Democratic House leader Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, spoke at a press conference in the Scott County Government Center in Shakopee — surrounded by her DFL colleagues — on Jan. 14, 2025. Photo by Michelle Griffith/Minnesota Reformer.
By: Michelle Griffith
ST. PAUL, Minn. (Minnesota Reformer) – Minnesota House Democrats have filed a lawsuit asking the Minnesota Supreme Court to find that Republicans’ attempt to elect a speaker and conduct business without them was unlawful because they lacked a quorum of members.
Democratic House leader Rep. Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park said she expects the Supreme Court justices will find that House Republicans acted unconstitutionally when they ignored Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon’s declaration that there was no quorum in the chamber Tuesday. Republicans continued the session without him and elected their own House speaker.
Republicans say their 67 members are all that’s required for a quorum of the current 133 sworn House members, and that they had the right to overturn the ruling of the chair Tuesday.
“What I expect is that the Minnesota Supreme Court would find that the Minnesota House was not duly organized today, that (those) who participated in the sham session violated Minnesota state law and ignored the constitutional requirement of quorum,” Hortman said at a press conference in Shakopee.
House Democrats did not appear at the Capitol Tuesday in an attempt to deny a 68-member quorum that Simon said is required to conduct House business.
Their goal was to prevent Republicans from using their temporary, one-seat advantage — sure to end after a Jan. 28 special election in a heavily Democratic-Farmer-Labor-leaning district — to elect a GOP speaker of the House. They also sought to block Republicans from refusing to seat Rep. Brad Tabke, a Shakopee Democrat who won reelection by 14 votes in a contested election in District 54A.
During their news conference, Democrats were flanked by Shakopee voters whom they said would be disenfranchised if Republicans moved not to seat Tabke to try to force a special election.
Tabke’s election was sharply contested by Republicans because election workers discarded 20 ballots before counting them. Tabke beat Republican challenger Aaron Paul by just 14 votes, raising the prospect that those lost ballots could have swung the election in his favor.
Just hours earlier Tuesday, however, a district court judge ruled that Tabke won reelection and denied Republicans’ request for a special election. District Court Judge Tracy Perzel found that the missing ballots, if counted, would not have changed the election outcome.
But the judge’s ruling is advisory only: The House and Senate each ultimately have authority to seat their own members, so a GOP-led House could ignore the judge.
“It’s just really frustrating that … Republicans are trying to steal the election from the voters of Shakopee,” Tabke said Monday.
Hortman said her caucus will continue to not show up at the Legislature because Republicans have not given her assurance that they would refrain from attempting to unseat Tabke.
She said that despite the boycott, relations remain civil.
“This is not personal. We have a dispute about how to operate the Minnesota House, but we don’t have a dispute with each other personally,” Hortman said.
This story has been updated as the lawsuit has been filed since the original report.
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