Thursday's first-in-a-while private meeting beween Gov. Tim Pawlenty and DFL legislative leaders might have allowed for "frank discussion," but it evidently produced anything but progress toward a budget-balancing deal. Pawlenty emerged saying that all DFLers want to do is raise taxes, which remains a non-starter with him. Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller and House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher faulted Pawlenty's inflexibiilty and his failure to lay out the program changes needed to make his proposed budget balance in 2012-13.
Could the Thursday meeting have produced a turning point in the Legislature's strategy for the session? That possibility was hinted at by Kelliher to reporters Friday: "It felt like the moment in September 2007, when the governor looked at me and said, 'Madame Speaker, I will never sign a transportation bill that this Legislature sends me.'" That conversation was Kelliher's cue to craft a transportation package that could survive a veto. She succeeded at that in February 2008.
Most Minnesotans would likely prefer a bipartisan negotiated settlement to a one-side-wins outcome this year. Perhaps if legislators and the governor met weekly, as their predecessors in decades past routinely did, a better outcome would emerge.
