So much activity, so few bills

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All in all, it was a pretty light year. Historically, even. Don’t tell that to Michele Timmons.

As revisor of statutes, Timmons oversees a team of three dozen staff, including 13 attorneys, who draft and finalize Minnesota’s statutes. As with most sessions, the staff spent much of the session helping authors produce new legislation, while awaiting the passage of legislation into law. That waiting period took even longer than normal.

Because the deal between House and Senate leaders broke so late, the staff spent the final four days working hours similar to a hospital emergency room, splitting into two teams that worked 24-hour shifts until the session ended.

“It was busy throughout the session, and very busy at the end,” Timmons said. “The last three or four days, exceedingly so.”

All of that toil, at the tail end of four months of committee hearings, press conferences and floor sessions, led to the creation of just 77 new laws. Of course, three other bills, all omnibus budget packages, were passed, but vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton, and two others — the Legacy Amendment budget and a bonding bill — were left unfinished on the final night.

Even if those bills had made the deadline, the session would have been the least prolific in the history of the state, according to research from the Legislative Reference Library, which published its findings on Wednesday. Total laws enacted have been edging down for decades, from nearly 800 in 1973 to more modest numbers of the present era.

But 2015’s count was slight even compared to its most recent predecessors. Since 2003, the average number of bills signed in odd-year, budgeting sessions, was 156, according to research Timmons staff compiled after this year’s session ended.

It’s not the case that lawmakers didn’t have ideas: At a total of 4,503 bills introduced in both the House and Senate, 2015 was just 250 introductions behind the record of 4,774, set in 2005.

Timmons, now in her 17th session leading the revisor’s office, was hesitant to speculate about just why the historically high rate of introductions led to a historically low rate of passage, and warned against reading too much into the data.

“I’m not sure it’s true … that one session makes a trend,” she said. “My experience is every session is different, has its own unique characteristics.”

But by Thursday, the reference library’s findings had already caught the eye of several Capitol insiders, and most were more than willing to venure theories to explain the numbers.

Rep. Lyndon Carlson, DFL-Crystal, one of the longest-serving legislators in the history of the state, said he had noticed the strange pacing of the session early in the year. For what seemed like weeks on end, he recalled, the House held short floor sessions, handling only administrative acts like referring bills from one committee to another, and adjourning.

“We had a lot of floor sessions where it was simply paperwork, and we convened for only about 10 or 15 minutes,” Carlson said. “It was a lot of wasted days, in my view.”

House Majority Leader Joyce Peppin rejected Carlson’s claim, saying it was “ridiculous” to assert that legislators should be taking action if there aren’t good bills in front of them.

“We should never be in a rush to pass laws,” Peppin said. “I think the session was managed really well. We tried to do a reasonable number of bills.”

Indeed, with about four hours left in session, as DFL lawmakers singled Peppin out for argumentative questioning, the GOP leader asked if the Democrats didn’t have bills it wanted to see passed before adjournment. Evidently, they did not: The speechifying continued, and just two more bills made deadline, the Legacy and economic development budgets, neither of which became law.

Peppin and Rep. Greg Davids, R-Preston, the longest-serving current member of the House Republican caucus, both said the dearth of new statutes could be traced to a conservative philosophy. Republicans want less government, they said, and less government means fewer laws.

“I don’t think we need to be measured on how many bills we pass, but how few,” Davids said. “I’ve got all the statute books in my office — I think we’ve got enough.”

True enough, the second-lowest figure of laws agreed to in a regular session is the 94 statutes signed in 2011, the last time Republicans had at least one legislative majority. But even that year, the required special session for a budget deal added another dozen, bringing the total to 106, 20 percent more than the expected final tally for 2015.

Almost everyone points to one logical explanation for how the huge stack of introductions was winnowed down to so few laws. Legislators from both chambers, and from both sides of the aisle, sought to get their smaller provisions, both spending and policy tucked into larger omnibus budget bills. The inclusion is generally the safest path for any idea, as legislators often feel compelled to support budget bills, especially when a conference committee report hits the floor with only hours to spare, as most did this session.

The practice has been commonplace for some time, but Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk tried, publicly at least, to warn senators from lacing budgets with controversial policy measures this year. Some attribute Bakk’s stance to his growing awareness of doings in the House, where Republicans had made no such agreement; Peppin now argues the Senate position was not only naive, but ultimately disingenuous.

“I can’t think of a time that budget bills had only appropriations,” Peppin said. “And frankly, no, the Senate didn’t hold to that at all. On the last night of session, chairs of energy and jobs committee had a compromise, and then the Senate amendment came back with a whole bunch of additional policy items that hadn’t been agreed to in either the House or Senate.”

Sen. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, explained that Senate DFLers had relented on their principled position only as a reaction to House Republicans. If the DFL caucus did not work to leverage their own policy desires into budgets, Rest said, it risked ceding control to the House on those matters.

“Members started to get very nervous about all kinds of policy being attached to finance bills in the House,” Rest said. “And then, policy might be disregarded in Senate bills that were done separately.”

Rest, for her part, said she had 13 individual bills enveloped into omnibus packages this session, and only one, a minor clarification on existing law, that passed in “about 10 seconds” as a stand-alone item.

“That has seldom happened to me,” said Rest, who joined the Legislature in 1985, “that I didn’t have bills that were just policy bills… that passed by themselves.”

The theory of regulatory and procedural items coming to bloat omnibus budgets bears out in at least a couple of instances this session. At 100 pages, the public and judicial omnibus bill, which contained numerous new Second Amendment protections, is more than twice the size of the corresponding 46-page bill passed in 2013, and the 207-page environment and agriculture omnibus is 32 pages longer than its 2013 predecessor.

In the latter case, controversial policy scattered throughout the budget ultimately led to its ruin, according to John Hottinger, a former DFL Senate leader who lobbied for the Sierra Club this year.

“Based on information we got from the governor, and from members, that clearly was the case,” Hottinger said. “You had 29 folks [in the Senate] who voted against that environment bill, and they almost surely didn’t do it on financial grounds.”

Hottinger guessed that the high number of bill introductions this session could partly be attributed to the influx of new freshman members, many of whom had made promises to voters and constituents. Likewise, Roger Moe, another former Senate DFL leader turned lobbyist, blamed box-checking campaign strategy for at least some of the volume.

“You can say, ‘I introduce this, this and this’, and it looks good on paper,” Moe said. “Then you say, ‘We were able to move it through, but those rascals in the other body didn’t.’ It really has more to do with campaign literature and ads than anything else.”

The rapid process of trimming thousands of small bills to just dozens of large ones can be unnerving for lobbyists, who can no longer focus on individual pieces as they work through committees and floor votes. Instead, advocates are forced to urge the preservation — or, as often as not, the elimination — of bits of language buried in gigantic financial packages, which, this year, appeared and vanished from conference committees at breakneck speed.

Rest, for her part, said she’s not necessarily bothered by seeing one of her ideas carried as part of a bigger proposal, though legislators might feel less ownership of their work in that case. She thinks the trend of shoving policy and funding side-by-side will only become more prevalent, though, as Dayton’s vetoes suggest, their coupling raises the stakes, but not necessarily the chances of becoming law.

“I think that’s going to continue, the growth in that particular attitude,” Rest said. “But when something gets into an omnibus bill, its fate — interestingly enough, almost as a contradiction — becomes more tenuous.”