It was one of the first virtual gatherings of Minnesota legislative leaders ahead of a session that will require a level of bipartisanship not seen for at least four years. One body is tied. One body has a single-vote DFL majority. A must-pass budget comes amidst a tight surplus followed by a deficit. The governor’s presence on a national presidential ticket likely exacerbated the state’s partisan divide.
So how did it go during a Tuesday panel discussion sponsored by lobbying firm Frederickson?
Not so well, as bipartisanship was mostly absent during a 60-minute rehash of the partisanship that led to a chaotic end of the 2024 legislative session and continued during the fall election.
- The state House will likely be tied 67-67, but DFL speaker-designate Melissa Hortman scolded her GOP counterpart for challenging two elections that Democrats won.
- The state Senate will retain a one-vote DFL majority, but Senate GOP assistant minority leader Jordan Rasmussen noted that one majority member remains charged with a felony and shouldn’t be a member.
- Hortman accused Rasmussen of spreading “a thick layer of hypocrisy” by pointing out the charges against Sen. Nicole Mitchell, who is charged but not yet tried or convicted, while not seeming to care that Republican President-elect Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
- House GOP-speaker-designate Lisa Demuth said a bipartisan budget is possible if tax hikes are taken off the table and the House takes a look at the 38% increase in spending in 2023 by DFL budget writers.
- Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy lectured Demuth after the Cold Spring Republican said the House will be where the action is because anything that passes the Legislature must first get a bipartisan vote in the House.
And so it went. During questioning from Humphrey School of Public Affairs Dean Nisha Botchwey, Murphy of St. Paul got the closest to a come-together moment when she said she was grateful for the interim between sessions.
“It gives you time to heal up and let go of the fights of the prior session,” Murphy said. But she said it in response to a question about a bonding bill, something that failed in 2024 when Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on issues that had little to do with selling bonds to pay for construction projects.
The 2025 session convenes Jan. 14. By then, Hortman and Demuth should have completed their so-called power-sharing agreement to manage a tied House. But they have already indicated with the appointment of co-chairs for all committees and the use of the titles of co-speaker that it will look differently from 1979 when one party got the speaker job and the other was given control over top committees.
Still, nothing passes — no bill, no agenda, no challenge of a parliamentary ruling — without at least one vote from the other party. Even if Demuth’s legal challenges to the elections of Rep. Brad Tabke over missing ballots and Rep.-elect Curtis Johnson over his residency are successful, she would still lack a parliamentary majority to pass bills.
Hortman seemed to allude to those election challenges when she answered a question about power sharing.
“I think every single member of the Legislature has a choice, whether they want to be petty and small and personal and partisan or whether they want to focus on the work the people of Minnesota sent us here to do,” the Brooklyn Park representative said. By sending a divided Legislature to St. Paul, voters said they want “a little from column A and a little from column B.
“And if we respect the voters and respect that they have asked for divided government … then we will look for ways to find win-wins instead of partisanship,” she said.
Yet when given an opportunity to identify areas where that compromise can occur, both Hortman and Demuth struggled. Hortman said the budget, something that must pass unless lawmakers want state government to close for business July 1. The next budget will spend less than the current spending plan because up to $5 billion of the current budget is being spent on one-time costs such as rebates, hero checks for pandemic workers and some cash construction spending.
But even at that she warned that it could break apart if Republicans raise what Hortman termed “socially divisive issues” and try to “hold issues hostage for a party’s ultra-partisan social issues.” And she suggested Democrats would resist any failure to include inflationary increases in agency budgets and public education spending.
She mentioned mental health services and continuing the state’s work that has led to a reduction in drug overdose deaths as issues of mutual interest.
Demuth said she was confident that a budget deal would be reached but then called for examining the increases adopted by the DFL majorities in 2023 and 2024.
“No family budget went up by 38%,” Demuth said. “We need to look back at what was done last, at the increases that were made.” While the panel was being held, House GOP co-chairs sent letters to agency heads asking for information on new public jobs, jobs that were funded but never filled and unused office space due to work-from-home policies.
“I’d hope Democrats would take tax increases off the table,” Demuth said.
Hortman avoided direct confrontation with Demuth when she aimed most of her harshest rhetoric at Senate Republicans and Rasmussen, the deputy leader for what is now the only minority caucus in the Legislature. It was Hortman, a House member, who criticized the senator for saying that Mitchell should not be in the Senate and it was Hortman who complained that Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson linked the capital construction budget to the Equal Rights Amendment.
“It’s a bit rich to be lectured by a Republican about people’s criminal backgrounds when we have a felon in the White House, who is a serial sexual assaulter and a racist,” Hortman said. (Murphy repeated her position from last session, that Mitchell should be able to serve until her case is ruled on by a court).
For his part, Rasmussen raised the issue of the final day of the 2024 session when DFLers put all remaining work into a single bill and passed it in just hours over the loud objections of Republicans. DFL leaders blamed Republican filibustering, but the Senate was mostly out of commission on the penultimate day when Sen. Omar Fateh essentially boycotted the floor to put pressure on his fellow DFLers for passage of his ride-share legislation.
“That type of approach, that tenor, that partisanship is not going to lead to a productive session,” the Fergus Falls Republican said.
Murphy, meanwhile, had to remind those watching the panel that there are two houses of the Legislature and that Democrats still control the Senate.
“I believe we will return to a framework that is familiar in Minnesota where the House and the Senate operate somewhat separately from one another,” the St. Paul DFLer said, a reference to the way the two chambers worked during the trifecta when one party controlled all three levers of power.
She pushed back at Demuth’s assertion that because bipartisan agreement is needed to pass items like a two-year budget in the 67-67 House, those deals need to be adopted by the Senate and signed by Gov. Tim Walz.
“It’s important to remember that in a tied House of Representatives we need to know the bills that are passed off the House floor and sent over to the Senate basically are the final decision,” Demuth said.
After saying that her no-compromise positions are that nothing passes that weakens elections or “strips people of their basic human rights,” Murphy noted that the Senate is not in a tie, that the DFL won a majority.
“We’re gonna work with the House. We’re gonna work with the governor,” Murphy said. “But I think it is false to assume that what the House passes is going to become law because the Senate has a perspective and so does the governor. And those things have not been nullified by the election.”
