An already contentious session of the Minnesota Legislature managed to become even more contentious — perhaps historically so — on the last evening that bills could be passed.
DFL leaders, claiming to be fed up with GOP delay tactics, placed many of the remaining bills into one massive bill — 1,430 pages worth — and passed it in less than 10 minutes in the House and 15 in the Senate. Ignoring shouts of objections from Republicans, as well as attempts to be recognized for debate or motions, House Speaker Melissa Hortman and Senate President Bobby Joe Champion moved both bills to passage before the midnight deadline for regular session actions.
Related | MinnPost’s massive list of what the Minnesota Legislature passed (and didn’t pass) in 2024
The massive bill — itself a combination of bills that are themselves hundreds of pages long — now moves to Gov. Tim Walz for his signature. While it is hard to summarize something that big, it contained issues of substance:
- Permitting reforms to speed up energy projects
- The settlement to the pay dispute between Uber and Lyft and ride-share drivers
- A plan to help low-income families collect the child tax credit throughout the year rather than just at tax time
- Updates to last year’s paid family and medical leave program
- Increased penalties for people who buy guns on behalf of those who cannot legally own them
While Democrats praised the work of the session, calling the last-hour maneuver necessary to complete their work, Republicans called it an unprecedented abuse of legislative rules, even “a crying shame.”
“I am very, very proud of the work that we’ve done over the last two years,” said Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy. But she acknowledged the chaos triggered by the DFL tactic.
“I don’t like when we get to the end of session and we experience what we experienced tonight,” she said. “I don’t think anybody does. But nor do we like or appreciate when people use hours and hours of repetitive debate and repetitive questioning to slow the debate down. They’re both barriers to the work we need to do for the people of Minnesota.”
But House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth saw it differently.
“What you just witnessed, what just happened in the House of Representatives in the state of Minnesota, I would have never expected,” she said. “The minority voice was shut down by the Democratic majority.”
The content of the bill was described using the bill numbers of what was being included. But the lengthy bill was not available online nor in printed form. While Democrats said all of the bills had been heard and discussed, Republicans said they couldn’t be sure what was there and what wasn’t without seeing it.
“So we have to trust them now, at this point, after what they’ve done to us for the last two years?” Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson said. “I don’t trust them. I don’t know what’s in this bill and quite frankly I don’t think anybody does.”
When a reporter asked if sports betting was in the bill (it is not), Johnson invited him to read through the bill to find out.
Many will write the final night chaos as routine partisan bickering. But few could recall such a scene. And while there have been last minute omnibus bills of omnibus bills (the GOP Omnibus Prime of 2018, for example) the timing and reaction wasn’t the same. One lobbyist said, “This has fundamentally changed the institution.” Another said, “there is no coming back from this.”
And a tweet from former DFL Sen. Melisa López Franzen got wide circulation: “As a former Senate Minority Leader, it saddens me to witness the erosion of this institution. The minority must always have a voice in the legislative process. May we find the courage to work together to restore the public trust and that of each other.”
Republicans resisted the term filibuster. But amendments and debates gobbled up much of legislative days. Eight hours on a junk fees bill, six hours on the paid leave updates, 14 hours on ERA. During debate Sunday on an agriculture omnibus bill, one member told stories of his days growing up on a farm while another gave advice on how to cook pork (don’t overcook it, she said.)
Both Murphy and Hortman had used procedures to close debate, rare moves in Minnesota but not elsewhere.
The session had already had its share of Minnesota Interesting. A senator is arrested and charged with burglary. Another goes on strike on the penultimate day, refusing to vote for any bills unless his views on a ride-sharing bill are adopted. Still another is diagnosed with aggressive cancer and serves remotely while undergoing treatment. Fights over whether the majority party can end debate before the minority party wants to stop talking.
No way could the 2024 session of the Minnesota Legislature get any more bizarre, could it?
Then came MEGA-OMNIBUS. What else to call a massive bill that combined a whole batch of massive omnibus bills into one really massive bill. How really massive was it? Two thousand, eight hundred and sixty pages massive.
After a hastily called meeting of the tax conference committee, that featured not a bill but Senate Taxes Committee Chair Anne Rest only reading the bill numbers of what it would eventually hold.
“I guess tonight the Timberwolves won, but the people of Minnesota and the legislative process lost,” said Sen. Bill Weber, R-Luverne. He called it a “garbage bill,” and said it was the “most-disgusting end to a session in the 12 years I’ve been here.” He was the only Republican on the joint House-Senate committee and the only one to vote no.
House DFL Speaker Melissa Hortman unleashed Mega-omnibus at 11:08 p.m. The entire process took less than 10 minutes.
Despite this mega-omnibus bill, not everything could be rescued.
Biggest among the failures was a proposed constitutional amendment that contained equal rights for women, reproductive health rights and protections for people based on their gender identity. After outlasting 14 hours of debate and 14 amendments in the House, the measure did not come to a vote in the Senate.
And a bonding bill was never considered on either floor. Even a so-called cash bonding bill that didn’t require GOP votes like the sale of bonds does, failed to meet the midnight deadline by 30 seconds.
Biggest among the final-weekend successes was the Uber/Lyft compromise that satisfied the companies, the drivers, the city of Minneapolis, Gov. Tim Walz and DFL legislative leaders. It averted a July 1 deadline set by the companies to leave the state if a Minneapolis ordinance took effect.
Both houses gave final approval to changes to the state recreational cannabis program including language to allow some licenses to plant seed this fall in hopes of having at least raw cannabis flower, if not manufactured products, in stores when they open next spring.
