Three weeks and many court hearings later, a tied Minnesota House figures out how to share power … again

And then, just like that, it was over.

The long – three weeks anyway – war between the partisan caucuses of the House was burning hot on Monday only to end in the evening hours of Wednesday.

It was a battle over how to handle a tied House that became an untied House with the expectation that it will be re-tied again next month. It included three trips to the state Supreme Court, scripted sessions in a slightly-less-than-half-empty chambers, innumerable press conferences, and a drive to recall every DFL member that was more theater than actual threat.

And then via a short joint press statement Wednesday evening, GOP and DFL leaders announced a deal. The DFL would end its boycott – a maneuver to deny the House a quorum to take any action – and the GOP would end its threat to use what would be a temporary majority to take control of the House and all its committees for two years.

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For the most part, the two sides will be back to where they were in December when they unveiled a power-sharing agreement after voters sent 67 Republicans and 67 DFLers to St. Paul. It was the second tie in state history and the first in 45 years. But it broke apart when one of those 67 DFLers was deemed by a court to be ineligible because he didn’t actually live in his Roseville district, and state law obviously says you can’t do that. 

If the DFL wins a March 11 special election, expected because the district is heavily DFL, there will be co-chairs of committees and mutual agreement for when bills pass committees and reach the House floor. As always, it will take 68 votes to pass bills, something that neither side would have unless the DFL loses the race in District 40B.

But there are three significant differences from the pre-Christmas deal.

• GOP leader Lisa Demuth will be elected speaker and rather than be reduced to a co-speaker if and when the Roseville seat is returned to DFL control, she will retain the job for two years. Melissa Hortman, who had been speaker since the DFL won control of the House at the 2018 election, will now be called “speaker emeritus.”
• Rep. Brad Tabke will no longer be threatened with being unseated, something the GOP had been talking about because they didn’t like the outcome of an election challenge to Tabke’s 14-vote victory amidst some vote-counting irregularities. The ethics committee will review the case, but with two Republicans and two DFLers, it is unlikely to send anything to the House floor. And if it did, the deal says 68 votes — bipartisan by one — are needed to unseat an elected member.
• A new Fraud and Oversight Committee, created when the GOP briefly organized the House (until the court told them they didn’t have the votes to do so), will be retained with a GOP chair and a 5-3 GOP majority. But the GOP majority will lack the two-thirds majority needed to issue subpoenas. 

At the appointed time Thursday, Secretary of State Steve Simon returned to the House rostrum and did what state law tells him to do – bang the gavel to convene the House, take the roll and then move aside once a legal quorum is present. That usually ceremonial task was different from what he has done for three weeks amidst the angry stares and sometimes jeers of House Republicans when he adjourned the body because it lacked a quorum to act.

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Thursday, after declaring that a quorum is present, his words were met with applause.

Demuth was elected speaker for real this time, the first person of color to hold the constitutional office that is third in line to the governorship and the first Republican woman to hold the gavel. She was sworn in by Senate President Bobby Joe Champion, who is the first person of color to hold that office which is second in line to the governorship.

Then, they passed the six-page deal signed Thursday night. The vote was 130-2 with two Republicans voting no: Rep. Drew Roach of Farmington and Rep. Tom Dippel of Cottage Grove.  

After that, the ministerial functions of electing a chief clerk, a sergeant at arms and informing the Senate and governor that the House is organized seemed anti-climactic — even though just a few days ago there was no accurate forecast for when they would occur. Next week? The week after? The doomsday scenario was that the DFL would remain on strike until St. Patrick’s Day when the Roseville election will be certified.

Instead, it was as though none of the previous unpleasantries had even happened — almost. Earlier in the day, during segregated news conferences to announce a joint agreement, both sides portrayed the deal as one tilted in their favor and that the standoff was worth it.

“Democrats secured the power-sharing agreement we were seeking,” said Hortman of Brooklyn Park. “Given the situation we faced, with Republicans looking to engage in an illegitimate power grab, Democrats made the difficult decision to deny quorum to protect the will of the voters, and we succeeded.”

