Brooks: Bill at Minnesota Legislature asks to give peas a chance

There are important bills at the Minnesota Legislature this session.

Bills that will set the state budget, decide how we educate our children, care for our elders and patch our potholes for the next two years. Bills that could improve Minnesotans’ lives or make them worse.

Then there’s this bill.

The official state vegetable bill.

Minnesota has an official state bird (loon), state fish (walleye), state beverage (milk), state apple (Honeycrisp), state sport (ice hockey), and state muffin (blueberry). But no designated state vegetable, despite the Jolly Green Giant billboard that looms over Le Sueur.

So upward of three lawmakers hope the Legislature will … give peas a chance.

State symbol bills come up almost every session. They’re one of the few goofy, bipartisan political pastimes we have left.

This year’s peas treaty is joined by a gloriously bipartisan effort to codify not one, but three official state songs. Minnesota has had an unofficial anthem since 1904, but “Hail! Minnesota” has never made anyone want to party like it’s 1999.

The proposed legislation would make “Hail! Minnesota” official and add Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” to the state symbol list. Authored by state Sen. Rob Kupec, DFL-Moorhead, its co-sponsors include Sen. Julia Coleman, R-Waconia, whose district includes Paisley Park; Sen. Robert Farnsworth, R-Hibbing, who represents Bobby Zimmerman’s hometown, and Sen. Bobby Jo Champion, DFL-Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis.

There’s also a bipartisan effort to give Minnesota an extra “honorary” state capital in the form of St. Peter. Because a state can never have too many symbolic capitals, the proposal was sponsored by state Rep. Erica Schwartz, R-Nicollet, and state Sen. Nick A. Frentz, DFL-North Mankato.

Any hope of a bipartisan veggie vote probably went down in flames after Senate Republicans tried to oust the bill’s sponsor — state Sen. Nicole Mitchell, DFL-Woodbury — from office on ethical grounds last week.

Besides, there are 201 members of the Legislature. Have you ever tried to get 201 people to agree on a vegetable? And do we really want the pea to be our state vegetable in a world where potatoes exist? Nobody needs a state vegetable that does not tot.

Even if we found a vegetable we could all get behind, and then top with Top the Tater, most proposed state symbols go down in Jolly Green Giant defeat.

The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library keeps a running tally of the state symbols we might have had. Maybe someday Minnesota will have an official state fossil or soup or amusement park ride or candy or dog or horse or amphibian or reptile or insect or color or book or poem or parasite.

Minnesota has been trying to pick a state mammal for half a century. A 1987 attempt to name a state beer resulted in a head-on collision between one bill in favor of Schell’s and another pushing Cold Spring beer.

Maybe peas will join the list of state symbols that weren’t. Or maybe Minnesota legislators will get behind the idea of a state vegetable — and we will have peas in our time.