Even with attempts by Gov. Walz and DFL legislative leaders to tamp down expectations — it’s not a budget year, the surplus was all-but used up last year, there’s an election in November — they did have a list of wants and must dos. Many didn’t make it. In addition to bonding, a sports betting bill never reached the finish line, despite a very last-minute deal that might have delivered majorities in the House and Senate.
And the ERA either lacked enough DFL votes in the Senate, or they ran out of time. Either are possible. Murphy said Sunday that she didn’t know if she would have enough time to debate a measure that was certain to take time for GOP amendments and debate. But had the Senate DFL had enough votes, the measure would have been there by now. While the Senate passed a version of the ERA last year, complete with nine Republican votes, that version did not include the abortion provisions.
Many of the losses can be blamed on the above referenced sturm and drang in the Senate. The illness of Sen. Kari Dziedzic removed the leader who had somehow kept the disparate Senate DFL group together last year. The arrest of Sen. Nicole Mitchell in late April and the last-weekend hardball on ride sharing by Sen. Omar Fateh helped erode bipartisan relations and gobbled tons of time.
Sports Betting
Even apparent agreements, like on a sports betting package that finally attracted enough bipartisan support to pass, bumped up against the clock Sunday night. A bipartisan group of sports-betting backers said Sunday they have never been closer to an agreement that would satisfy the state’s tribal nations, the horse-racing tracks, nonprofit charities, the pro sports teams and the national betting companies. Details were still being worked out and time ran out.
“There is a framework that we all are comfortable with,” said Rep. Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids. Sen. Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, said the conflicts in the Senate Sunday put a damper on cooperation.
“We accomplished what many people didn’t think we could when we put together a deal that can not only get buy-in from the stakeholders but get bipartisan support,” Miller said. “What we’re not sure of is do we have the time to get that done and then, given the activities we had in the Senate, do we have bipartisan support to get it across the finish line.
“I think if we had another 48 hours we could do this,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington. “It’s in an improved place.” That, he said, speaks well of the odds when the Legislature returns — either in some sort of special session or next January.
Much of the talks involved how revenues from mobile betting would be distributed. Charities have been hurt by the removal of a type of electronic pull tab the tribes say too closely resembles slot machines. The two horse racing tracks that would not get to offer sports betting that would be the sole domain of the tribes wanted money to make up for the losses. Those numbers had been resolved, backers said.
Uber/Lyft
Time to complete favored bills was already in short supply when the Senate went into a 12-hour recess when Fateh, DFL-Minneapolis, disappeared from the floor. No bills were acted upon until late Saturday night after a Fateh-endorsed agreement on regulating transportation network companies statewide.
Fateh has been working on a bill to give drivers more pay and more job security from the two big ride-share companies, Uber and Lyft. A bill he pushed for in 2023 ended up being vetoed by Walz in response to threats by the two services to pull out of Minnesota. A task force looked into the finances of the industry with recommendations but the city of Minneapolis adopted a more-generous ordinance, which again triggered a threat to leave by Uber and Lyft.
Walz and DFL leaders spent much of the session trying to come up with a deal that would satisfy the driver’s organization Minnesota Uber/Lyft Driver’s Association (MULDA) as well as the council and the companies. One deal struck this weekend was objected to by Fateh, who launched the day-long refusal to provide the 34th and deciding DFL vote on bills.
That broke with the announced deal Saturday night.
“I was gonna start out by saying, “Live from St. Paul, it’s Saturday Night,’” Walz said at what was pitched as a press conference but was actually a pep rally for DFL lawmakers and activists. The deal provides a 20% increase in pay for drivers — $1.28 per mile and 31 cents per minute. But it also provides an unusual provision that the companies must contract with a driver organization to represent them and that MULDA would likely be the only organization allowed to receive such a contract based on the requirements of the bill.
ERA
Murphy said the Senate received the bill from the House early Sunday morning. It was in a position to be taken up at any time, but, she said, “the issue is time. It is an issue that we have to debate. It is language that we haven’t debated before in the Minnesota Senate.”
Minority Leader Johnson said the ERA issue has been around since the Senate passed its version a year ago, a version that did not include abortion provisions.
“If ERA was a priority for them it would have been done weeks ago,” Johnson said.
An episode Sunday morning illustrated the turmoil of the final weekend and the partisan stresses that endangered any bill needing GOP votes. Walz convened a meeting of the four caucus leaders. In the midst, Murphy left and rushed back to the Senate, with Johnson still in the meeting discussing, among other issues, a bonding bill. Senate DFLers made a motion to end debate on the cannabis law changes. According to the Legislative Reference Library, a motion to end debate in the Senate has been used just six times in the last 25 years, and not since 2011.
Once he was informed, both Johnson and Demuth left the meeting and dashed to their respective chambers. Johnson called it an “embarrassment to the Minnesota Senate.” Republicans used a series of motions to delay, but not stop, the rare motion to hold a final vote on the bill. It passed on a party-line vote.
But Johnson said the fact that a meeting to see if a late deal on bonding could be reached was used, in his view, to deceive Republicans, suggests why a deal couldn’t be reached.
“They’ve gotten a lot worse today,” Johnson said when asked about relations between the DFL and the GOP.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of pages in the mega-bill. Republican leaders said it was 2,860 (1,430 pages front and back). The bill that was finally made available online later Monday contains 1,430 pages.
Peter Callaghan
Peter Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost. Follow him on Twitter @CallaghanPeter or email him at pcallaghan@minnpost.com.
