Now a DFLer, will Ron Erhardt also annoy his new party?

Gene Pelowski pulled out his iPad on the first day of session and went straight to YouTube. The incoming Democratic chairman of the House Higher Education Finance and Policy Committee likes to pull up the same video clip for anyone who comes into his office to ask for something: the famous opening scene of the Marx brother’s 1932 movie “Horse Feathers.”

Current and former legislative colleagues of the late Sen. Gary Kubly recall a man of compassion and dry wit and a legislator who refused to draw ideological lines in the sand.

The Minnesota Senate Republican caucus is in disarray after a tumultuous few days that saw Majority Leader Amy Koch suddenly step down following allegations of an “inappropriate relationship” with a direct subordinate on the Senate staff.

Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch sent shock waves through the Capitol complex late Thursday afternoon when she announced that she will not seek re-election in 2012 and that she is resigning her post as Senate majority leader, effective immediately.

No one seemed to see Larry Pogemiller’s departure coming. Not even him. Gov. Mark Dayton announced late last week that the Minneapolis senator of nearly 30 years would move to the Office of Higher Education to replace former Director Sheila Wright, who resigned suddenly in September.

A steady downpour didn’t keep Indian gambling workers from flocking outside the state Capitol in St. Paul last April. At least 1,500 people gathered outside on the building’s steps, some arriving by the busload from reservations hours away. Clad in raincoats and shielded by a canopy of umbrellas, workers thrust signs into the air that read, “Rural jobs count too” and “Don’t gamble with my job!”

The compacts that regulate Indian-run gambling in the state never came up for a vote in the Minnesota Legislature. In fact, the whole affair happened rather quietly.

Nearly six months after DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and the Republican-controlled 87th Minnesota Legislature were sworn into office and set to work concocting the 2012-13 biennial budget, the state has crept inexorably toward a government shutdown whose scale and consequences remained unclear in important respects even after a Wednesday order from Ramsey County District Court Judge Kathleen Gearin.

Six years ago GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature deadlocked over a $466 million budget deficit. The DFL-controlled Senate wanted to raise nearly $1 billion by increasing income taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents. Pawlenty dismissed the move as “profoundly stupid.”