How would a divided Minnesota House work in a budget year?

The Minnesota House appears headed for a 67-67 split for the first time in decades, and leaders of both party caucuses have started trying to figure out how exactly that will work.

The critical business of a state budget should be a more bipartisan business than policy bills, said Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, who was House Speaker last session and will continue leading the DFL caucus.

“The thing that’s most important is true shared power,” Hortman said of her goals for negotiating a shared-power agreement with Republicans, “and not that people are trying to game each other.”

Voters stripped Democrats of their six-seat majority in the House after just two years of the DFL trifecta, though the lone state Senate race went to the DFLer.

Rep. Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, who heads up the House GOP caucus, has said she thinks voters wanted to see more moderation after two years of one-party control. And while she projected optimism about passing a budget, she noted a hurdle.

“We are looking at an impending deficit,” Demuth said, adding her priority would be “being responsible with taxpayer dollars.”

But Rep. Jamie Long, DFL-Minneapolis, noted Wednesday that more Minnesotans voted for Democrats than for Republicans statewide, with high turnout in deep-blue metro districts. “We have a map that doesn’t favor us,” he said.

A recount for the seat now held by Rep. Brad Tabke, DFL-Shakopee, could give Republicans a one-vote majority. Tabke leads Republican Aaron Paul by just 13 votes. There could also be a recount in the St. Cloud race for DFL Rep. Dan Wolgamott’s seat.

If the chamber stays tied it is not yet clear who will serve as speaker, though state statute says the secretary of state — Democrat Steve Simon — will open the session as speaker. Demuth and Hortman said they are just beginning to work on other structures.

Hortman said she is looking at the way other state legislatures have handled evenly-divided chambers, instead of the last tie in Minnesota, in the 1979 session.

That year, a negotiated power-sharing agreement led to an Independent-Republican serving as speaker of the House, with DFLers chairing the key Rules and Appropriations Committees, recalled former Rep. Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, who was serving in the House that year.

Instead of divvying up committee chairs, Hortman said, she is eyeing a model of committee co-chairs, one Republican and one Democrat.

Now observing from the outside, Sviggum said both parties have challenges ahead.

“This is going to be a test to see if the Democrats can really share in governance,” he said. “For Republicans in the House, it will be a real test to see if they can hold their team together.”

Hortman said she does wonder about some Republicans’ willingness to engage with DFLers, though she maintains she has a good working relationship with Demuth and other Republican leaders. She pointed to Republicans’ hourslong debates on bills last spring, even relatively uncontroversial bills like one that required an up-front disclosure of fees.

“I don’t think that the three-week filibuster was orchestrated by the leader,” Hortman said of the end of the 2024 session. She has not gotten to know the newly elected Republican members but hopes they will be willing to engage — and she is looking for her members to do the same.

“It doesn’t work if we want to get along and other people don’t want to get along,” she said.

The shouting match on last night of session in 2024 left a bad taste, Republicans agreed.

“We have the institution’s integrity to protect,” said Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska. “I feel that was somewhat damaged last year.”

Demuth said she felt Republican were shut out all last session since DFLers could move legislation without them.

“There was not an opportunity to work collaboratively and in a bipartisan fashion, because the votes were not needed,” Demuth said. “This is almost a forced way.”

She said she hopes cooperation, even forced cooperation, will lower the temperature in the chamber.

“We can set the stage, given the circumstances, to change the rhetoric,” Demuth said.

Somehow, both House leaders say, their members will put aside the acrimony that marked last session, and govern together.

Hortman said she wanted to avoid the partisan jockeying for position that marked the 1979 session, and eventually led DFLers to vote to expel an Independent-Republican member and take a one-seat majority.

Former Rep. Mary Murphy, DFL-Hermantown, was serving her second term in 1979. She and Sviggum remembered the first few months of the session working pretty well, and the House passed a budget in the evenly split chamber.

But in May that year, DFLers voted to expel Independent-Republican Rep. Robert Pavlak of St. Paul. The DFL had sued Pavlak, alleging he distributed false information in campaign literature. Sviggum said Pavlak reprinted a newspaper editorial that got some facts wrong. Pavlak lost an appeal of the case, and the DFL moved to oust him. Because Pavlak could not vote in his own case, the vote was 67-66, and he was removed. That move gave the DFL a one-seat majority.

“It was power politics at its best, or worst,” Sviggum said. The floor session was tense.

“You could hear a pin drop on the House floor,” he said. “There were tears being shed, real tears.”

Murphy said the vote to expel Pavlak was one of the hardest of her 46-year career in the House.

Hortman said she hopes today’s leaders will not try to remove members, and will instead work across the aisle.

She repeatedly pointed to her experience in the 2020-21 session working with former Sen. Paul Gazelka, then the Republican Senate majority leader. With divided government, Minnesota got a budget passed, along with some bipartisan police accountability bills after the murder of George Floyd.

Demuth and Hortman both said they expect far fewer bills to be introduced next year, but Hortman said she wanted to see some action.

“Folks that are trying to build coalitions to do positive things and work with each other will be rewarded,” Hortman said.