Brooks: Worst. Legislature. Ever.

Minnesota Republicans are playing House.

Since declaring themselves in charge of a branch of government they didn’t actually win, the 67 Republican state representatives have rattled around St. Paul, holding hearings that do nothing and go nowhere, because — as the Minnesota Supreme Court informed them — you cannot make law in the House without at least 68 lawmakers.

House Democrats meanwhile, hobbled by a seeming inability to understand how addresses work, have bugged out of the Capitol entirely.

Not one Democrat has shown up to work. Not one Republican has done any work. We’re 20 days into the 2025 legislative session.

All of them, presumably, will continue to collect our paychecks. A special election in March is likely to return the House to business as usual, the everyday partisan deadlock that’s more feature than bug in St. Paul.

This was supposed to be the year the Minnesota House would be forced by necessity to get along. Tied 67-67 after Election Day, representatives promised to hammer out a power-sharing agreement that would ensure the state at least passed a budget, dealt with a looming deficit and kept the lights on and the potholes patched for another two years.

Then a newly elected Democrat resigned his seat after a judge ruled he did not meet residency requirements. Suddenly, the 67-67 tie was 67-66 until Roseville can hold a special election for its safely Democratic seat.

Delighted by their brief and spectacular numerical superiority, Republicans scrapped power-sharing plans and announced that they would be electing a Republican Speaker of the House and locking in Republican committee majorities for the next two years.

Why share power when you can just call shotgun?

Democrats responded by simply not showing up on the first day of session, depriving the GOP of the quorum it needed to make its power grab legal. The Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed that it takes at least 68 bodies in the seats to elect a House Speaker, or do anything else. Twenty days into the session, if you seek the list of House files introduced so far this year, you reach a blank page.

On Tuesday, House Republicans held a news conference announcing a bold new plan to simply have all 66 House Democrats kicked out of office on the grounds of nonfeasance — not doing their jobs. House Democrats might counter that their colleagues are guilty of malfeasance — doing their jobs illegally. Welcome to whatever the opposite of the Minnesota Miracle is.

We’ve already watched Democrats in Washington do almost nothing in response to a government takeover by a manic billionaire and a couple of teen tech bros. We’ll see how doing nothing works out for the DFL at the state level.

This would have been a wild legislative year even if everyone had behaved like grown-ups.

As the polls closed on Election Night, it looked like the good voters of Minnesota had crammed the entire Legislature into a Get-Along Shirt. The House was tied. Democrats had a one-vote majority in the Senate.

The Minnesota House switches parties more often than any other legislative chamber in the country. The House has flipped from GOP to DFL control and back at least 10 times in the past 50 years because apparently that’s the way we like it. You’d think our lawmakers would have learned to share by now.

But no. Because someone in Shakopee’s 10th Precinct threw out 20 absentee ballots in a race Democratic Rep. Brad Tabke won by 14 votes. Enough voters testified that they had cast their missing votes for Tabke to make it mathematically improbable for his GOP opponent to win. The GOP wanted to invalidate the election anyway. Scott County said no.

Then former Senate Majority Leader Kari Dziedzic, DFL-Minneapolis, died. The Senate was briefly tied, but a special election last month restored the party’s one-vote advantage.

But the Minnesota Supreme Court, spreading its reprimands across the political spectrum, tanked Gov. Tim Walz’s attempt to rush a separate special election in Roseville for the seat that had been won by the disqualified Curtis Johnson, DFL-Little Canada Actually.

So we’ll have to wait until — maybe? — March 5 to fill the vacant seat. If the two parties can’t work out a power-sharing agreement before then, the House will have done nothing for — maybe? — 50 out of 120 days of this year’s session. Almost half the legislative year, wasted.

Then again, considering how many budget years end in sweaty late-night negotiations and last-minute omnibus bills rolling toward lawmakers like boulders trying to flatten Indiana Jones, would it really amount to that much of a difference?