Anyone who watched the Minnesota Legislature in the months following the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic might have thought that the state House and Senate were full-time institutions.
In addition to the regular sessions that spread out from January to May, the Legislature returned to St. Paul monthly due to provisions of state law governing declarations of peacetime emergencies. Lawmakers met in session for at least one day a month between January 2020 and May 2021.
But it wasn’t full-time then and it isn’t full-time now. Regardless of the time spent in session, the annual salary of $48,250 doesn’t change. Under a constitutional provision, the Legislature can meet in regular session for just 120 “legislative days” over the course of two years. Each year, the House and Senate must adjourn regular sessions on the Monday following the third Saturday of May (May 23 this year). Special sessions don’t count against the 120-day cap.
But for the first time since 2003, a bill has been introduced to change that. The proposal, (House File 4840) introduced by Rep Jamie Long, DFL-Minneapolis, along with a companion bill in the Senate by Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville, would ask voters to remove the 120-day limit and the May adjournment date from the Minnesota Constitution.
“We are losing a lot of good people every single cycle who aren’t able to make it work with the demands of having another part-time job,” Long said. “A number of my colleagues see the downsides of having a full-time executive and a full-time court system and only a part-time Legislature.”
[image_caption]State Rep. Jamie Long[/image_caption]
“It’s not a very good way of legislating,” Long said.
Amending the Constitution in Minnesota is relatively easy — majority votes in the House and Senate and a majority vote of the public. But there is a quirk in that an amendment must receive a majority of all votes cast in the election, which means not voting on an amendment is the same as voting ‘no.’
Still, it’s not going to be on the ballot this fall. There are two reasons. First, Republicans who control the state Senate pretty much hate the idea.
“Moving to a full-time legislature is an absolutely terrible idea and would move us more toward Washington, D.C.-style politics,” said Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller, a Republican from Winona. “It’s important to maintain the current citizen-legislature to ensure we don’t have a legislature full of career politicians.”
[image_caption]State Sen. Lindsey Port[/image_caption]
“My goal is to start the conversation and see if we can build bipartisan support for next year,” he said. “We’re just starting to have the dialogue about it, but I’m hoping this will give the public a chance to weigh in and force members to think hard about whether the way we do it now is the right approach.”
Not an outlier
The National Conference of State Legislatures doesn’t measure the 50 state Legislatures in terms of strictly being full-time or part-time. Instead, it breaks states down along a gradient, from full-time with large staffs that spend many days in session to part-time with small staffs and few days in session.
The 10 states with full-time legislatures tend to be the most populous — but also include Alaska and Hawaii.
Minnesota is among the states that have what the NCSL considers hybrid legislatures, which spend more than two-thirds of their time doing legislative work and have professional staff but aren’t paid enough for most to avoid having other income.
[image_credit]National Conference of State Legislatures[/image_credit]
All of which brings up another question: Would lawmakers get a pay raise if Minnesota went to a full-time Legislature? A previous constitutional amendment in 2016 turned over legislative salary setting to an independent commission. That group looks at legislative pay in other states and would likely propose increases to match other full-time legislatures such as those in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois.
“Being a legislator should not require you to be independently wealthy,” said Senate prime sponsor Port.
I’m not sure more time to get nothing done is much of an improvement. And I think there’s something to be said for a legislature composed of citizens that work in the community. I think we’d have to talk about the effects of creating a professional legislating class.
I agree.
Agreed. They get very little legislating done, so how would it improve the success by giving them several more months in which to achieve even more nothing?
Talk of a pay raise is obscene. Work together and find common ground and do something for Minnesota, or get out of the way.
Would anything ever get done without a deadline?
Actually, precious little is accomplished WITH a deadline. Even then we have bills to allow beer sold in ‘growlers’ but no education spending bill. We need to show with our balloting this fall how we feel about legislative priorities.
My goodness no….. please no! They should have a shorter session with very few but important issues they must get done. The more politicians get together to spend your tax dollars, the worse it gets for you. Take the omnibus bill, you will have lawmakers voting for their 350 million dollar (taxpayer dollars) project, while complaining about someone else’s 350 million dollar project. They make up procedures and policies that cover their own backsides steady. The less they are together the better for the citizens of Minnesota.
More time to get into mischief
As far as I am concerned, a full time legislature is one where being a legislator is the legislator’s only job. Is that something we want?
