The short version:
Minnesota governor Mark Dayton this morning offered the Republicans controlling the Minnesota Legislature a choice: He’d accept their June 30 proposal, which delays school payments and doesn’t tax the rich, on these three conditions:
– They dump all the ALEC-inspired social/policy agenda bullshit (including their own version of Scott Walker’s union-busting bill), crap which they’d spent the entire session pushing
– They drop their plan to cut state employee numbers by 15%
– They approve a $500 million bonding bill to put people back to work in Minnesota.
It took them several hours, but the Republican leadership decided that protecting the rich from more taxes was far more important than looking fiscally prudent or even gutting unions and pushing mandatory picture voter IDs.
The details will have to be worked out, and this is still a tentative framework, but (assuming Zellers and Koch — or rather, their leaders Tony Sutton and his deputy Michael Brodkrob, who dictate every breath Zellers and Koch take — can get the rest of the GOP caucus to agree) the shutdown is very likely going to end soon.
Think about it. They were so desperate to protect the rich that they actually agreed to dump ALL the Taliban legislation they’d been trying to push all session — the union-busting, the anti-stem-cell crap, the picture voter ID, all of it — along with any pretense that they were deficit hawks, just to keep Dayton from taxing the top .03% or 7,700 richest Minnesotans.
That tells you something.
By the way, Dayton’s not up for reelection until 2014, whereas the legislature’s all up for reelection next year.
And again, there is a chance that some of the wackier GOP freshmen might refuse to back this because all of the Taliban crap got stripped out. But it’ll probably go through, with GOP votes — the DFL will sit this one out most likely.
