Almanac: At the Capitol

I'm a Democrat. This means that I should be incensed right now at the results of the recently-concluded legislative session, right?

Not so much.

Don't get me wrong, I think the DFL caucuses got thrashed in the public relations war. While DFL leaders were and remain on the right and just and upstanding side of the issues, they crafted no coherent narrative of why their stands are the right way forward for Minnesota. There are issues at the leadership and communications levels that will need to be addressed if the DFL hopes for more success in 2008, both at the Capitol and at the ballot box.

But let's pull back and put this session in perspective. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the saying "representative democracy is a bad form of government — it's just better than anything else out there..." or something like it. It holds true at times like these. Governmental deadlock is annoying, for sure, and has short-term detrimental effects. But in the longer run, that deadlock and the checks-and-balances system that causes it are gifts to us from the Founding Fathers. Co-equal branches of government, especially those controlled by opposing parties, mean consensus must be reached for anything to get done. Deadlock, committee process, parliamentary procedure, and even arcane traditions like the U.S. Senate's filibuster mean that no one group can shove an agenda into law through sheer force of will and arm-twisting. And those factors leave us where we are today, with a state government that hasn't done much to help where they might have, but hasn't done much to hurt either.

Consider also where the Legislature was a few years ago. Gone are the days of the State Senate stonewalling on things like Michele Bachmann's anti-civil-rights constitutional amendement and voter suppression. Instead, the pressure is on the Republican minorities and Governor Pawlenty to support or defeat DFL priorities.

Lost in the bloviation and crowing from such conservative luminaries as my AATC Brain Trust colleagues, House Minority Leader Marty Seifert and David Strom of the Taxpayers' League, is what marginal DFL-sponsored tax increases would have paid for — a sound fiscal policy that would have fixed disintegrating roads, provided relief from property tax increases by bringing high-earning Minnesotans' tax rates in line with the middle and working classes, and pushed more funding into classrooms across the state.

Many of these initiatives were defeated. But there's still another legislative session coming next year, and the DFL will still control both chambers of the Legislature. I would much rather control the debate, the issues, and the agenda heading into an election than be forced, as former Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson was, to stonewall against a reactionary right-wing fusion of public policy and electoral strategy.

The public demands a progressive, people-powered public policy regime. It's only a matter of time — and a little improvement here and there in the DFL's PR machine. A frustrating session? To be sure. But worth being angry about? As Martin Luther King said and Senator Barack Obama echoed recently, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Right now, that arc just needs a little bit more organized pressure from DFL leaders and their supporters.