Fiscal Conservatives and constitutionalists wake up -- the Judges are spending your money. If you still maintain that old fashioned idea that only the Legislature can appropriate money take a look at what your Minnesota judges are doing.

In 2005, a budget deadlock in the Minnesota state Legislature led to a shut down of the state government. The budget negotiations in the Legislature were not resolved on June 30, 2005 which was the date that the previous fiscal year’s budget expired. The high stakes game of political poker, ended with the Republicans who controlled the Minnesota House and the Democrats who controlled the Minnesota Senate blaming each other for the failure to pass some type of stopgap spending bill.

On July 1, all checks stopped. Thousands of government workers were told not to come to work. The Governor, who was a Republican and the Attorney General, who was a Democrat, went into district court to ask for a court order, compelling the state to pay for “core” government services. The court appointed a special master to determine what were core government services and to recommend the amount of money necessary. The court adopted the special master’s recommendations and issued orders for the Commissioner of Finance to disburse the funds. Under this special master structure, the Commissioner disbursed state funds totaling more than $569,000,000. (State of Minnesota ex. rel. Speaker of the House of Representatives v. Hanson)

Thirty members of the Legislature, Republicans and Democrats, thinking that the court had gone beyond its constitutionally limited powers, filed a lawsuit. The District Court denied the legislators' requested relief. The legislators appealed. In May 2007, the Minnesota Court of Appeals held that the case should be dismissed because the controversy that was resolved by the Legislature in the exercise of its constitutional powers (by finally adopting a budget) was not justiciable!

“We start from the fundamental principle that we cannot exercise powers that belong to the legislative branch.  The Minnesota Constitution provides the legislature with the power to make appropriations.  And, ‘[w]ithin the constitutional limits of their jurisdiction,’ members of a coequal branch ‘have an independence of official action no less complete and no less important than that of the judiciary.’  Before the legislators brought this action, the legislature, acting as a whole, passed the appropriations for the 2005-2007 fiscal biennium.  This enactment expressly stated that the appropriations were retroactive to July 1, 2005, the inception of the biennium, and that they superseded and replaced the funding authorized by the district court . . . Not only is the question nonjusticiable from the courts’ standpoint, but, because of the structure and function of legislative power, it is the legislature and not the judiciary that has the institutional competency to devise a prospective plan for resolving future political impasses.  The legislature could prevent another judicially mandated disbursement of public funds without an authorized appropriation by, for example, creating an emergency fund to keep the government functioning during a budgetary impasse or enacting a statute setting forth the procedures to be followed during a budgetary impasse. ”(State of Minnesota ex. rel. Speaker of the House of Representatives v. Hanson)

Note that the Court of Appeals starts by saying that only the legislature can make appropriations and then ends by saying that if the legislature wants to prevent another judicially mandated disbursement they must create some other funding mechanism such as an emergency fund. (Apparently, the separation of powers contained in the Minnesota Constitution is not enough.)

Wow!