The Minnesota Supreme Court said Friday that it was within Gov. Mark Dayton's authority to veto funding for the state Legislature, ordering the DFL governor and Republican legislative leaders to work with a mediator to finally resolve their long-simmering constitutional dispute.
Dayton and lawmakers "should resolve these doubts through the political process," Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea wrote in the six-page order. Failure to do so means "Minnesotans may soon be deprived of their constitutional right to three independent branches of government," she wrote.
The court was definitive on the propriety of Dayton's underlying action: Citing a section of the Minnesota Constitution, Gildea wrote that Dayton's "exercise of his line-item veto power over the appropriation for the Legislature's biennial budget was constitutional." But the order was less clear about the real-world consequences of Dayton's decision, and it threw the question of ongoing state funding for the Legislature back into limbo.
"Constitutional powers may not be used to accomplish an unconstitutional result," Gildea wrote.
Dayton and DFL allies praised the order, with Dayton pronouncing himself "pleased." Dayton has long argued that his veto was a legitimate political weapon wielded during a contentious budget debate, as the governor tried to pressure Republicans to reconsider a series of tax cuts and several policy changes that he said he only signed into law under pressure.
Republican leaders, meanwhile, argued that the order did not vindicate Dayton's action.
The justices did not reach a definitive conclusion about how to secure future funding for the Legislature. The legal wrangling prompted by Dayton's veto and the Legislature's subsequent lawsuit, the court found, continues to "raise doubts" about the legislative branch's ability to function.
The order states that the two sides must go through mediation first before they could return to the Supreme Court to make a case for why the justices should (or should not) order funding.
