This is a sham [the call for a special session]. The Minnesota House is evenly split: 67 Republicans, 67 Democrats. Rules negotiated after the 2024 elections require bipartisan agreement for any bill to advance. Committee co-chairs and caucus leaders must align or bills die. In a special session, every bill restarts — drafted, introduced and vetted anew. Without prior consensus, nothing passes.
A faster path exists: A supermajority of 90 votes can suspend rules for immediate floor consideration. But with our 67-67 split, this requires crossover support Walz hasn’t pursued. If he were serious about protecting children, he’d negotiate with all caucuses to secure a signed agreement before calling a session. Instead, he’s orchestrating chaos — random motions and doomed bills — for political optics.
This isn’t incompetence; it’s calculation. Walz’s focus isn’t Minnesota’s safety but power. His camera-ready announcements, followed by afterthought outreach to Republicans, reveal his intent: a stunt, not a solution. Using dead children to force divisive votes is reprehensible.
Wally writes bad doublespeak copy from 1984. Wally’s “faster path” is a path to no meaningful action at all. By Governor Walz calling the session without an agreement with people who don’t want one, we’ll at least know why there is no action. The Republicans would never agree to anything meaningful. Wally calls it “calculation;” I call it transparency.
What Wally is really afraid of is that he and his Republican pals will be revealed, during a special session, naked as jaybirds (don’t think about that image too much), before the voters as gun-sucking idiots. Which, regrettably, they are.
Regrettable also is the fact that although Wally Hudson, the Representative from Discount Shopping, may not be dislodged, some of his more vulnerable fellow travelers may be.
Really, not so regrettable.
Update 9/12: Polonius would have been a better name for Wally.
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Update: 9/18: You know from reading this story that improving “mental health” is the principal prevention of gun violence strategy of the Republicans in the Legislature. That was echoed in the recent hearings of the Senate Gun Violence Prevention Working Group, and by the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, too.
From the Kare 11 article at the link:
In the House, GOP Speaker Lisa Demuth released a list of priorities that included more funding for school security and school resource officers, as well as further investment in mental health treatment, among other items.
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“I am less interested in bickering over what specific design feature of a firearm makes it more dangerous or less dangerous,” said Rob Doar, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs with the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, “and more interested in solutions that can identify someone who is in crisis, connect them to resources, [and] divert them from violence long before they start whatever journey of harm that they are seeking to inflict.”
You must recognize what a bunch of unserious boobs these people, and Republicans in general, are when you have one group of them arguing for mental health screening and services on the one hand, while on the other hand you have another group saying this:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are calling for an end to school-based mental health screening and therapy. Instead, they argue in a Washington Post op-ed that kids need, quote, “natural sources of mental health.”
The late Princeton professor and moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt coined a special term of art for this: Bullshit. Bullshit is an indifference for the truth; it’s broader than lying. It is saying or writing whatever advances one’s cause, regardless and uncaring of the truth.
President Trump is the country’s premiere practioner of the art of bullshit, of course, but he has plenty of acolytes here in Minnesota.
Update: 9/19: Here’s an example of the true Republican approach to mental health:
Feds reject Rochester Public Schools’ appeal for mental health grant, citing DEI