Ramstad: In a last interview, Hortman discussed how politics have shifted

Three days before she was killed by an assassin targeting Minnesota Democrats, Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman told me she thought work in the Legislature was becoming harder because Republicans were more concerned with the culture war than economics.

I interviewed Hortman, the DFL leader in the Minnesota House since 2017, and House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who has led Republicans in the House since 2023, separately by phone last Wednesday for a column published this weekend.

We were discussing the issue that most divided the two leaders in this year’s legislative session: ending publicly funded insurance to undocumented, or illegal, immigrants.

The big surprise during budget negotiations, Hortman said, was that Republicans put ending that Medicaid insurance above all other issues, including regulatory changes sought by Minnesota businesses.

“This is a new kind of Republican,” Hortman said June 11, two days after work concluded on the new state budget that starts next month.

“You look at what’s happening nationally. The party is just so far from its roots. I would relish a real debate over line-by-line spending in the state budget. That’s not where we are. It’s these culture war issues, right?”

Republicans criticized her this spring for wasting time by leading House DFLers on a boycott of the session while they waited for a special election that happened in February. She told me she believed Republicans wasted time in the session by belittling immigrants and transgender people.

“This othering of people is more important than the fiscal issues that used to drive the party,” Hortman said.

In the moment, her observations about Republicans didn’t strike me as new or deep. The Republican party has turned away from the free markets, free trade and freedom-for-all beliefs that I hold personally. I’m upset President Donald Trump’s juvenile views of trade dominate his approach to the economy and may tip the country into recession. From my first column, I’ve written about the tension between our prejudices and our pocketbooks.

After the killing of Hortman and her husband Mark on Saturday, I listened again to my recording of our conversation. She sounded happy the session was done and swung between praise and criticism, even aiming some barbs at progressive activists who were upset about the budget compromise.

Above all, she was voluble. I was pushing my deadline and felt pressure to end the interview, but we wound up talking for nearly 30 minutes.

I noticed Hortman, like many skillful leaders, had a knack for making people feel good for what they knew about things, rather than feel badly for what they didn’t know. “Interesting, but no,” she said when I mentioned the budget talks looked fairly placid.

Last year’s election produced the most politically balanced Legislature in history. Democrats and Republicans split the House, and Democrats held a one-vote edge in the Senate. The mechanics turned messy because special elections were needed in both chambers, delaying the heavy lifting of negotiating the state budget until late April.

“What became clear in negotiations was the one and only thing [Republicans] must have was ending health care for undocumented people,” Hortman said. “We offered things that the business community had sought, like concessions on paid family medical leave, on earned safe and sick time and noncompetes, all the things the Minnesota Business Partnership and Minnesota Chamber of Commerce were looking for. These are not the interest of this Republican Party. I’m just telling you very frankly.”

I first met Hortman along with Sen. Kari Dziedzic, who died last year of cancer, in 2023 after I’d criticized the big jump in state spending they engineered that year. Hortman then said she thought the state had “gotten off the deficit-surplus roller coaster.”

That turned out to be optimistic. In late 2024, it became clear two areas of increased spending — in special education and Medicaid benefits to the elderly and disabled — were exceeding forecasts.

If things didn’t change, the state would have a $6 billion deficit on its approximately $70 billion two-year budget in 2028-29. Gov. Tim Walz in January proposed cuts to the spending growth of both areas, which Hortman supported.

Hortman said she and Walz were shocked Republicans didn’t push for even more spending cuts. She acknowledged controversies about the impact of some policies, such as paid family medical leave, passed by the DFL majority in 2023 and not yet in effect.

“The energy spent hating immigrants could have been spent saying, ‘As we put these policies in place, did we make all the right decisions balancing between workers and business?’” Hortman said. “We could have had a very disciplined, very constructive conversation about that.”

Ultimately, the regular session ended without a budget even after Hortman, Walz and Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy conceded to Republicans to end the benefits to illegal immigrants.

In the special session that followed, Hortman stuck to the deal to get the budget done. She became the only Democrat in the House to vote to end those benefits.

“What sort of vitality are we going to lose because of this push-out mentality?” she asked me. “There’s going to be an economic cost and it’s slowly going to impact us.”

I told Hortman she did a hard, pragmatic thing. She quickly said thanks and then thanked me for agreeing to talk on Wednesday rather than Tuesday, the day after the special session pushed deep into the night.

“Glad we talked today because I’ve had a little more rest,” she said. “Have a good rest of the day. See ya.”