‘Our ideas finally get a hearing’: House GOP targets paid family leave during fleeting majority rule

The issue was paid family and medical leave, but on Monday it stood in as a metaphor for the 2025 session of the Minnesota Legislature. At least for the period that will end on St. Patrick’s Day when the House most likely will return to a 67-67 tie.

Until then, House Republicans have an odd partisan advantage. With a 67-66 majority, they can pass bills out of committee and bring them to the floor for final passage. But they don’t have the constitutional majority of 68 votes to pass them, and for all but the least controversial bills, they haven’t.

Even if they could pass bills from the GOP’s own legislative agenda, they would have trouble getting through the Senate where Democrats retain their 34-33 majority. And even if they could get the bills past that partisan barrier, Gov. Tim Walz can veto them.

They do have the power to set the agenda, though. They can talk about their issues. They can highlight them with floor debates. And they can force DFL members to cast ballots on amendments and bills that could populate campaign mailings in 2026. Little of that has been available when the GOP was in the minority in both the House and Senate in 2023 and 2024.

Monday, however, that fleeting power butted up against one of the pillars of the much-touted DFL trifecta. While it is hard to single out any of the dozens and dozens of the new laws and funding decisions that marked the trifecta’s agenda, creating a paid family and medical leave program patterned after unemployment benefits would make most DFL short lists. It was the second bill filed in both the House and Senate in 2023.

Related: Legislators work out details of bill that would create a paid family and medical leave program 

DFL defends paid family leave

As adopted in 2023, the state would join a dozen other states that have a program that assesses a payroll tax on employers and employees to pay up to 12 weeks of benefits for childbirth, extended illness or to care for sick dependents. It was such a significant part of the agenda that the DFL even set aside $680 million from the massive budget surplus to jump-start benefits in January 2026. Without that infusion, the program would have started collecting the taxes for a year or more before accumulating enough reserves to begin paying out benefits.

Related: Actuarial argument? Critics of new paid family leave want cost savings, but lead sponsor says plan is sound 

DFL leaders Monday vowed to defend and protect the program, even if Thursday’s revenue forecast projects deeper deficits.

“Minnesotans have waited long enough,” said House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman of the issue that took 10 years from inception to passage. “Republicans are making it clear that they don’t want a delay, they want a full repeal. Democrats are not going to let either of those things happen.”

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, said she is confident that her caucus has the votes to keep the program in place.

“After a decade’s worth of work, the Legislature in 2023 passed paid family and medical leave to support working families across the state of Minnesota and we’re going to keep it,” Murphy said.

That pledge ran into the House GOP’s two-week window to sort of control the House. A GOP bill – House File 11– would delay the start of the program. Rather than have both the payroll tax collection and the benefits start January 1, 2026, both would begin in January of 2027. That bill has been fast-tracked so as to get it out of the committee and to the floor soon, or at least before the special election in an open Roseville district is certified.

Deadlines and then deadlines

How fast is the track? Monday, the lead sponsor of the bill asked the House Ways and Means Committee for an amendment to make a technical fix. When the fix itself needed fixing, the committee’s Republicans decided to pass the bill to the floor anyway and try to fix it there. DFL members pointed out the odd procedure and noted that the hurried timing coincided with the pending return of the tie.

At another point in the hearing, House Education Finance Committee Chair Ron Kresha, R-Little Falls, complained that the original bill should have gone through the Education Finance Committee that he now chairs. That’s because the law puts a significant cost onto school districts that are trying to figure out how to pay for it.

DFL Rep. Dave Pinto of St. Paul then moved to refer House File 11 to Kresha’s committee to examine the issue. Kresha opposed the move.

“I’ll let Chair Kresha work it out with Chair Kresha since they appear to be disagreeing,” Pinto said. The motion initially failed but was later adopted along party lines and sent to the House floor.

Rep. Zach Stephenson, the Coon Rapids DFLer who will likely co-chair Ways and Means after the special election, wondered about the rush. House GOP and DFL leaders have already agreed that the deadline for fiscal bills to clear committees is April 11, something he joked as “at least five eternities” in legislative time.

