Plain Talk

Just before Gov. Kelly Armstrong appeared on this episode of Plain Talk, he issued two vetoes for two very controversial bills passed by the legislature.

The first was a rejection of Senate Bill 2307, a book ban bill sponsored by Sen. Keith Boehm. "I'm kind of a free speech absolutist," Armstrong said of his decision to spike the legislation, "because nobody's ever figured out who polices the policers."

Armstrong criticized the leg...

Dane DeKrey is a criminal defense attorney with the Moorhead-based lawfirm Ringstrom Dekrey. He recently signed onto an amicus brief in a legal fight over an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which exacts retribution on a law firm Trump feels has wronged him. It does so by, among other punitive measures, revoking the firm's security clearances and prohibiting its personnel from entering go...

When former Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford accepted the job as interim chancellor of the North Dakota University System, he said a long time colleague contacted him to say he's "proven that you like dysfunction and you like to jump into that."

Sanford said he laughed it off.

"I hope it's not that I'm some kind of junkie for chaos for goodness sakes, but there's a lot in in in higher ed in general, especially with ...

"The way the current process is set up, it is ready for exploitation and weaponization," Rebecca Binstock said on this episode of Plain Talk.

Binstock is the executive director of the North Dakota Ethics Commission, and she admits that there are p...

If you're a Republican on the ballot in North Dakota you're probably going to win.

It wasn't always that way, and it won't always be that way, but it is that way now, and it makes a problem within the NDGOP, where a certain faction is playing games with the rules to control which candidates appear on the ball...

"I think we are for certain going to see another property tax measure if that's the version that we kick out."

That's what Minot Republican Rep. Matt Ruby said of the watered-down version of Gov. Kelly Armstrong's property tax plan that the state Senate is currently backing.

"I don't think that that measure failing by that amount was because people love paying property taxes," Ruby continued, referring to ...

Gov. Kelly Armstrong is pushing a "bell to bell" ban on cell phones in schools, and his inspiration is a book called the Anxious Generation, which was written by Jonathan Haidt. But it's more than a book. It's also a movement. Casey Mock, the senior policy manager for Anxious Generation, joined this episode of Plain Talk to discuss their initiative.

Some are condemning this effort as another teen panic, but Mock says that's not so.

It's an annual tradition to have Gov. Kelly Armstrong on Plain Talk for a baseball-only episode contemporaneous to MLB's opening day. Unfortunately, we didn't keep our promise this time, since we're in the closing weeks of the legislative session in Bismarck, and there's a lot going on.

When you have the governor on in that context, you have to ask some political questions.

We asked Armstrong about amendme...

There is a big debate over criminal justice reform at the legislative session in Bismarck.

Attorney General Drew Wrigley suggests the state has been soft on crime, and that's resulted in higher crime rates. He's pushing a bill to keep people convicted of many crimes locked up for longer.

But Jonathan Holth, Gov. Kelly Armstrong's Commissioner of Recovery and Re-entry, pointed out on this episode of Plain Talk that, far from being s...

Many North Dakotans are demanding that our state's federal delegation hold town hall meetings to take questions about the extraordinary beginning of President Donald Trump's second term in office.

I've called for town halls, too.

Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak joined this episode of Plain Talk, and while that's not a town hall, she did take some questions on the topics that are motivating those calls for town halls.

MINOT — Our attitudes about health insurance shift, depending on the context we're in. When we're healthy and paying premiums, we want costs to be low. When we're sick or hurt or sitting alongside a family member suffering some malady, we want expansive coverage and not a lot of bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, these things are in tension with one another; part of it is the process of prior authorization. What ...

It's no secret that the oil industry is central to North Dakota's economy. Still, it's surprising even for in-the-know citizens to look back at the remarkable growth of that industry over the last couple of decades. The North Dakota Petroleum Council routinely commissions studies into the economic impact of their industry, and the findings are eye-popping.

The first study was conducted in 2005.

We invited Sen. Kristin Roers to this episode of Plain Talk to discuss the debate over term limits reforms making their way through the Legislature in Bismarck, but before we turned to that topic, I asked Roers about recent comments made by state Rep. Brandon Prichard about her former colleage Rep. Josh Christy.

Christy passed away during the current legislative session. He served in Fargo-area District 27 alongside Roers. When the...

President Donald Trump's announced tariffs against Canada and Mexico and their retaliatory measures have significant economic risks, particularly for places like North Dakota, where so much of our economy is tied up in international markets. But perhaps even more damaging is the uncertainty Trump's mercurial approach to this policy area engenders.

One of the first questions we asked North Dakota Farmers Un...

"It's a tragedy what's happening in Texas," Dr. Paul Carson said on this episode of Plain Talk, referring to that state's measels outbreak, which has already claimed the life of one child.

Carson is a medical doctor and an emeritus professor of the public health faculty at North Dakota State University. I wrote recently about North Dakota's statewide kindergarten vaccination rates for well-established vaccines for things like mease...

Rep. Scott Louser, a Republican from Minot, is one of a handful of North Dakota lawmakers who, after casting a vote in favor of a resolution asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn precedent striking down state bans on same-sex marriage, came to regret the decision.

"I'm taking the heat for it," Louser said of his change of heart on this episode of Plain Talk.

"I don't have a fantastic answer that's going to satisfy everybody," ...

On Tuesday, February 25, lawmakers in the state House of Representatives worked late into the evening to finish work on the hundreds of bills introduced in that chamber this session so that they could be sent over to the state Senate for consideration.

This legislative session has seen a lot of bills introduced — the most since the 1990s — and that's put a strain on the process. So much so that state Rep. ...

"I got angry," Scott Davis said on this episode of Plain Talk. "I had to walk away."

Davis served as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs under three North Dakota governors (John Hoeven, Jack Dalrymple, and Doug Burgum), and now works as a consultant for North Dakota's tribal communities (he has familial roots in both the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa). What made him angry, and w...

MINOT — For the first time ever we took the Plain Talk podcast on the road, to famed bar, restaurant, and political hangout Peacock Alley. We interviewed Senate Majority Leader David Hogue and House Minority Leader Zac Ista. We also interviewed a couple of former lawmakers, Jessica Bell and Erin Oban.

The theme of the night? The legislature is going to have to change.

Bell and Oban talked about how much th...