Olson: Overtime at the Capitol: As stakes climb, talks get tougher

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Divided government works. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, even though state lawmakers ran out of momentum and didn’t finish their work at the Capitol by Monday night’s deadline.

Deadlines are tricky. Even when we have them, we often don’t pay them much attention until the consequences are real.

“It’s easy to get people in the lifeboats on the Titanic when it’s about to slip under the water,” former DFL House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler said. “It’s way harder at the beginning when people aren’t sure it’s about to go down.”

In this metaphor, the legislative ship is listing. It will start sinking as the deadlines get closer with each passing day. That means tough choices will soon need to be made since the regular 2025 legislative session ended without the necessary passage of a two-year budget.

A state government shutdown, which will happen July 1 if the Legislature doesn’t pass a budget by that date, currently seems unlikely. However, the tangible preparations for a shutdown begin June 1 and ramp up from there.

That leaves less than two weeks to convene a special session and deliver the budget. Legislative leaders sound optimistic, but then again they also assured us for much of the 2025 session that overtime was unlikely — yet here we are.

If we look on the bright side, the 2025 regular session ended much better than in 2024, when Senate and House Republicans angrily shouted at DFL leaders from the chamber floors, thwarting the majority as it tried to pass a megabill that most had not bothered to read.

It’s a good thing the meltdown didn’t happen this year, because legislators need to keep negotiating a biennial budget deal, and it won’t get any easier. What’s needed now is more compromise and cooperation, not increased acrimony.

At the outset of 2025, things looked promising as the two parties sorted out the leadership in the House amid the 67-67 partisan split. In her first session as the speaker of the House, Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, insisted the Legislature’s work would be completed during the regular session. She was a hard and persistent “no” on overtime.

But delivering is considerably harder than promising. “It’s really hard to wrangle these folks,” said lobbyist Amy Koch, a former Senate majority leader who speaks from experience.

The November 2024 election sent to the Capitol a Legislature that couldn’t have been more evenly divided between parties. Of the 201 legislators, 101 are DFLers and 100 are Republicans.

The theory at the outset of 2025 was the parties had to work together, that divided government provided an opportunity for Minnesota to be a model of cooperation.

For a long while, it looked like that might actually happen. Demuth emerged from closed-door negotiations late last week into Gov. Tim Walz’s reception room along with the two DFL leaders to publicly announce that a deal had been reached. There would be an orderly close to the session.

“We have proven that we can get this work done,” Demuth declared. “We have agreed to do what is best for Minnesotans.”

Standing beside the three women, Walz also proclaimed victory. “We are as evenly divided as any state in our country has been and here we stand with a deal,” he said. “Democracy’s hard, but it can still work.”

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, and House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park were more somber and, as it turned out, for good reason. Before the quartet could finish responding to reporters’ questions, reality came pounding on the giant wooden doors to the ornate room. Outside the door was heard a bellowing and disconcerting chant: “Don’t kill immigrants.”

DFL legislators, members of the People of Color and Indigenous Caucus (POCI), were angry. However, it is highly unlikely that they were surprised that the budget deal entailed pushing undocumented immigrants off MinnesotaCare.

From the beginning, Republicans were eager to strip the benefit from immigrants. The GOP was immune to the DFL’s moral and fiscal arguments about immigrants often being front-line workers and that providing insurance is more cost effective than covering emergency hospital visits.

Murphy and Hortman appeared visibly upset, but they’re both experienced leaders who understand that painful concessions are often part of the deal. Even Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope, a leader in the POCI caucus, acknowledged the group was angry but wouldn’t force a shutdown over the issue.

Like it or not, this will now be the give-and-take rhythm of the overtime session. Bills are harder to pass in a special session because a supermajority must approve procedural maneuvers to get the substance of the bills in front of the House and Senate. That gives dissenters leverage they lack in a regular session.

The work began Tuesday morning as leaders gave working groups until 5 p.m. Wednesday to wrap up their bills. I wouldn’t bet on a prompt or speedy special session. I‘d expect the clock to wind down further and the pressure to increase before the negotiating gets serious. In the words of songstress Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!”

Now is the time for average Minnesotans to tune in and check out what our public servants are up to. There are big, defining votes on issues of great importance. And in a democracy, voters get the ultimate say over whether they like what their representatives do and how they do it.

Democracy is hard, but it still works well — even when it goes into overtime.