Minnesota Legislature adjourns for regular session with long to-do list awaiting them in special session
It was less of a sprint and more like a slow walk to the end of session on Monday, the constitutional deadline for the Minnesota Legislature to wrap up its work for the year. They didn't finish on time and closed out with little fanfare.
The Senate adjourned around 10 p.m. and the House followed suit just before midnight, leaving a long to-do list for a looming special session.
The work will continue on Tuesday, albeit unofficially. Conference committees, which are small panels of lawmakers in both chambers sorting out the differences between different spending plans, will transform into working groups to finalize the remaining sticking points.
Gov. Tim Walz, who has the sole power to call lawmakers back, said he wants lawmakers to finish all outstanding bills before returning for a short, one-day session to pass the remaining parts of the next roughly $66 billion state budget.
The special session will mark the first since 2021. The earliest it would happen is Thursday, but it could come a few days later.
"We're hoping to have the budgets buttoned up in the next couple of days, but we want to make sure that the staff has the time. So it could be the case that we are in special session by the end of this week or very early next week, knock on wood," Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, told reporters after adjournment Monday.
Over the weekend and through Monday, lawmakers approved several budget bills, including housing, agriculture, veterans, and public safety, sending those spending plans to Walz's desk for signature. The latter includes the plan to close Stillwater prison.
But it was quiet most of Monday, as lawmakers embraced that they would inevitably return. The remaining bills include taxes, health and human services, transportation, K-12 education spending and more. Those bills are often the largest and most contentious proposals to sort out.
The margins are slim at the Capitol; the House is tied at 67-67 and the DFL has a one-seat majority in the Senate. That make-up is more closely divided than ever before and forced a compromise on a top-line budget agreement between Walz and legislative leaders with both the GOP and the DFL.
In the Minnesota House, leaders ended a weekslong dispute early in the session with an agreement to share power on committees, while Republicans held the powerful speakership.
"It is really interesting as you watched the stutter, start, stop, start-the whole thing that kind of went through as we tried to get set this year," House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said of the delayed start to the session in January. "Nothing was exactly perfect. It was really hard. But I think the power sharing overall went very well."
Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, the speaker emerita, said she was still processing how the session played out with the unique dynamics in the House. She characterized it as a "bumpy ride" at times.
"The opportunity is to really be bipartisan. The opportunity is to team up and work together and to kind of step out of that normal Democrat versus Republican frame," she said. "Unfortunately, some people haven't accepted that invitation, so we're doing it kind of the old-fashioned way, which is a little bit disappointing to me because I thought it might be a different kind of session and a little bit it's the same partisan baloney that we see often."
One part of that broad leadership budget deal that could upend how lawmakers wrap up their work for this year is ending state health insurance coverage for adult undocumented immigrants, which faces fierce pushback from rank-and-file Democrats at the Capitol. Progressive DFL legislators chanted and protested outside the governor's office when Walz and leaders announced they had included that provision as part of the budget deal last week.
That fragile compromise will need bipartisan support in the House and Senate, where Democrats have a one-seat advantage, but many DFLers have said they would vote against it.
The expansion of undocumented immigrants in MinnesotaCare, a state health plan for people with low incomes who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, just began in January, and Republicans are concerned about increased enrollment and future costs. The compromise was a partial rollback of the program, removing undocumented immigrant adults but allowing children to remain eligible.
Murphy said the legislation will likely need to run as a standalone bill, and not be tucked into a larger budget bill, in order to pass. Hortman said she would be the sole "yes" vote on it if that's what it takes in the House — where 68 votes are needed to advance anything and each caucus has 67 members — despite her deep personal opposition to the proposal.
"We made an agreement, and we need to get it passed. People in Minnesota deserve a budget. There's a lot of people on MinnesotaCare, and they all deserve to have MinnesotaCare funded. So our caucus is not going to be standing in the way of funding state government," she said.
Going into overtime has happened in four of the last five budget-writing sessions, which fall during odd-numbered years. The common denominator was divided government. When Democrats had total control of the House, Senate and gubernatorial office in 2023, they ended on time.
"There's some tough compromises in here. We know not everyone is happy. But I say once again to Minnesotans, against the backdrop of the dysfunction in D.C., this is a pretty remarkable thing to see the most closely divided legislature in Minnesota history, working together in a fiscally responsible way of dealing with it," Walz told reporters earlier Monday.
The budget needs to pass by June 30 to avert a government shutdown. A shutdown hasn't happened since 2011.
