Feds sue Minnesota over prediction market ban

Good morning, Reformers. 

Minnesota was promptly sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday after Gov. Tim Walz signed into law a ban on prediction markets. The ban was tucked into a public safety bill that passed with broad bipartisan support. 

Alyssa Chen reports the lawsuit aims to block the law from taking effect on Aug. 1. The feds argue that prediction markets, where people can bet on the outcome of events, fall under federal oversight. 

The platforms have received scrutiny for insider trading with bettors reaping massive sums based on non-public information. For example, one anonymous Polymarket user made $400,000 from a series of well-timed bets in December and January on the downfall of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The CFTC alleged that the user was a U.S. Army soldier. 

Meanwhile, the ban is already set to be revised to allow betting on weather events over concerns about how the ban could affect futures markets, which farmers use to hedge against bad seasons.  

Read the full story here. 

By Julie Appleby

Enrollment in the Affordable Care Act continues to erode as some customers struggle to make premium payments, with the declining numbers churning market uncertainty for insurers, KFF Health News reports. 

A KFF analysis found that the average ACA plan deductible saw the steepest increase in history — growing by 37%, or over $1,000, from $2,759 in 2025 to $3,786 in 2026 as enhanced premium tax credits expired.

Those rising costs pose a political challenge for President Donald Trump and the GOP, which has opposed enhanced subsidies to help people purchase Obamacare coverage. Republican lawmakers also passed a spending package last year — enacted as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that included provisions expected to reduce ACA enrollment and was cited among factors fueling higher premiums this year.

Shelisa Demuth, daughter of Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth, wrote a searing piece in the Star Tribune about her mother’s refusal to hold a vote on new gun control laws following the school shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church last fall.  

She writes that her mother, who is now running for governor, “concluded her time as a legislator without prioritizing meaningful change to protect children like mine from gun violence.” 

What’s especially striking about gun control dividing the Demuth family is that they have been directly impacted gun violence. Shelisa Demuth and her three siblings were on the Rocori campus in 2003 when a shooter killed two high school students. 

The Star Tribune’s Walker Orenstein wrote a story last month about how that experience shaped the house speaker’s view of gun control. 

“I remember sending my kids to funerals of schoolmates,” Demuth told him. “That’s something that will stick with me and will stick with them forever.”

But she said gun restrictions proposed by Democrats were not the answer, and not going to bring the dead children back. 

(Lisa Demuth also voted against the state’s red flag law, which was used to confiscate the guns of a woman who threatened her.)

Shelisa Demuth replied in her commentary: “When leaders memorialize victims but decline to deliberate on prevention, they are telling us who they are.”