Just a question. It probably won't come to this. But the events of 2009-2010 have certainly raised the question: What are the limits of the unallotment power of Minnesota governors?

Gov. Tim Pawlenty's surprise use of the power last year, as an alternative to working out a balanced budget deal with the Legislature, and the subsequent court challenge to his use of the power, have put the question on the table. We might get some guidance on that question this spring from the Minnesota Supreme Court, which is scheduled for oral arguments in the big unallotment case March 15.

But last week's passage, by bipartisan veto-proof majorities in both houses, of a bill to revive the GAMC program, and Tpaw's immediate veto of it, provide at least an opportunity for a thought experiment. What if the Legislature overrides the veto. Is the unallotment power so broad that the guv can overrule even a two-thirds majority of both houses and unallot the funding for the program?

Please understand. This is not really the way things are headed. At the moment, even though the bill to revive GAMC passed the House by an overwhelming 125-9 margin, it now seems reasonably likely that all the Republicans who voted for it will reverse fields and vote to sustain the guv's veto.

The House Repubs seem to be saying they were tricked into voting for it, believing that the Senate would pass a different version and that a conference committee provide the time and the place to work out a bill that both parties could accept and that the governor could sign. Maybe so.

Failure to communicate

It's also clear that communication between TPaw and the House Repubs was less than perfect as the guv traveled to Washington for the Conservative Political Action Conference. If Pawlenty had told his Repub allies that he was going to veto the bill, most of them would not have voted for it. It's a pretty big mess for the moment, and a lot of House Republicans are on the horns of an I-voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it dilemma. But there's a decent chance the whole thing works out peaceably, if there's a formula for keeping GAMC alive that both parties and the governor can accept.

(GAMC, I should have said, is General Assistance Medical Care, which provides health coverage for the very poor. And I should mention that when he elminated GMAC, Pawlenty tried to make MinnesotaCare available to the former GAMC patients, although the coverage wasn't as good and although it required that others be bumped off of MinnesotaCare to make budget room for the new recipients. Whew.)

But my purpose in bringing up last week's GAMC veto and potential override is really just to ask whether unallotment is such a robust power that it enables the governor to overrule even a supermajority of both houses of the Legislature. If so, that's some power and raises the question of whether it can be reconciled with a reasonable view of the balance of powers between branches.

When Pawlenty decided last year to end the GAMC program, he didn't do it under his unallotment powers. He did it with a line-item veto, which is a more familiar and less controversial power of Minnesota governors. Pawlenty did use his unallotment power to move up the date on which GAMC would end to March 1, 2010, which means the program will blink off next week if nothing is done to change the situation. This is surely among the reasons that the Legislature was rushing the GAMC through early in the session.

But if the Legislature did override TPaw's veto and reestablish GAMC, under normal balance of power scenarios, that is supposed to be the end of the story. In the real world, if that were to happen, the guv would probably accept it.

But under the robust theory of unallotment that Pawlenty and his attorneys in the unallotment case have developed, the only thing the governor needs in order to reduce or eliminate an appropriation is a finding by the governor's own commissioner of management and budget that a shortfall in revenues (compared with previous projections) has thrown the budget out of balance. Armed with such a finding, under this robust interpretation of the unallotment statute, the governor is empowered to unallot pretty much anything in the budget, even if it passed with supermajorities, even if it got into the budget through the override of a gubernatorial veto. If so, is it possible that unallotment power is a bigger threat to the balance of powers between the branches of the state government that previously suggested?

Personally, I would bet that the 1939 Legislature, which created the unallotment power at the request of then-Gov. Harold Stassen, was not thinking through scenarios like this. Certainly, they didn't specify how the new power would apply to such scenarios within the statutory language. Pawlenty's side has argued at each stage of the unallotment challenge that the court lacks the power to search for implied intentions or implied limitations on the power.

Ramsey County Chief District Judge Kathleen Gearin, who ruled that Pawlenty exceeded his authority with his 2009 unallotment, didn't describe with precision what might be the upper and lower limits of the unallotment power. Perhaps the Supremes will clarify.