Minnesota’s legislature has had a wild ride the past three years — and now, it has taken a much darker turn.

Minnesota’s legislature has had a wild ride the past three years — and now, it has taken a much darker turn. I summarized the state of play in January:

In 2022, when Democrats won their own one-seat, 34–33 majority in the state senate to go with a 70–64 majority in the state house (which is elected every two years), Tim Walz and the DFL in both houses decided to go hog-wild with leftism. As progressive as much of Minnesota is, its voters can be pushed too far, as was illustrated in 2021 when the Minneapolis electorate routed the “Defund the Police” people off its city council. 

At the moment, with no election having intervened, the DFL majority in the state senate is down to a 33–33 tie, after Kari Dziedzic — who began the 2023 session as the majority leader — died of ovarian cancer on December 27, 2024. A special election to replace her will be held on January 28, pitting DFL Medtronic executive Doron Clark against Republican software engineer Abigail Wolters, the winners of a January 14 primary. While special elections can be unpredictable, the DFL will likely win. Still, nothing can happen in the state senate until then. In Minnesota, there is no tiebreaking vote for the lieutenant governor, so a 33–33 chamber is controlled by nobody. 

The DFL’s position is even more tenuous given the bizarre saga of Nicole Mitchell. Mitchell, a former Weather Channel meteorologist, faces felony first-degree burglary charges after being arrested, dressed all in black, in the basement of her widowed stepmother’s home. With just a one-vote majority, Democrats needed Mitchell’s support for their orgy of leftism, so while Mitchell was stripped of her committee assignments, the DFL resisted Republican efforts to oust her until the 2024 legislative session was over…last week, the judge ordered her trial now cannot start until 60 days after the scheduled May 19 end of the legislative session. The alleged burglar will be the margin of any DFL majority for the whole session. 

The [2024] result, once all the disputed races were called, was a 67–67 tie in the state house, thanks to the DFL winning three of the four races decided by less than a point, and five of the seven races decided by less than two points. That’s when things really got wild. 

Republicans challenged the outcomes of two state house races…armed with 67 –66 majority while waiting for the open district to be resolved, Minnesota house Republicans gathered on January 14 and elected their speaker, Lisa Demuth. But wait, there’s more! The DFL boycotted the session and insisted that this denied the Republicans a quorum in which to operate.  

In the end, the Minnesota legislature ended up evenly divided, and the standoff ended with a power-sharing deal in the state house, with the Republican Demuth as speaker and the incumbent DFL speaker, Melissa Hortman, as “Speaker Emerita.” But that meant that any budget — which the state had to pass before the legislature could adjourn — could pass only if enough concessions were made to Republicans to get their votes.

The legislature ended up concluding its session without finishing its business, requiring Governor Tim Walz to call a special session, which ended late Monday night. The deal that was struck with the state GOP removes illegal immigrant adults from the state’s taxpayer-funded health care system (Minnesotacare), while keeping children on the program regardless of legal status. This was massively unpopular with Minnesota progressives; Walz at one point had to hold a press conference with protesters banging on the doors behind him. So Hortman — an arch-progressive who was speaker in 2023–24 when they passed all the crazy-left-wing stuff — ended up as the public face of the deal in the House and the only member of the House DFL to vote for it. The state senator who was shot today before Hortman’s assassination chaired the human services committee in the state senate, and was similarly part of the deal. Walz, while he has pledged to sign the deal, was just yesterday denouncing it as a human-rights violation at a Center for American Progress event in D.C.

With the gunman at large, the police say that this was politically motivated, but aren’t elaborating further.