Capitol Watch: Politics over policy in St. Paul

This week Democrats in the Minnesota Senate spent almost four hours debating a bill to allocate $40 million for rental assistance to poor families (less than 200% of the federal poverty guideline) who have “experienced financial hardship after August 31, 2025, including but not limited to loss of income or unemployment; and are at risk of experiencing housing instability or homelessness, including but not limited to risk of lease termination or eviction.”

Illegal immigrants living in Minnesota would also qualify for the rental assistance, a fact Sen. Steve Drazkowski uncovered during committee testimony.

Although the bill language does not mention Operation Metro Surge, the intent of the appropriation is to help the “neighbors” who were too scared to go to work and now can’t pay their rent. None of these neighbors came forward to testify for the bill. Instead, we heard stories from a parade of advocacy groups on their behalf. 

Families who lost their main breadwinner during Operation Metro Surge are certainly hurting. But if the breadwinner had a criminal record or an order for deportation on file, Minnesota taxpayers should not be obligated to pay their rent. Breadwinners and their families without criminal records (beyond illegal entry into the country) pose a more difficult challenge, but the result is the same. A country with a logical and ordered immigration policy can’t allow some families to break the rules while others wait. 

Instead of offering temporary rent payments, Minnesota should help the “neighbors” that are here illegally self-deport and come back through legal means.

The political left did these families a disservice by allowing them to enter the country illegally under the false premise that their immigration status would not catch up to them at some point. Leaders like Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey made it worse when they stoked fear and encouraged illegal immigrants to hide while telling other Minnesotans to revolt against ICE. And now their solution is to ignore the larger immigration debate and focus instead on helping people in crisis pay their rent, even though they created the crisis in the first place.

Senate Democrats characterized Republicans who opposed the bill as heartless and cruel. They’re relying on swing voters to feel empathy for the poor immigrants and vote for more Democrats in the next election.

At best, this bill represents a political strategy that is inherently lazy and relies on the suicidal empathy of voters who don’t take the time to investigate the larger issue of immigration. At worst, it’s part of a national Democratic strategy to allow immigrants into the country to boost their voting numbers in the next election.

The good news

The good news is that House Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, will use their hard-fought 67-67 tie to defeat this bill and others like it. The other good news is Minnesotans aren’t buying the Democrats’ arguments on immigration and ICE.

According to the latest Thinking Minnesota Poll:

• Eighty-one percent support deporting individuals here illegally who have a criminal record in the U.S. or abroad.
• Forty-eight percent support deporting as many people as possible who are here illegally back to their country of origin (49 percent oppose).
• Seventy-two percent support Minnesota state and local officials cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)to find and arrest undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of crimes in Minnesota, a number similar to other recent polls in Minnesota.
• Half of respondents (50 percent) told us political leaders — such as the governor and mayors — made the ICE situation more heated with their comments, with only 25 percent saying leaders helped reduce tensions.
• Forty-five percent support the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE in Minnesota with 53 percent opposed.
• Seventy-five percent support making sure illegal immigrants cannot vote in Minnesota elections.

After weeks of ICE protests dominating the local news, the Thinking Minnesota Poll shows a silent majority of Minnesotans support the mission of ridding our state of criminal illegal aliens. Minnesota Democrats’ strategy of making the 2026 session and subsequent November election about empathy for immigrants won’t work.

Click here for more information on the latest Thinking Minnesota Poll.

House hearing forces the hand of Democrats opposed to school choice

In a remarkable display of self-ownership, House Democrats on the Education Finance Committee this week admitted their opposition to school choice is the fear that too many parents will choose private education for their children if given the chance, thereby hurting the public school system. Democrats fell all over themselves expressing admiration for Minnesota public schools, but in the next breath said if we allowed scholarships for kids to leave the system, they would in droves. Instead of working on fixing the reasons parents would leave, their solution was to block participation in a federal tax credit that wouldn’t impact the state budget at all. 

Catrin Wigfall testified at the hearing in favor of H.F. 3490 and wrote about it here:

The Minnesota House Education Finance Committee held a hearing Tuesday (March 10) on H.F. 3490, which would opt Minnesota into a new federal education tax-credit program that allows scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) to provide scholarships to eligible public school, non-public school, and homeschool students.

The federal tax-credit program was enacted by Congress last summer and is now part of federal law. However, scholarships will only be awarded if governors opt their states into the program. More than half of states have announced their intent to participate, but Minnesota is not among them. H.F. 3490 would change that, adding Minnesota to the list.

As a federal tax-credit program, opting in would not increase state spending or reduce public education funding. Instead, it would expand educational support for Minnesota students through private donations incentivized by federal tax credits while leaving existing state education dollars unchanged.

Democrats on the committee strategically ignored what the federal tax credit does and instead demagogued the bill, repeatedly calling it a voucher plan. 

As Wigfall noted in her testimony, this bill is significantly different than past school choice plans because most of the benefit will flow to students in public schools. But the fear of school choice taking root in Minnesota, helping parents flee failing schools and making the entire education system better, was too much to handle so Democrats opposed the bill.

The good news? Twenty-seven states so far have already opted into the federal tax-credit scholarship program, and the success of school choice in these states will be impossible to hide from Minnesota parents.