“I wonder if the deadline we’re actually worried about here is March 11 and March 17, which if the public isn’t aware is the date of the special election and probably that that member will be seated,” Stephenson said. “Because once those dates arrive this bill will be dead, and we all know that.”

‘This is not posturing’

Republicans know they have a brief time period to highlight their agenda and political vision. An agreement reached to end the DFL boycott of the House and to resolve multiple lawsuits means that if there is a tie, bills go nowhere without bipartisan agreement.

After two years in the minority in both the House and the Senate – and with a DFLer as governor – they have complained that their voices and the voices of their constituents have been ignored. Now, they see their chance.

One other example of these early session dynamics – a GOP bill to prevent transgender girls from playing on girls school sports teams – briefly entered the Ways and Means hearing. Chair Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska, recessed the hearing for an hour so GOP members could attend a rally in support of the bill on the Capitol steps. Republicans were able to get the bill to the floor, where it failed on a 67-66 vote.

“We’re showing Minnesotans what we believe versus what the Democrats believe,” said Rep. Elliot Engen, R-White Bear Township. “Showing that juxtaposition is pretty telling.”

Added Rep. Kristin Robbins, R-Maple Grove: “This is my seventh year and for my first six years none of these bills got heard, even in committee let alone on the floor. So we are using this time in the majority to make sure our ideas finally get a hearing.”

Bills that fail on a tie vote are technically still alive past self-imposed deadlines. That means they are around for whatever end-of-session dealmaking might occur to get a state budget through a Legislature with 101 DFL members and 100 GOP members.

“This is not wasted time, this is not posturing,” Robbins said. “It is getting the work done that we were sent here to do.”

Paid family and medical leave is an issue that Republicans raised concerns about in 2023 and said they felt ignored. Their method was to create tax incentives for employers who don’t now offer leave to purchase leave insurance through private providers. Their complaints now echo concerns raised by businesses, local governments and school districts that the plan is too expensive and too expansive.

The payroll tax that was first envisioned to be 0.70% of taxable earnings split between employer and employee is now set to be 0.88% — in the top five of states with plans, though benefits vary by state. Minnesota’s proposed payroll tax remains below the 0.92% rate cap that was agreed to in the original bill. When fully in place, the state estimates that about $1.46 billion will be paid out in benefits to workers in 2026.

Paid leave pause?

Rep. Dave Baker, R-Willmar, has worked on trying to forge compromises in the past, but the DFL has maintained their position that a state system that covers all workers is more fair and could end up being cheaper.

Baker said he is working on other bills to adjust the program. But he thinks the pause is needed to provide time for that work and repeated fears that jobs will be lost and businesses closed. He supports exemptions for very small businesses, better treatment of seasonal employers, and more flexibility for employers to have policies that work better for their businesses. Despite once misspeaking that the bill would repeal the plan, Baker said it is only a one-year postponement.

“It’s not going away,” he said of the program, “it is going to happen. But we have to make sure we continue to work on it so that people who take time off have a job to come back to.” At least two bills by other House Republicans would repeal the program.

DFL Rep. Esther Agbaje, DFL-Minneapolis, said she, too, has heard concerns about the program’s cost and rules.

“I think it would be a better use of our time going over one of those bipartisan bills that you talk about,” she said to Baker during the Ways and Means hearing. “You keep saying it is not a repeal but I don’t see a replacement here, so I’m looking at it as a repeal.” And other DFLers said a delay adds to anxiety over the program rather than resolving it and creates delays in when workers can get some pay after the birth of children or to care for sick family members.

Sen. Alice Mann, the Edina DFLer who was the prime sponsor in 2023, said she doesn’t expect that any significant changes will be made this session. Mann, who carried around a file box to the measure’s many committee stops with research on the program, said the benefits are large.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about a quarter of American workers have paid family leave, numbers that are about equal among private employees and government employees. Around 90% have access to unpaid family leave that protects jobs but offers no compensation. 

“There is no downside to paid family and medical leave,” Mann said, listing benefits such as decreased maternal deaths, decreased pre-term births, increased breastfeeding, decreased clinic visits for young children, decreased infections, narrowing of gender pay gaps and decreases in employee turnover.

“I could go on,” the medical doctor said.

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Editor’s note: Peter Callaghan wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost. 

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

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