Is it constitutional to allow a district court to decide what can be spent during a Minnesota government shutdown?

The state may never know.

On Tuesday, the Minnesota Supreme Court decided to dismiss Republican lawmakers' shutdown-era case that asked the question. The decision closes the lingering legal question over this summer's three-week long state government shutdown.

"The constitutional questions posed by this case are currently moot and will not arise again unless the legislative and executive branches family to agree on a budget to fund a future biennium," the court wrote.

Over the summer, a Ramsey County district judge sorted out what functions need be funded and what could lie dormant during the shutdown.

The court said that lawmakers and the governor could "put mechanisms in place that would ensure that the district court" would not have to make spending decisions.

A similar thing happened in 2005 when lawmakers filed a suit protesting the constitutionality of courts deciding what should be funded and not during a shutdown. After the shutdown ended, the court declined to address the key question.

The repeated dismissals mean the court has never fully addressed whether the state constitution allows any functions to be funded in a shutdown.

Justice Allen Page dissented from the court's dismissal.

"Even if there is never another budget impasse, the authority of the district court to do what it has done in this and the previous impasses must be addressed. Indeed, the particular answers to those questions are of far less importance than the simple fact that they are answered, so the judiciary can no long be used as a pawn in the two political branches' partisan disputes," Page wrote.

Here's the opinion and the dissent:

Shutdown Lawsuit