The Legislature adjourned Monday without a new state budget in place, the perfect capper for what has been a session marred by the extreme liberals’ failed leadership and broken promises.

 

They clearly put their fringe partisan agenda ahead of doing what’s best for all Minnesotans, especially with their insistence on raising taxes by $12 billion at a time the state has a surplus of $1 billion and growing. Now a brief special session is necessary to finish the budget, a job that could have been completed on time had the Democrats actually lived up to their sales pitch.

 

Gov. Tim Walz and the House majority said they were going to operate under a “One Minnesota” philosophy, then rolled out proposal after proposal that would disproportionately damage Greater Minnesota. Their proposals have included cutting $68 million cut to nursing homes, raising the gas tax by 70 percent, expanding the core metro’s advantage in K-12 education funding, creating new renewable energy mandates over the objections of our rural electric cooperatives and utilities, and more.

 

Fortunately, it appears as though we have defeated the gas tax increase and numerous other transportation-related hikes.

 

Walz and the House majority entered the session claiming they were going to reduce health care costs. In reality, their push to extend the “sick tax” on health care was a major sticking point in reaching a budget deal. I have received notes from constituents who are concerned that allowing this tax to sunset as scheduled would result in their MNCare being defunded. The dirty little secret is the sick tax doesn’t pay for MNCare. It once did, but it doesn’t anymore with the advent of Obamacare. Now the sick tax has become a slush fund to be raided and used as a way to shield spending.

 

The liberals in St. Paul also promised new transparencies and a bill-making process that would avoid the late-session rush that results in bad government. That’s not how it turned out. As adjournment arrived at midnight Monday, House Democrats had led just one of this year’s finance bills to passage (higher education), the fewest budget bills sent to governor’s desk during a session since 1985.

 

Last year, House Speaker Melissa Hortman tweeted “The dynamic of five individuals meeting with staff behind closed doors has to stop. We need a new construct for our conversations that brings the give and take and debate fully into public view.”

 

It sounded good, but that’s not what happened. This year, regular-session budget talks concluded with just three individuals and staff in the room. Leaders spent the final hours of session meeting in secret, conducting 15-minute meetings to make decisions on various budget areas. So much for involving all 201 legislators as Hortman pledged.

 

So, here we are, with the 2019 session adjourned and the vast majority of our state’s next two-year budget in limbo, with an unnecessary special session now required to finish the job.

 

Select groups that are not subject to transparency or oversight of official committees have been meeting to put the budget together, in some cases literally behind closed doors.

 

The good news is many egregious policy provisions extreme liberals buried in finance bills are falling to the cutting-room floor. For example, proposals to infringe on our Second Amendment rights appear to be defeated.

 

Minnesota is bringing in almost $3 billion more in new revenue, has a $1 billion surplus and has received an additional $573 million since February. It should not have taken until now for Walz and the House majority to concede their budget proposal was damaging, unrealistic and unacceptable.