Up next for the DFL: amending the state Constitution

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Pretend with me for a few sentences, please, that you’re a DFL member of the Minnesota House.

You are thinking — more likely obsessing — about your bid for re-election this year. You’re worried that weak enthusiasm for your party’s president, Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s non-contest for a fourth term, and the absence of any other high-profile statewide races will translate to low DFL turnout. You fear that poor turnout may land you back in the minority in 2025.

Are your thoughts turning to constitutional amendments? You’re thinking like a legislator already!

The notion of ginning up turnout by turning crowd-animating issues into proposed amendments to the Minnesota Constitution is not a new one. Republicans tried that very thing — and failed spectacularly — with their same-sex marriage ban and voter ID amendments in 2012.

With their trifecta control of the State Capitol, DFLers have a ripe opportunity in the session that convenes on Feb. 12 to try their hands at this game. Not that DFLers need a trifecta to put constitutional amendments on the 2024 ballot, mind you. The Legislature is empowered to do that all by itself, without a governor’s say-so or signature.

Gov. Tim Walz can only offer encouragement, which he did at an event on Jan. 8. That day’s venue was Planned Parenthood headquarters in St. Paul, leaving no doubt about which issue the DFL governor has in mind.

It’s “important that we keep [abortion] at the forefront of people’s minds,” Walz said that day. “We need to make sure the public is active” in efforts to protect reproductive rights from future changes in state political tides.

That’s the argument for adding protection for abortion rights to the state Constitution. It’s not that the legality of abortion is at risk under current state law. Minnesota’s statutory foundation for abortion rights was strengthened by the Legislature and Walz just a year ago, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision.

Rather, it’s that statutes can be changed with relative ease by future governors and Legislatures. Constitutional provisions are harder to dislodge.

The obliging folks at ERA-MN are preparing just what Walz ordered. They’ve been revising the language of their long-sought state Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to explicitly include protection for reproductive rights, including abortion.

There’s some irony in that move. For decades, advocates for federal and state bans on gender-based discrimination have rejected the charge that the ERA is really a stalking horse for abortion. They are separate issues, the pro-ERA forces insisted, pointing to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court found ample justification in 1973 to make abortion legal without an ERA in the federal Constitution.

Now that SCOTUS has changed its tune about abortion, so has ERA-MN, acknowledged its founder, former state Rep. Betty Folliard.

“The ERA question is much bigger than abortion. It says discrimination is not OK, and we want protections for all people, especially in the workplace,” Folliard told me.

But “after Dobbs, we’ve seen that rights can be given and rights can be taken away unless they are embedded in our constitution.” Those rights include bodily autonomy, she said, and she’ll be at the Capitol pushing to put on the 2024 ballot a version of the ERA that says so.

ERA-MN won’t be alone in an amendment quest. In fact, one amendment has already landed on this November’s ballot. Last session, legislators agreed to ask voters to give the state’s lottery-funded Environmental and Natural Resources Trust Fund, due to expire in 2025, another 25-year lease on life.

Joining the ERA advocates in hot amendment pursuit will be a housing coalition called Our Future Starts at Home. Composed of more than 50 nonprofit organizations, the coalition will be asking for a 3/8ths percent increase in the state sales tax, to be dedicated to housing assistance for low-income Minnesotans. The request is modeled after the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment that led the ballot in 2008.

Anne Mavity, executive director of the Minnesota Housing Partnership, says the data are clear: The state’s housing market for lower-income people is broken, and other societal ills can’t be remedied unless housing needs are met.

Inconsistent funding, one legislative session at a time, can’t solve the problem, she added. “One and done is not how housing development works. We need funding in an ongoing way.”

Mavity and Folliard both say their organizations are ready to run robust Vote Yes campaigns this year. Both will argue that the constitutional changes they favor have wide support and can boost turnout, particularly among the progressive voters that DFL legislators want to attract to the polls. Both plan rallies at the Capitol early in the new session — the ERA on Feb. 12, the housing coalition on Feb. 20 — to punctuate that point.

Are you still thinking like a DFL legislator? If you are, you can hear both Mavity and Folliard singing sweet music in your ear.

Lori Sturdevant is a retired Star Tribune editorial writer. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.