Minnesota House leaders have had a heck of a time finding someone to take the gavel of the State Government Finance Committee. First it was Denny McNamara, who bailed on it to grab the Environment gavel given up by Tom "Hackbark" Hackbarth. Mark Buesgens agreed to take the committee but then decided against it - we hope to free up time to continue his awesome work as a floor leader.
It appears that the orphaned gavel may have finally found a home with Morrie Lanning, District 9A, Moorhead. Lanning, of the Legislative Commission to End Poverty in Minnesota by 2020, is one of BillsandVotes.com's low achieving moderates.
Lanning takes over a gavel that has been held by some of this state's premier radicals from both sides of the isle. His recent predecessors include Tommy Rukavina, the Croatian Sensation who put the division on the map. ("Division" is shorthand for any finance committee since they are normally divisions of the Ways and Means Committee.) Rukavina literally had DFL Leadership camping outside the committee chamber for days as he put his omnibus bill together. Lots of grudges in there.
Phyllis Kahn and Phil Krinkie - the diametrically opposed PK's - kept SGF in the spotlight for years. There was always hell to pay for both parties when the SGF bill surfaced from the committee for a hearing in Ways and Means and then moved to the House floor for first passage. Their strategy was simple but effective: Load the bill up with so many objectionable provisions that in future committee stops members would simply get worn out amending and debating and voting to remove them all.
Marty Seifert kept the heat on with lots of insightful reforms of his own and many recycled ideas from the Krinkie era. Thanks to Marty the DFL can no longer pack busloads of "activists" to go roving on election day with someone to vouch for them at each precinct. He changed the number from unlimited to 15 vouchees per voucher. (And for those of you who think 15 is too high, you're right - but talk is cheap. Try getting it down to zero and you will begin have a clue how hard it is for Republicans to fix our broken election process.)
We don't expect much in the way of radical from Lanning. And that's too bad. SGF has a smallish budget (the 2009 SGF bill spend just under $670 million for the biennium - a pittance). But the spending division controls the office budgets of state government's biggest political players, including the governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state and the legislature itself.
The division is also a stop for the workproduct of several critical Senate-House commissions. The 18 government worker bargaining agreements stop in SGF - last biennium the total bill for those contracts as just over $7 billion. The Legislative Commission on Pensions and Retirement - which controls roughly $50 billion in government worker pension assets and is larger than all other finance committees put together - generally makes an appearance in SGF after the Commission finalizes the Omnibus Government Worker Pension Bill.
Lanning has the reins of something that is much larger than he bargained for. The core functions of this state's government are at his command. Hopefully he's up for it.