Legislature faces conflict

02/27/2006

Cooperation is the watchword at the outset, but core issues could torpedo that goal.

BILL SALISBURY
Pioneer Press

While looking ahead earlier this month to the legislative session that starts Wednesday, Minnesota House Speaker Steve Sviggum predicted, “The tone will be cooperative, not confrontational.”

A few days later, Sviggum, a Republican from Kenyon, went to Willmar, home of Senate Democratic-Farmer-Labor Majority Leader Dean Johnson, to speak at a rally promoting a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Johnson was the target. For months, amendment supporters have been pressing Johnson to bring the issue, which has already passed the Republican-controlled House, to the Senate floor for a vote.

Johnson, a Lutheran pastor, didn’t attend the rally. He was, ironically, in St. Paul participating in the wedding of a heterosexual couple.

“The speaker says he wants to cooperate,” Johnson said later, “but going into someone’s district to whip up the folks over the marriage amendment doesn’t lend itself to setting the table for a very cooperative session. I think it showed disrespect.”

That little clash between the Legislature’s two most powerful leaders points to the conflicting political pressures all elected state policymakers face in an election year.

On the one hand, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and members of the DFL-controlled Senate and GOP-run House want to cooperate enough to accomplish at least a few things they can brag about in their campaigns.

On the other hand, they want to make the other side look bad.

House and Senate DFL and Republican leaders agreed the vast majority of legislators want to get their work done and go home as quickly as possible this year.

“But we also want to bring up stuff that will trap each other into bad votes. It’s that damn simple,” said Senate Minority Leader Dick Day, R-Owatonna.

For instance, some Republican senators — not Day — will try to force DFLers to cast unpopular votes against the proposed ban on same-sex marriages.

House DFLers are likely to push for votes on some popular education and health care programs Republicans will feel compelled to oppose as too expensive.

Meanwhile, a growing group of legislators will try to tone down the partisan bickering, push for more cooperation between the two houses and take other steps to prevent the gridlock that led to a government shutdown last summer.

“People do not want another meltdown,” said Rep. Kathy Tingelstad, R-Andover, a leader of a group of more than 60 lawmakers who are trying to reform the legislative process. In a February survey by Tingelstad and Rep. Diane Loeffler, DFL-Minneapolis, 80 percent of House members said they wanted to “do something different” to strengthen House-Senate interaction and reduce partisan divides.

But Democrats and Republicans have real policy differences, and they will use this election-year session to focus attention on them.

“There’s a very fine line between being cooperative and caving in on your values and your principles,” Sviggum said. “We want to be cooperative, but we also want to be able to show that there are some differences.”

A constitutional ban on gay marriage is one of those differences, he said. He and most other Republican lawmakers support the so-called “marriage amendment” as essential to protecting families, while Johnson and many other Democrats oppose the ban as unnecessary.

Johnson said it’s not needed, because state law and a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling already bar same-sex marriages. He accused Pawlenty and Republican legislative leaders of using the amendment as a “wedge issue” to stir up their conservative base for the fall election and divert attention from issues such as education and health care that he considers more significant to most residents.

“The Republicans are using one divisive issue after another, right out of Karl Rove’s play book,” Johnson said. In addition to “going after gay people,” he charged they are playing to racial prejudices by attacking illegal immigrants and previously demanding that Indian tribes share casino revenue with the state.

Sviggum argued that protecting the institution of marriage is a critical social issue, and DFLers are equally guilty of playing politics with it. He said, “Democrats have to be subject to the question: Are you going to destroy marriage, destroy the family only for political purposes?”

While same-sex marriage will be the hottest hot-button issue in the session, Sviggum said the most important political issue is demonstrating to Minnesotans that the Legislature can get things done. After the 2004 session, when lawmakers couldn’t even agree on a bonding bill to finance construction projects, and last year’s government shutdown, they have been widely criticized as a “do-nothing Legislature.”

To change that perception, legislative leaders agreed they must pass a bonding bill this year. They said they also could improve their reputations by acting on issues that aren’t deeply partisan, such as restricting the use of eminent domain and cleaning up lakes and streams.

Sviggum said he doesn’t expect any help from DFLers in the House, where Republicans hold a narrow 68-66 majority. With Democrats drooling at the prospect of taking control, the speaker said he anticipates they will try to create chaos and controversy, “fueling the fire that we can’t govern.”

Not so, responded House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, DFL-St. Paul. “Democrats used to think that we didn’t need to have a plan, that it was enough just to criticize the Republicans’ plan. But I think we’ve realized that if we expect the public to vote for us, we have to have a clear agenda on education, health care and transportation, and we have to work to get it passed, or we don’t have any credibility.”

Entenza wants DFLers to “focus relentlessly on those few core issues.” That will require a discipline the party has rarely shown in the past.

“Democrats historically have had ADD (attention deficit disorder) when it comes to politics,” he said. “We’ve talked about 20 different things and had 40 different solutions. The public has seen us as a party that’s more interested in government programs than in delivering some things that will have a real impact in their lives. That’s been a terrible mistake.”

In the Senate, Democrats hold a 38-29 majority. DFL leader Johnson said they will “stick to the nuts-and-bolts issues” such as bonding, education, health care, transportation, energy and public safety.

All the leaders agreed that if they want to get re-elected, they’d better get their work done on time — May 22 is the constitutional deadline — and get out of St. Paul without another special session.

“In this election year, I think there’s an attitude that a special session would be the next worst thing to the bird flu, politically,” Johnson said.