"I Love It When A Plan B Comes Together"

A friend of mine observed on Twitter this afternoon that there sure seem to be a lot of “Plan B’s” floating around the state capitol for a government dominated by one-party rule.

It’s true.  Everywhere you look in St. Paul this week, the Democrats are playing a mulligan off the tee:  whether it’s the Governor’s Budget 2.0, the Mayo expansion bill, financing for the Vikings stadium, or the on-again-off-again gas tax.

To be fair, I would have trouble getting organized if I were governing from a program completely unrelated to the one I campaigned on.  Minnesota’s 88^th legislature has passed just 10 laws to date.  The gridlocked, hyper-partisan, do-nothing, Republican-controlled 87^th had managed to pass a dozen laws by this point in 2011.

As it happened, back in 2011, I spent much of the first few weeks of the 87^th legislature sitting in committee hearings and watching floor sessions.  Back then, the Democrats, newly in the minority, took every opportunity to leap upon each Robert’s Rules slip up or parliamentary faux pas.  The Democrats were trying to develop an “amateur hour” narrative around the newly-elected Republican majority.  With the 88^th legislature, the amateur hour theory doesn’t work, as Democrats are the natural party of government.

As the possibility of an on-time finish in five weeks recedes beyond the horizon, I am still confident that 2013 will see record amounts of legislation passed—even if it takes all twelve months to get it done.  What I’m most concerned about is the quality of the work product.  Like last year’s Vikings bill, too much of what gets slapped together minutes before committee hearings has that Pelosian “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” feel. 

To expand on a quote from a few posts ago, Time magazine’s Joe Klein wrote back in 2010 of the national party version,

Democrats tend to be more interested in legislating than in managing.  They come to office filled with irrational exuberance, pass giant fur balls of legislation — stuff that often sounds fabulous, in principle — and expect a stultified bureaucracy, bereft of the incentives and punishments of the private sector, to manage it all with the efficiency of a bounty hunter.

Our Minnesota version, the DFL, seems to suffer from a similar malady.  Whether it’s the new state healthcare exchange, the ever-evolving tax bill, or the many social engineering efforts, this year’s priorities have no shortage of detail and complexity.  As for workable, check back with me next year.