Minnesotans play out budget drama

Amid the tense drama of a looming government shutdown Friday night, Minnesota's lawmakers seemed to be caught up in the same poker game as everyone else in Congress.

Some were showing their cards, some weren't. But both sides said it was up to the other side to play the final hand. "We've passed bills to fund the government, and we've passed bills to fund the troops," said Angelyn Shapiro, a spokeswoman for Minnesota Republican John Kline, a close ally of House Speaker John Boehner. "The Senate's not doing its part."

Senate Democrats, including Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, blamed the impasse on Republicans they see as pressing a broader social agenda on environmental policy and funding of Planned Parenthood and other groups.

"Boehner and the president reached a figure," Franken said, "so it isn't about that at all. ... An ideological issue should not be used as a gun to everybody's head at the last minute."

Providing much of the fury behind crippled budget talks was an energized Tea Party caucus led by Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, who vowed to oppose any deal that did not defund President Obama's health care law.

"That pledge to the American people remains unchanged," Bachmann blogged Friday, as she decried both Republican and Democratic leaders for playing "small ball."

"We should be fighting over trillions, not billions," she said.

Bachmann was one of just six Republicans to vote against a two-week budget agreement on March 1.

By March 15, Bachmann had rallied 54 Republicans to join her in Tea Party-led opposition to a three-week budget resolution. Minnesota Republicans Erik Paulsen and Chip Cravaack, along with Kline, supported both short-term budget bills.

But Friday, as time ran out, Cravaack and Paulsen said little in public, leaving it to Boehner to negotiate, with Bachmann tossing in her views in TV interviews and on RedState.com, a conservative blog.

Twin Cities Democratic Reps. Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison both lamented what they saw as the outsized Tea Party influence.

"Shutting down the federal government has been the Tea Party Republicans' goal since last November," McCollum said Friday.

"Any temporary shutdown of the federal government can only be called a short-sighted, hollow victory for Tea Party extremism over common sense and compromise."

Ellison, who voted against the last two short-term budget deals, said he'll examine any new deal that's reached. But he said he couldn't see how he would vote for $38 billion in cuts, the number that negotiators were throwing out on Friday.

"I fundamentally disagree that our problem is we spend too much money," Ellison said. By early evening, he tweeted that he was "waiting around Capitol, praying R's come to their senses."

Leading up to the final countdown, Ellison and McCollum joined Bachmann -- for different reasons -- in voting against the previous stop-gap budget bills, while Democratic Reps. Tim Walz and Collin Peterson supported them.

This week, the House GOP passed a bill that would fund the government for one week, fund the military for the rest of the fiscal year, and cut $12 billion.

The measure passed the House on a mostly party line vote -- though Peterson voted for it and Bachmann voted against it. The Senate did not take up the bill.

But amid the politicking and the posturing, both sides were willing to concede it was a messy affair. Klobuchar, on the Senate floor, contrasted the budget fight with the flood battles in the Red River Valley.

"The whole community comes together," she said. "I see that and I wonder to myself, [why] we in this body, in this Congress, can't come together. When we are this close, when there actually was agreement on a number, we can't come together ... that's absurd."

Kevin Diaz • kevin.diaz@startribune.com Jeremy Herb • jeremy.herb@startribune.com