As the stalemate in the Minnesota House approaches its fourth week, both sides seem to agree on one thing.
As Minnesota House impasse continues, both sides open to a future tiebreaker in the chamber
Other states have used everything from a coin toss to siding with the governor’s party in cases where there’s a tie.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
January 31, 2025 at 4:59PM
Let’s never, ever do this again.
Bipartisan interest is forming on the idea of changing state law to create a mechanism to break any future ties in the state House of Representatives. That could prevent another circumstance where the 134-member chamber lands in a 67-67 deadlock.
“It’s sort of an unnatural situation,” said House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman, who noted that on the federal level, the vice president can break a tie in the U.S. Senate. “There’s a whole lot of things that are cropping up here that we don’t want to happen again.”
Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, said a tiebreaker is an “interesting conversation that maybe this experience can lead to some bipartisan agreement on.”
After the November election, the Minnesota House was evenly split for the first time in decades. Without a way in state law to break a tie, Democrats and Republicans had been negotiating a power-sharing agreement until December, when a court ruled that DFL candidate Curtis Johnson didn’t live in his district and couldn’t take the oath of office.
The 67-66 edge pending a special election to replace Johnson prompted Republicans to back away from power-sharing negotiations with Democrats. To prevent Republicans from taking power without an agreement, Democrats have boycotted the first three weeks of session to block them from getting a quorum.
While the stalemate in Minnesota is unprecedented, legislative ties are fairly common across the country. Since the 1960s, there have been more than 40 instances of split legislative chambers in other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The legislative bodies in Montana have been tied five times, four times in Alaska, and Michigan has had three ties over the years.
Some states handle the situation much differently than Minnesota does. In Wyoming, a coin toss is used to determine the winner of individual seats and break a tie in the chamber. In two dozen states, the lieutenant governor presides over the Senate and can break a tie.
Minnesota’s Senate has an odd number of members, so there is only a tie in a situation where there’s a vacancy.
The Senate is currently tied pending the swearing in of Minneapolis DFL Sen.-elect Doron Clark, who will fill a vacancy created by the death of former Senate Leader Kari Dziedzic. That will restore the chamber to a 34-33 DFL majority.
“Even if you do have an odd number of seats, you can always have a vacancy and end up in a tie, but I think it is worth probably having that conversation,” said Niska. “Do we have three reps for each senator so that we have an uneven number in both houses?”
South Dakota, Montana and Indiana select chamber leaders from the party of the governor or the secretary of state in cases of a tie.
But many states have a setup similar to Minnesota: Power-sharing agreements must be negotiated in order to continue in a tied scenario.
Those agreements often require the parties to switch the gavels for the speakership back and forth, either every other day, week or month. In some cases, one party controlled the chamber for a year, the other the next.
The last time Minnesota’s House was tied, in 1979, the speaker of the House was Independent-Republican Rep. Rod Searle, but Democrats were given the gavel for the powerful rules, budget and tax committees.
Republicans and Democrats had been negotiating a co-leadership model in Minnesota, with split membership on committees, before discussions broke down. Since then, the two parties have met sporadically but mostly been battling it out in legal fillings over the boycott, the quorum and the timing of a special election to bring the chamber back to a tie.
In her latest letter to Republicans, Hortman suggested adding more members to the negotiations to “expedite a resolution,” which has helped break stalemates in other states, according to the NCSL.
“We have an obligation to the people of Minnesota to work together, and to keep negotiating until we reach an agreement,” she wrote.
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