Woodchucks and logrolling: Ominous or onerous omnibus? Watch many bills become one big bill!

by Staff
Published: April 14,2009
Time posted: 1:00 am
Tags: 2009 Legislature, Omnibus bills

[This story originally appeared in the April10 issue of The PIM Weekly Report.]

During the two legislative days this week, committees held over plenty of bills for consideration for their omnibus bills. In theory, it’s not supposed to be like the old days, with controversial bills appearing in obscure conference committee negotiations. Peter Wattson laid out the nature of the beast in a 2005 treatise, "Omnibus Bills and Garbage Bills" [.pdf], which has all the legal references and great judicial slapdowns over the years. A few of the high points we borrowed:

The court rulings around overly broad bills developed with a vengeance in Minnesota before 1900; one can imagine the frontier imagery of "logrolling" — sprawling bills people have to vote for — and "woodchucks," or hidden controversial provisions.

Our favorite precedent was the "Egekvist bread case of 1932" (Egekvist Bakeries Inc. v. Benson, 186 Minn. 520, 243 N.W. 853). As Wattson describes, the Legislature passed a law entitled "An act regulating the weight of bread" which required bread to be weighed before it was sold. In 1931 legislators tried to require the bread to be wrapped in the bakery before sale; they did it by amending the 1927 law. The court said that ordering the wrapping of bread was unconstitutional, since it was "not germane to the general subject expressed in the title of the act sought to be amended."

The state Supreme Court has warned the Legislature three times about attaching unrelated items to omnibus bills. In 1986, Mattson v. Kiedrowski unfolded when state treasurer Robert Mattson objected to having his duties transferred to the commissioner of finance via the 1985 omnibus state departments appropriation bill (which was 273 pages long). The court struck it down as unconstitutional, because a constitutional amendment should have been put before the voters. In his concurrence, Justice Lawrence Yetka memorably warned the legislators:

The worm that was merely vexatious in the 19th century has become a monster eating the constitution in the 20th. [...] While we recognize that modern times require modern methods of legislating, it was never intended by our founding fathers that the legislature be able to combine into one act a number of totally unrelated subjects. Thus, we should publicly warn the legislature that if it does hereafter enact legislation similar to Chapter 13, which clearly violates Minn. Const. ar. IV,

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