Minnesota lawmakers knocked on a lot of doors and sacrificed a lot of time away from their families and day jobs to come to St. Paul.
None of them came with the intention of making laws in the dumbest possible way.
But here we are.
The Legislature has a few more hours to wrap up its work for the year. Most of that work could have been done weeks or months ago, but this session, like every session, ends in a last-minute rush to push a big wad of bills, tax cuts, good intentions, and typos out the door before midnight Sunday.
That unwieldy wad is the 2018 omnibus supplemental agriculture, environment and natural resources, jobs, energy, economic development, housing, and state government bill. It was a heavy enough lift before Friday, when a gunman walked into a Texas high school, killed 10 people, and sent lawmakers here scrambling for extra school safety funds.
As of midnight Friday, they were still cramming things into the omnibus or yanking them out. Minnesota's constitution requires the Legislature to craft laws one subject at a time and one bill at a time. But the only rule that gets bent harder and more often is the line in the legislative manual that prohibits members from speaking "impertinently … superfluously or tediously."
Which brings us to this long weekend of immovable deadlines and flexible legislative priorities.
Lawmakers are cranky, staffers are weary and the Capitol press corps is stress-eating big Costco tubs of peanut butter pretzels.