We are now in the final stages of the 2024 legislative session and time is getting very tight.  The Minnesota Constitution limits the Legislature to 120 legislative days (days in which business is conducted on either the House or Senate floor and not calendar days) over the biennium and today (Monday, May 6) will be the 112th legislative day.  The need one day to adjourn sine die (Latin for “without any future date”), which marks the end of the biennium and no bills can be passed on the last day of the biennium.  That leaves eight days over the next thirteen for the Legisature to finish its work.

The 2024 legislative session is entering its homestretch and the stretch has gotten a bit more complicated over the past week due to the legal problems being faced by a DFL state senator.  With the DFL currently holding a one-seat majority, they need every vote to pass legislation unless they can bring a Republican or two or six across the political divide in order to get bills across the finish line.

With the funding bill deadline in the rearview mirror, we will see a lot of activity over the next two weeks as funding bills hit the floor.  Funding bills all have to go through the appropriate over-arching finance committee in each body (Ways and Means in the House, Finance in the Senate), so there will likely be logjams in those two panels later this week and into next week as the mad rush to get the bills to the floor will ensue.  On top of that, policy-related conference committees will likely begin their work this week.

We’re racing down the backstretch of the 2024 legislative session and for education funding and policy, we’re actually closer to the final turn into the homestretch. The House passed its version of the omnibus education policy bill last Thursday night on a party-line vote of 69-61. Debate on the bill lasted almost four hours and there were several amendments, most of which were defeated on party-line votes. The amendments that received the most airtime were ones calling for the repeal of the ethnic studies standard, changes to the READ Act to incorporate language specifically highlighting the term “science of reading,” and repeal of much of the content contained in last year’s bill relating to non-exclusionary discipline. If I had gotten a nickel for every time I heard the word “mandate” uttered during the debate, I’d be off on a European vacation tomorrow without having to spend any of my own money.

I get a number of updates from legislators and this week one of them struck me as a little bit humorous. The legislator’s headline read “Session at the Halfway Point.” That may be accurate in terms of time if the legislative session runs all the way to the constitutionally-mandated day of adjournment on May 20, but so much work has already been completed in the policy committees as their respective omnibus bills begin to hit the House and Senate floors that it seems like we are at least at the three-quarters point in the process.