I worked at the legislature for almost 11 years. The first six of those years were when the Republicans had the majority in the house. Then came four years of a DFL majority, and then a return to the Republican majority that we have today. Even though only four years separated the two Republican majorities, having lived through them, they were quite different beasts. Today’s majority is both more indifferent and more harmful than the previous version, making this year’s elections all the more important.
What do I mean by that? To start with, let’s make no mistake about it: the Republican majority that I saw from 2000 to 2006 was a Republican majority. They passed a lot of laws that I profoundly disagreed with, such as the poorly-titled “Women’s Right to Know” law. Their budgets made cuts to areas like higher education and an ill-fated property tax overhaul. They had an agenda and tried to get it passed, and although a Democratic senate would sometimes thwart them, they were often successful. I certainly don’t want to return to those days.
At the same time, however, the Republican caucus did believe on some level, I think, that government should be good at what it does. There were a number of committee chairs who, although Republican, took their roles as government stewards seriously, and tried to find solutions that both sides could buy into. Not always, of course, but often enough. Again, I wouldn’t always agree with people like Dennis Ozment, Ron Abrams, Ron Erhardt, Larry Howes, Jim Rhodes, Peggy Leppik and others like them, but they were serious about their jobs and the state was better as a result. Of course, there were some bad apples and more extreme members of the caucus, and their numbers grew as time went on, but they weren’t necessarily placed front and center in terms of messaging and governing philosophy. At then end of the day, compromises were made.
Over the course of the years, and especially after the 2006 elections, those more moderate Republicans were replaced by either Democrats or much more conservative Republicans. The moderate faction disappeared almost entirely. This was of minor consequence when the Republicans were in the minority for four years, but after the 2010 elections, which brought the Republicans into the majority again, all of a sudden it mattered a great deal.
What was oddest about my year in the new Republican majority was that, for all intents and purposes, they still acted like a a minority party: throwing up more extreme positions, not caring about passing bills, and not worrying about compromise at all. Nowhere was this more evident than at the end of the 2011 session: not only did the Republican majority waste time by passing the marriage constitutional amendment, a vote that they didn’t even bother trying to justify on the floor of the chamber, but on the last day of session, they didn’t act with any urgency about the impending state shutdown. All of the previous last nights of session that I had been a part of, Democratic or Republican majority, had been a flurry of activity: conference committees meeting, bills being passed left and right, and an all-out push to get everything done. Not in 2011.
I think a large part of the reason is the fact that for many in the current Republican majority, a well-functioning government is not their goal. Their goal is to radically reshape government and end large parts of it. There is no reason to worry about doing things well when you don’t think it should be done at all, and in fact, if the government does it badly, that’s all the more reason to stop doing it altogether!
Probably the most ironic piece of this is that it isn’t conservative at all, insofar as they are advocating small, incremental changes to how government works. Just look at house freshman Kurt Bills, running for U.S. Senate. He has an incredibly radical economic policy, going so far as to introduce a bill about making gold and silver legal tender. Far from being an outsider, though, views like his seem to be on the ascendancy.
Or look at the reluctance to implement the health care exchange in Minnesota. This one blows me away: what is more conservative and free-market than a marketplace where consumers can shop among different plans and choose the one that works for them? Isn’t that far better than mandatory enrollment in a single-payer plan if you are a Republican? And isn’t it better to have a state-run exchange than to have the federal government come in an run one for us? But no: instead of a conservative extension of the government’s role in health care, which is exactly what Obamacare is, the most popular position among Republicans is to have zero government role in health care.
I think our state is much better served when people who believe that government has a valid function are debating about how to run our state. Not when people are more interested in throwing rhetorical and procedural bombs at the other side. The Republicans in charge are a far cry from those old-fashioned Main Street Republicans of lore. We’ll have to see if this election changes that.