Minnesota state House Democrats walk out in effort to block GOP speaker vote

Minnesota’s Democratic state representatives walked out Tuesday, failing to show up for the first day of the legislative session to deny the state House a quorum amid a fight over how to manage a chamber that's set to be equally divided.

After Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who control's the chamber's gavel between sessions, adjourned the state House and said there was no quorum, state House Republicans nonetheless moved to convene a legally questionable session in a half-empty chamber and elect a new speaker.

The 67 Republican members present voted unanimously to elect state Rep. Lisa Demuth as speaker, though the designation is set to be challenged in court.

State Rep. Melissa Hortman, Democrats' speaker-designate, condemned the proceedings before they even began, saying she expected a "kangaroo court" and a "sham" proceeding, noting Democrats would go to court to try and block them from conducting business.

"We have to accept election results even when we don't like them. And Republicans want to do this kind of crazy revisionist version where they just throw out election results if they don't like them, and we can't let them trample over our democracy in that way," Hortman said ahead of the session.

Voters elected 67 Democrats and 67 Republicans to the state House in November, and lawmakers began to craft a power-sharing agreement for the tied chamber, which requires a quorum of 68 to conduct business. But after a residency challenge knocked one Democrat out of office — forcing a special election for Jan. 28 — and an incident of tossed absentee ballots called into question another’s victory, Republicans said they planned to take control of the body.

"It is no longer a tie — someone broke the law. The court ruled that he could not take office. I think my Democrat colleagues are frustrated with that reality," Demuth said in an interview on Monday night.

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By failing to show up, Democrats are keeping Republicans from electing a state House speaker and appointing committee heads without all their expected members present. The Democratic caucus plans to stay away from the Capitol until after the special election in late January, when another Democrat is expected to be elected giving them more power in the House.

“At noon, we will have a total body membership of 133 members that are eligible to take the oath of office, 68 is usually a quorum, but under these circumstances, the way that we are looking at it is members that are eligible to take the oath of office is 133 so that would give us a 67-member quorum,” Demuth said.

Simon, the secretary of state, made it clear he disagreed.

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“If there are not 68 members present, I have no authority to take any further action and will adjourn,” Simon said in a letter to leadership last week. He promptly adjourned the session after taking the roll call and finding just 67 members on Tuesday.

The walkout comes after negotiations between the parties, which ran late Monday and into Tuesday morning, failed. Democrats argue that the open seat set for a special election is in a safe Democratic seat, maintaining the legislative tie, while Republicans insist nothing is set in stone.

National Democrats have responded in kind, with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee announcing a $100,000 investment into the party caucus to support them broadly and the candidate, David Gottfried, who is running in a seat a Democratic candidate won in November by 30 points.

Then there are the issues surrounding state Rep. Brad Tabke, whose win in November was called into question when election officials discovered they’d accidentally thrown out 21 absentee ballots without counting them.

Tabke won by 14 votes in initial tallies. After investigating the thrown-out ballots, a state court upheld Tabke’s win on Tuesday, citing testimony from enough voters whose ballots had been thrown out who said under oath they’d voted for Tabke.

But Minnesota law dictates that the state House of Representatives determines Tabke’s eligibility, meaning a Republican majority could force another election for the seat.

In a statement Tuesday, Hortman said Democrats “have no other recourse” than to deny a quorum until the special election restores the 67-67 balance.

“Democrats are united in our will to fight Republican efforts to kick Representative Brad Tabke out of the Minnesota House. We cannot allow Republicans to engage in this unprecedented abuse of power, and will use every tool at our disposal to block it,” she said.