In a complete disgrace, Democrats wrapped up their two-year chokehold on Minnesota government on Sunday night.  Over the past two sessions Democrats spent your $19 billion surplus, raised your taxes another $10 billion, approved abortion up to and including birth, made Minnesota a gender affirming care sanctuary state, mandated job-killing Paid Family Medical Leave and Safe and Sick Time, crippled our schools with budget breaking mandates, increased the cost of health care and reduced availability, made our energy supply more expensive and less reliable, did nothing to make our elections more secure, implemented new gun control laws, and replaced our historic flag and seal.

Sunday night was the climatic finish to this disgraceful run. Over the last number of weeks, bills were coming to the Senate Floor with new language having been inserted into them.  Language that had not been heard in committee, and in some cases, had never even been in a bill of any sort.  These “dark of night” additions would be challenged on the Senate Floor as being against rules cited from either Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure or our own Senate Rules. There would be numerous consequential rules violations found in a single bill and the Senate President, who is a Democrat, would rule against the findings and let the bill move forward anyways.  This happened over and over and over and over again in the past month.  The powder keg that erupted on the last night of session had been brewing for a number of weeks!

The single party control on display the past 17 months has been a total disaster for the State of Minnesota and all citizens.  The final move by the Democrat majority was to dump all of their remaining controversial bills into a single bill totaling 1431 pages and pass it while the floor was in total chaos because of the erroneous Presidential rulings.  No one knew what was in that bill. I could not even get it loaded onto my computer until a half hour after the session adjourned. This is how the Democrats have governed the past 17 months!

Democrats had a special interest agenda and they rammed it through. They claimed that bills were vetted in committee, but the fact is that committee membership was already weighted heavily in the Democrats favor. As an example, our Health and Human Services Committee where I serve as the Republican Lead, there are six Democrat and three Republican members. They made sure they would never lose a vote on their bills. They also had, if not all the conferee assignments, a majority in every committee.  When the bills came to the floor, they used the vote of a charged felon to be the deciding vote on most bills 34-33.

I want to remind folks that Democrats only have a one seat majority in the Senate. That means their actions have silenced half of Minnesota. We were all elected to be the voice of our constituents at the capitol, and the Democrats’ actions make it clear that they do not care about what greater Minnesota thinks about these bills – they have silenced opposition. That is not democracy.

Now it is time to call on Governor Walz to do what is right and SAVE Minnesota! If Governor Walz has any strength, he will VETO the session ending mega-toxic omnibus bill (HF5247).  Send it back to the legislature now. These elected officials must be held accountable for the blatant corruption that has plagued our institution.