MINOT — The problem with Sen. Keith Boehm’s book-banning bill, which has already passed the state Senate and is currently before the House Appropriations Committee, is that it would cost North Dakota taxpayers an enormous amount of money.

No, strike that.

The problem with Boehm’s bill is that it’s censorship, motivated by a seething hatred of the LGTBQ community and grounded in the notion that the government, not parents, ought to curate the sort of literary content kids consume.

But certainly, a problem with Boehm’s bill is undoubtedly the cost. Boehm seems to be aware of that, which is why he turned up before the appropriators with an amended version of the legislation in hand that, while compromising his censorious vision, certainly reduces his cost.

Hilariously, Boehm proposed removing his bill’s restrictions on digital content. He asked that a requirement for age verification on the online library system be cut, something the state library estimated would cost $2 million to implement.

This was desperation, and state Rep. Karla Rose Hanson, a Fargo Democrat who serves on the committee, called it out. “It seems like it would be an inconsistent application of your policy, just to eliminate a fiscal note in order to get it passed,”

she said,

and, well, yeah. Precisely.

Boehm’s bill also got a smackdown from the state’s prosecutors.

The way things work now, there is a reasonable democratic process through which people irked by library content can file a challenge to have that content restricted in some way or removed. It’s typically handled by local library boards, or school boards, and for generations this process has been just fine, though in most parts of the state it hasn’t been used often, because despite what troglodytes like Boehm and his ilk might have you believe, our librarians and educators are not devious pornographers bent on soiling the innocence of North Dakota’s young people.

Senate Bill 2307

allows any member of the public, be they a North Dakota citizen or not, to appeal a decision made about library content to law enforcement. Specifically, state’s attorneys. They would “have to read the material, determine if it’s unlawfully obscene, decide whether to prosecute the library and potentially be the prosecutor,”

Peyton Haug reports.

Jonathan Byers, representing the North Dakota States Attorney’s Association, said that process would be expensive and burdensome for prosecutors. He’s got a point. Prosecutors have to deal with actual criminals and shouldn’t be distracted by some gadfly perturbed because a junior checked out a book about a gerbil with two dads.

He also said that putting prosecutors in the position of a censor would be “unethical.”

Byers noted that Boehm didn’t bother to talk to them about his legislation. In fact, Boehm, who is not what any reasonable person would describe as a competent or diligent lawmaker, didn’t bother to engage with the State Library Association or the State School Board Association.

“I have not engaged all the stakeholders,” Boehm was forced to admit to the committee.

Think about that for a moment.

Boehm has wasted hours and hours of this Legislature’s time during its hectic session — he’s distracted his colleagues from important debates about property taxes and infrastructure spending — to debate a bill that accuses our state’s libraries and schools of spreading pornography and would turn our prosecutors into cultural bowdlerizers.

He’s done all that without bothering to have a conversation with the people who run our libraries and schools or the people he’d put in charge of his proposed interdiction.

One wonders if Boehm’s ever actually been in a library. Or read a book, for that matter.

Per Haug’s reporting,

several members of the Appropriations Committee were deeply skeptical of the fiscal implications of Boehm’s bill. “There has to be somebody and some entity that has to bear these costs,” Rep. Brandy Pyle, a Republican from Casselton, said during the hearing. “Somebody’s going to have to pay if this goes forth.”

She’s right. There’s a heavy cost to this sort of legislation. In dollars and cents, sure, but there’s a cultural cost, too, that comes from replacing enlightenment in our community with darkness and fear. Unconvinced by Boehm’s maneuvering, the committee, today, gave his bill a 22-1 “do not pass” vote.

Boehm and those who side with him seem to delight in being offended, but the most offensive thing in this sorry spectacle is that someone like Boehm would be given the privilege of serving in elected office.

The citizens of District 33, the voters of the great state of North Dakota, deserve better than this.

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.