Olson: Minnesotans just showed their true character. Legislators, follow their lead.

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Enough, already, with the low expectations for the 2026 Legislature.

It’s been an unimaginably difficult period for Minnesota. In the eight months since the 2025 legislative session adjourned, Minnesotans have endured a historic stretch of violence and pain.

In June, former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home. Sen. John Hoffman, DFL-Champlin, and his wife, Yvette, were shot. In August, two children died in the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church. In recent weeks, two Minneapolis residents were killed by federal agents in a massive federal immigration deployment that continues to inflict economic damage and instill fear.

The Legislature began Tuesday with a solemn remembrance of the Hortmans in the House chamber. It is from their legacy and the actions of ordinary Minnesotans that our 201 legislators should find courage to set aside patterns, divisions and grievances and find a way to work together.

Ordinary Minnesotans, acting on their own accord, have shown the way forward.

Conventional wisdom suggests this won’t be a productive legislative session and that election-year politics will inhibit any real action.

In January 2026, we will have a new governor. All 201 legislative seats are also on the ballot in November. Despite several special elections last year, the Legislature remains as it was in 2025: nearly evenly divided between DFLers and Republicans.

The expected excuses for inaction are there. The margins are too thin and the divisions too deep to do anything substantive in an election year. But these are our elected officials whom we pay — not to mention imbue with the power that comes with their office — to be leaders.

Surely the legislators can find a way just as thousands of untrained, average citizens found their collective power with whistles and cellphones. The citizens shelved quotidian stresses about rent and mortgage payments, insurance costs, food bills and carpool schedules to flood the streets. They refused to yield their constitutional rights and values.

The world took note.

The Legislature should now give Minnesotans the session they deserve.

It cannot be too much to ask, to hope, that our legislators, our elected leaders from every corner of the state, revisit their motivations for seeking public office and resolve to be creative, compromising and humble.

The past several weeks have proven costly to Minnesota. Economically, the state needs the kind of boost that a big bonding bill would provide in terms of jobs, cash and civic mojo. A failure to pass a bonding bill this session would be a sad statement on the state of our leadership in St. Paul.

Many would like to see the Legislature pass new gun measures, but House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, has made opposition to new gun safety bills a pillar of her gubernatorial campaign. Which raises the question, how many more lives must we lose before legislators act?

In contrast, both DFLers and Republicans agree that the state’s widespread social services fraud is bad. Whether they can agree on a way to curb and prevent it is another question.

New technology should be an easy win that would benefit all 87 counties, meaning every legislator’s district. This should be at the top of every legislator’s to-do list. It’s a direct way to fight fraud, improve services and demonstrate bipartisan commitment to good governance.

I’m hoping there’s more to come, that there are legislators willing to surprise us this session with new ideas and a collaborative willingness to work for the public good.

What’s been lost since June and nearly forgotten were the pledges that came after the Hortman murders to tone down the divisive rhetoric and try harder to find common ground. That effort must be reclaimed.

I would not characterize myself as hopeful, as only a handful of Republicans found a way to denounce constitutionally suspect acts of the federal incursion these past few weeks. In their silence, the rest of the GOP, including Demuth and Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, signal an unwillingness to cross the partisan divide even when the consequences have proven deadly to Minnesotans.

Everyone must look forward now and try to bridge the gap. If the session devolves into an us-versus-them scorecard, everyone loses, including every Minnesotan who took to the streets.