The Senate passed its bonding plan -- like the House it also includes $200 million in cash projects -- onto the Finance Committee, which will hear the bill on Wednesday. Sen. LeRoy Stumpf, DFL-Plummer, said he was pleased with the strong support his bill received in the Senate Capital Investment Committee on Tuesday.

There are a few rites of passage Gov. Mark Dayton has yet to undertake since entering office two years ago, and appointing a justice to the Minnesota Supreme Court is one of them.

DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and Republican leaders of the Legislature spent the week fielding questions about their close-of-session priorities, and lawmakers shuttled between news conferences and marathon floor sessions in both chambers.

The conventional wisdom from the start was that Session 2012 would be a short one. A healthy budget surplus plus newly redrawn legislative districts meant less work to be done at the Capitol and more to be done back home, where some lawmakers will face intra-party endorsement challenges and others have to get to know a daunting amount of new territory.

Leaders and activists in the Republican Party of Minnesota haven’t had much time to think about elections lately. In a whirlwind series of events, the party lost its chairman, deputy chairman and secretary/treasurer in the span of three months amid mounting questions about the party’s finances.

In late November, a group of roughly two dozen Republican activists gathered at a residence in Edina to discuss the future of the state Republican Party. The meeting included a broad cross-section of the GOP’s notoriously fractious base.

Brian Steinhoff has his agenda set for the upcoming legislative session. As the president of the Minnesota Retailers Association (MRA), which represents 2,000 businesses ranging in size from major corporations to mom-and-pop shops across the state, he is making the issue of online sales taxes his main focus in 2012.

A steady downpour didn’t keep Indian gambling workers from flocking outside the state Capitol in St. Paul last April. At least 1,500 people gathered outside on the building’s steps, some arriving by the busload from reservations hours away. Clad in raincoats and shielded by a canopy of umbrellas, workers thrust signs into the air that read, “Rural jobs count too” and “Don’t gamble with my job!”

Members of the Capitol lobbying corps could have been excused for thinking they were in the wrong building at the start of the 2011 legislative session. A new administration and 60 new legislators took office in St. Paul, and a new complement of Republican leaders and chairs took the place of DFLers in both legislative chambers. The Capitol building itself was just about the only thing that resembled the state of affairs from the prior year.