Over the weekend, a friend told me that the DFL overreached in the early days of the legislative session, proposing a smorgasbord of bills on everything from a gas tax hike to medical marijuana to domestic partner benefits. As a result, they didn’t gain any traction with the public and were in a weaker position when it came time to strike a deal at the end of the session. I don’t necessarily agree with that analysis. Compromise requires good faith on both sides and the Republicans’ maniacal devotion to ideology rendered them incapable of making sensible bargains. The transportation bill is a particularly good example of the lock-step mentality that afflicts Republican legislators. For years, Minnesota voters have been clamoring for improvements to our roads and transit system. Many Republicans voted for a comprehensive bill that would raise the gas tax and give counties the option of raising funds for transit improvements. But when it came time to buck Pawlenty’s veto, they caved and obediently got in line behind their leader. <\/p>\n
The session did accomplish a few good things. The smoking ban. Health insurance for more kids and adults. Renewable energy standards<\/a>. Real change comes slowly and the DFL message machine could probably use a little tweaking before the next session. But the Republicans are being forced to play defense, which can only be a good thing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the weekend, a friend told me that the DFL overreached in the early days of the legislative session, proposing a smorgasbord of bills on everything from a gas tax hike to medical marijuana to domestic partner benefits. As a result, they didn’t gain any traction with the public and were in a weaker position […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-pA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}