and jet fuel because refineries will have less of the crude oil they need, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at the University of Houston.

Higher-priced diesel could lead to higher grocery prices because diesel trucks transport those products, he said.

Other experts said the refineries likely have a supply of crude oil already on hand that would help protect against immediate impacts of the shutdown.

“Even if the pipeline gets cut off completely for, say, 2 or 3 weeks, they have enough crude (oil) to continue refining for gasoline,” said Mark LaCour, editor-in-chief of the Oil and Gas Global Network.

Gas prices increased for a third consecutive week in the U.S., but that could change as oil prices drop amid the escalating global trade war.