It seems apparent that the present Legislature is not a performing asset for the people of MN. Whether making it “full time” would be an improvement seems questionable to me but worth thinking about. The Leg might become even less responsive to public needs and more responsive to big-dollar interests.
More time to accomplish nothing?
How about cutting the number of legislators, cutting their pay and cutting the length of sessions.
How low should the pay be? Low enough only the wealthy can afford to serve?
Low enough so that you need to have a real job, instead of just being a professional politician.
Right on!
Three major changes — at a minimum — need to be included in any proposal for a full-time legislature:
— A reduction in size. The Minnesota legislature is one of the largest in the nation. Maximum for a full-time legislature should be half the current 201.
— Term limits. The state does not need two cahmbers dominated by career politicians.
— All aspects of compensation — including per diems, health insurance, post-service benefits (“retirement”) — determines by the independent compensation commission.
And there should be assurance of specific, non-reservable changes in the way legislators do business — including single-subject bills (no more mega-topic omnibus bills), legislative deadlines, limits on number of bills considered at any annual session … .
Just extending the time (and expense) for business as usual is totally unacceptable.
All three of your suggestions are worth considering even if we don’t extend the legislative session length.
In my dozen-plus years here, the ineffectiveness of a part-time legislature has been repeatedly demonstrated. In a few cases, I’ve been happy to observe the ineptitude, but more often than not, it has worked against the interests of most Minnesotans. Paul Udstrand’s criticism of the idea of a full-time legislature is not without merit, but that merit is more than counterbalanced by our part-time legislature’s inability to address issues that affect citizens all over the state, coupled with a recurring resort to omnibus bills that not only violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the state Constitution, but that, also more often than not, cram together numerous legislative proposals that, as a previous article pointed out, many legislators would never vote for as stand-alone measures, but that end up as law because they’re legislatively tied to something else that those same legislators like very much. It’s not exactly a compromise – more like arm-twisting.
I’d be especially enthused about a full-time legislature if the proposal was tied to term limits. This is an area where I’m in agreement with Paul Udstrand – no one should be able to make a genuine, life-long career out of being a legislator, and term limits of, say 3 terms or 10 years, whichever is shorter, would go far to achieving that. It would move both left-wing and right-wing crazies out of state government and back into the real world. Even better would be coupling full-time legislators, term limits, and a prohibition against former legislators being paid as lobbyists for, say, a decade after their legislative service has ended.
I do think full-time legislators ought to be paid more – a living wage seems a minimal requirement – but not dramatically so. $48,000+ annually is a higher wage than an awful lot of Minnesotans are able to take home, which is part of the state’s ongoing problem in a number of areas. If it were up to me, I’d peg legislative pay at no more than 5% above the state’s median annual wage.
Lack of efficiency is a failure of leadership and personnel, not attributable to length of sessions. There undoubtedly are part-time legislatures that are far more efficient and possibly full-time legislatures that are just as inept.
The size of the legislature may be a factor. The larger, the more bureaucratic and bumbling.
One word to refute your argument on full time legislature
CONGRESS
Back in the day when I was tangentially involved in legislative stuff, I always had the sense that nothing really ever happened until the last moment. My panacea then for a lot of legislative problems was simply to move the last moment up. I was a supporter banning all amendments to bills ten days before the end of session, the theory being that laws couldn’t then be changed in the middle of the night in order to avoid scrutiny.
The answer to today’s question is “No.” The 120-day schedule is there for a reason: so the State of Minnesota’s business gets done efficiently. Were it allowed to take 365 days, it would. One’s financial independence isn’t a requirement for holding elected office in Minnesota’s Senate or House. I’d run if I wasn’t 70 yrs old! There’s a lot of dysfunction in our State Legislature, but it’s the only one we have. This year more than ever, I’ve learned that elections have consequences.
70 isn’t too young
Go gor it
The population is static and declining. They seriously can’t get their work done?
We should be looking at ways to shorten the sessions. Maybe urgency would be the right pressure to get things done.
If they make it a full-time job it should be with a limit of two terms.
No, no, and no.
Term limits, yes.
Only if the numbers are reduced. There is way too much dead wood in the present house snd senate. Too many are small timers who support the single issue smallness of their constituents. I see that within my Hubbard/Becker/Clearwater county area house and senate representatives.
A full time representative, educated, intelligent, well rounded who is not overtly biased, regardless of the party, would be accepted and would bring respect and credence back to state of Minnesota representative government.
Just to slightly off thread, the term limits thing doesn’t seem to match well with reality. There is in fact quite a bit of turnover at the Minnesota legislature. It’s far from the greatest job in the world, and it seems to me imprudent to discourage people from taking it.