Hortman said the final deal was close to what she offered Jan. 13 and said Republicans have taken this long to absorb the decision made by a district court judge that Tabke won his election, that 20 missing ballots would not have changed the outcome.

So what changed the dynamics that turned a standoff to a deal? Could the latest Supreme Court conflict that was heard Thursday morning have been what prodded movement? Neither side would cop to that, preferring the narrative they prevailed due to the strength of their arguments or the external pressure brought by voters and threatened recalls.

But three floors above where the back-to-back press conferences were held, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in Demuth and Niska v. Secretary of State. The third trip to the court asked it to decide whether Secretary of State Steve Simon was obligated to entertain GOP motions to compel the attendance of absent DFL members even though they lacked the 68 votes to organize the House.

Despite a request by GOP lawyers to hold off on the hearing due to “Pending Mootness,” the court held the hearing anyway. Once the House deal was officially adopted by the House Thursday afternoon, the “pending” part went away and all that was left was “mootness.” The court will then have to decide whether to dismiss the case or issue a ruling anyway.

It will have no impact on this Legislature because those absent members the GOP sought to compel had already walked into the chambers voluntarily.

But had both sides waited for a court ruling, three things could have happened:

• The court could have told the House to stop bringing its squabbles to the court.
• The court could have ruled against the GOP, which would retain the status quo
• Or, the court could have said Simon had to recognize the GOP motions, which would set in motion yet another mess.

In January, before the court ruled on an earlier dispute over how many votes make up a quorum (it’s 68, not 67), Hortman said lawyers prefer negotiated agreements over depending on winning in court. Negotiations can be controlled; judges can’t.

“Both parties have a lot of risks going into court,” Hortman said on Jan. 21. “Both of us have huge downsides and those are uncertainties that can be controlled through a settlement agreement. You can control your own destiny if you write up an agreement and if you go to court you have no idea.”

Absent the Wednesday night deal, the two party caucuses would have not had control of the result. The deal gave them that.

But Hortman said she was confident in the DFL position in the latest court case and said “it was time” that made the deal came together. And she said it is the court more than the House that will be relieved if they can avoid yet another ruling.

“Their order on Jan. 24 essentially said, ‘leave and don’t come back,’ ” Hortman said.

Demuth cited outside pressure from voters unhappy that the DFL wasn’t in the Capitol and a recall campaign by the state Republican Party. On Monday, she said, the DFL offer was similar to what it had been for three weeks, one that would make her speaker “in name only.”

What is in the final deal came on Tuesday and was a very different offer, giving Demuth more though not all of the powers that go with the gavel. She can preside over floor sessions, make rulings on procedure and whether amendments are appropriate to the underlying bill.

“This is a considerably different offer,” Demuth said, one she attributed to public pressure from voters who didn’t like elected officials not showing up but still getting paid.

“They were losing in the public perception of that,” she said. “Twenty-three days is a long time to not do what you were elected to do. The combination of the length, the public pressure, the looming court case and the fact that we actually have work to do.”

The big gives by the GOP were forfeiting the chance of not seating Tabke — or any other members should the House have a majority of those present on any given day — and the return to committee co-chairs.

For the next month, the House GOP will have the power to pass bills out of committee and bring them to the floor for votes. While they wouldn’t have the power to pass them, they could force DFL members to vote against bills and make public stands on issues that could be used against them in future campaigns. They could include bills on public safety, tax cuts and fraud.

So was it all hugs and high fives Thursday? Sort of. A few members crossed the aisle that divides the two parties to greet members they hadn’t seen for a while. But, for the most part, the hugs were intraparty, not bipartisan.

Hortman acknowledged there are still raw feelings.

“They are very suspicious of us. We’re very suspicious of them,” she said in direct reference to budget discussions but that could apply more broadly. To that she said, “everyone is still pretty angry.”

And Demuth? “The best negotiations is when not everyone walks out completely happy.”

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.