The cynic H. L. Mencken once quipped that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The sad reality is that bad choices in a single election cycle can have toxic consequences that not only are undeserved by the outvoted minority, but also can linger long after a passing majority has crumbled. So it may be for Minnesotans after the recently concluded session of the state legislature.
Minnesota has long been liberal, but with a frequently divided government that kept its radicalism tethered. The state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party — formed by a 1944 merger between Democrats and a leftist party from the heyday of American socialism — held the trifecta of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature for only two years between 1991 and 2022. Republicans most recently held the state house from 2015 to 2018, and the state senate from 2017 to 2022. Entering the 2022 midterms, Minnesota had the only legislature in the country with each party controlling one house. Now, that last bulwark against full leftism has been removed, and the consequences are in full view.
For the DFL, 2022 was hardly a sweeping mandate. Minnesota Republicans won 48 percent of the vote in federal House races, a significant improvement from 2020 or 2018, and had their best showing in the governor’s race since 2006. But their gubernatorial candidate, Dr. Scott Jensen, was easily caricatured as an extremist on the 2020 election, abortion, and vaccines. The state senate went from a 34–33 Republican majority to a 34–33 DFL majority. On that slim basis, the DFL set out to turn the state overnight into a frozen California. The legislature, with the eager connivance of Governor Tim Walz, voted routinely in partisan lockstep to enact a wish list of left-wing radicalism. Republicans could do little to hold back the deluge.
The DFL’s top priority was all culture war, all the time. They enacted a “fundamental right” to abortion, sweeping away all limits on abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The state officially repealed its law stating a preference for birth over abortion, and, by eliminating all limitations on the financing of abortion while defunding alternatives, the DFL showed that they mean it. Dozens of state laws even modestly regulating abortion were repealed: laws providing funding for counseling or support for abortion alternatives, laws requiring informed consent, laws allowing women to sue abortionists who perform abortions without consent, laws requiring reports of women dying or suffering complications for abortion, laws requiring doctors to treat infants born alive after an abortion, even laws prohibiting coercion of women to have abortions.
The stripping away of informed consent in these “Don’t Say Baby” bills is combined with statutory references to “pregnant people” — don’t say “women,” either. Abortion clinics would be severely deregulated compared with any other business in the state.
Minnesota also banned extraditions or compliance with subpoenas or court orders from other states related to abortions obtained by those states’ citizens in Minnesota, while protecting the Minnesota medical licenses of doctors convicted of performing illegal abortions in other states. Minnesota likewise declared itself a “refuge” for transgender surgeries and therapies for minors, while declaring “conversion therapy” illegal and punishable with the loss of health-care licenses. Gender surgery is also now to be publicly funded. Walz and the legislature make no pretense at neutrality: They have chosen their side and mean to bend the full power of the state behind both abortion and LGBT ideology.
Then there’s racial education. The state passed a new “ethnic studies” mandate for public and charter schools at the elementary, middle, and high-school levels. The law commands “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States. Ethnic studies analyzes the ways in which race and racism have been and continue to be social, cultural, and political forces, and the connection of race to the stratification of other groups.” School boards are mandated to adopt curricula that are “antiracist and culturally sustaining,” and to offer training to teachers and administrators in the “knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to be antiracist and culturally sustaining.” The law defines these terms to include “actively working . . . to change policies, behaviors, and beliefs that perpetuate racist ideas and actions.” Funny, we were told that nobody wants to teach critical race theory in schools and that the law couldn’t possibly define these concepts.
Minnesota schools are mandated to collect race and ethnic classification data even with regard to recess detentions in order to ferret out “institutional racism.” They are dictated to teach “the history of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples . . . including the genocide, dispossession, and forced removal of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk.” Meanwhile, private colleges are forbidden to “require a faith statement” from enrolling students. So much for religious colleges.
The legislature made drivers’ licenses and state-funded health care available for illegal immigrants. On gun rights, it passed a red-flag law and expanded background checks for private gun sales and transfers. On voting, it gave convicted felons the right to vote before completing parole or probation, enacted automatic voter registration combined with automatic, permanent mailing of ballots to people who sign up once to vote by mail, and allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to get their names pre-registered on the rolls even though they can’t legally vote.
The DFL also went on a massive budget spree, blowing in a single session Minnesota’s $17.5 billion surplus, most of it on spending and the rest on one-time “tax rebates” that will do nothing to improve the state’s tax climate going forward. The state’s $72 billion budget increases spending by 38 percent over 2022 levels, plus $2.6 billion in additional infrastructure spending that is heavily financed by debt. Pricey new programs were created, such as free public college (subject to a means test), universal free breakfasts and lunches for all students, up to twelve weeks of state-financed family and medical leave, expanded free-housing vouchers, and free menstrual products in schools. Hourly paid school workers will be eligible for unemployment every summer.
The budget includes a $2.2 billion hike in school spending over the next two years. School spending already consumes a third of the state budget, yet nearly half of the state’s public-school students can’t read at grade level. But at least they will be instructed to advocate for “antiracist” public policies.
Taxes on most Minnesotans will be going up to pay for all this. Gas taxes will be hiked by as much as five cents a gallon over the next four years. Sales taxes will increase by one percentage point. A payroll tax will be added to finance the family- and medical-leave program. A 50-cent delivery fee will be added to most online shopping orders over $100. Car tags and driver’s license fees will increase; many boating registration fees will double.
Heavy-handed environmental rules were not neglected. The state will mandate 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040, and it passed the strictest regulation in the nation on the use of chemicals in consumer products. There are also new business mandates, including “earned safe and sick time” even beyond the state-funded program and a rule targeting Amazon by requiring warehouse workers to be given specific written notice of how fast they are expected to work.
Even worse ideas got serious consideration. Walz unsheathed his veto pen just once, complaining that a mandate for higher pay for Uber and Lyft drivers “could make Minnesota one of the most expensive states in the country for rideshare” and eliminate access to transportation. A proposal to create a committee of unionized nurses to oversee hospital staffing levels was scrapped at the last minute after the Mayo Clinic — the state’s largest private employer — threatened to pull billions of dollars of planned investments from Minnesota. DFL lawmakers are even openly pondering a confiscatory tax on unrealized capital gains, having learned nothing after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the state’s argument for seizing an old lady’s home for unpaid taxes and keeping the profits from the sale.
Meanwhile, the Gopher State is doing little to stem the public disorder that has gripped the Twin Cities since the murder of George Floyd, the ripples of which have left Minneapolis with a desperately understaffed police department even after the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters roundly rejected a “defund the police” initiative and threw its proponents off the city council.
As retired medical-device CEO Howard Root wrote in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in explaining why he was moving to Florida, “What used to be Minnesota Nice has become Minnesota Nuts, and I’m out. I’ve heard from many others who are planning a similar exit to states like Tennessee and South Carolina, which should put Minnesota on pace to soon exceed the 19,400 net residents who left for other states last year.”
Californians have long tolerated bad, radical governance in exchange for the state’s balmy climate, gorgeous beaches, and Hollywood glamour. The same deal may seem less appealing when the return is Minnesota winters. But even if a voter backlash restores to Republicans a share of power in Saint Paul and allows them to roll back some of the DFL’s excesses, it will be difficult any time soon to undo the full damage of this legislative session.