Exactly. But don’t let the facts get in the way of gnawing on the ‘term limit’ bone!
Another nostrum which simply displays hostility to government. A solution in search of a problem…
But there is also a core of long time near lifers as well
Over the last 30 years, a lot of my work has involved watching legislation in every US jurisdiction. I can say that, based on my observation, a full-time legislature is a solution in search of a problem. The problems of a shorter session are still there – there is a flurry of activity at the last minute before sine die adjournment, and bills relating to everything up to and including the kitchen sink are rushed through with little debate or knowledge of the contents of the bill.
Making a session even shorter is likewise no answer. Texas has a relatively short session and has it only every other year, with the result being legislators don’t know what they’re voting for (Texas being the state that passed a legislative resolution honoring Albert DeSalvo for his “unconventional techniques involving population control”). Lobbyists have a lot of sway in Austin.
Term limits are likewise no answer. Term limits are an arbitrary limitation on the right of the people to choose their representatives. It takes away the responsibility of the electorate to vote for representatives they feel serve their interests. It also deprives the law-making process of the expertise of experienced lawmakers, leaving the process in the hands of staffers and, to an even larger degree, lobbyists and special interest groups. Unresponsive representatives can and are removed, if the people feel strongly enough about it (my first year attending caucuses was the year Jack Davies was denied re-endorsement).
This is the same body that covered up the clock when they missed their deadline, to pretend they didn’t
It seems to me that the problem with the MN Legislature is not structural, it’s political. Given the endemically anti-government, obstructive nature of today’s Repub party, a party whose base is hostile to the very idea of compromise, and whose candidates are now largely radicalized carbon copies of each other, the institution is in essentially complete paralysis when it is ‘divided’. It’s actually a miracle the body accomplishes as much as does.
Neither democratic government or the legislative enterprise can function properly when a party which despises government holds any of the levers of power, as we see on a daily basis with the (full time) national legislature, another ‘divided’ (and thus totally paralyzed) political institution. The full time or part time nature of the body will be irrelevant; no structure will ‘work’.
Given its hostile ideology, try putting the Repub party into the position it deserves to be: a minority party in both chambers that can quibble about things at the margins, and see how the institution functions then.
In short, as the Repub party was increasingly radicalized over the course of the Conservative Era (1980-20?0), the legislative set-up of the MN Constitution collapsed and the legislature was intentionally broken. Correlation and causation.
But it is a really really hard job. They are accountable for so much. I can’t help but laugh as I typed that out.
You sound like one of those rabid sports fans who never get any closer to the playing field than their couch or a barstool, yet will go on at great length about the incompetence of the players and coaches.
Put down your beer and suit up. Let’s see how you would do.
Hard Pass on a FT Legislature.
The existing legislative calendar proves consistently to be a waste of time with delays on any actions until the last minute. Then they shove thru a ton of laws/bills in the last 48 hours of their session and no one really has any idea of what is going on except for the small handful of legislators that control the process.
Change MN to a unicameral body, 100 total reps for the state. The legislative session should last 31 days (let’s say from Jan 4-Feb3) in St. Paul, then the reps go home. Unicameral removes the need to compromise/justify the bills between the House and Senate before sent to the Gov. Agree with Hiram Foster’s comment to enforce a drop dead date on Amendments (like his 10 days before the bill is voted on) to ensure the public and legislators have a chance to read/learn about the unadulterated bills before they are voted on.
Pay should be 1/12th of the average Minnesota FT pay (since they only work 1 month of a 12 month year). So if the average working Minnesotan working FT makes $40K/yr, the legislators would get $3333 for their 1 month of service. For the other 11 months of the year, they should get paid a nominal amount to have 1 official public meeting per month in their district to hear & discuss concerns from the population that they represent and for the time needed for constituent communication.
Special sessions only for emergencies (like March 2020 Covid or a severe natural disaster like massive Red River flooding that happens every 25 years or so). No special sessions to get work done that should have gotten done in the 31 day regular session.
Having a part-time legislature helps assure the members and leaders have some contact and familiarity with the real world. Full-time politicians as a whole demonstrate a real deficiency in that regard, both at the state and national levels. Sad but true.
The issue with forming a unicameral legislature would be whether to allocate members based on population (like the House) or based on geographic area (like the Senate). Since vacant land doesn’t vote, I know what my preference would be, but that decision would be pretty important.