It took a month for the Legislature to pass standard legislation extending unemployment benefits to laid off steelworkers when it should have taken a week.

But Republicans and Democrats saw the need to engage in partisanship to apparently score political points and gain talking points for the upcoming election.

Both sides deserves some of the blame. We’ll let voters decide who and how much. But consider these facts in this war of words that became a mini-series.

First, take the Republicans who, according to their own account, did not know Democrats would object to them attaching an unemployment tax cut for employers to the extension of unemployment benefits to workers.

OK. Fair enough. If the GOP was sincere in this respect, then DFL calls on the floor that the GOP was withholding benefits to laid off workers to serve their corporate welfare interests was out of line. The DFL spoke before they listened.

But when people of reason and this newspaper were calling for both houses to pass the bills separately, as both sides had supported both proposals in the past, the calls went unheeded.

Republicans in the House went ahead and passed a bill with both provisions, knowing that the DFL Senate was not going to accept that. We don’t know if the House GOP wasn’t paying attention to Senate DFL Majority Leader Tom Bakk when he said his majority was not going to accept or vote on the GOP combination bill, but they should have been.

So the GOP move to do it anyway caused needless delays. To what end, we don’t know. Another day of partisan headlines? There was no real reason to tie the bills together, though Republicans said they were unsure the tax relief bill would pass. That was an unsubstantiated assumption, and they would have plenty of political material having Gov. Mark Dayton on record supporting the unemployment tax cuts to employers in the past.

But, to their credit, House minority DFLers voted for the GOP combo bill. Kudos to them.

The Senate then passed both bills separately with a bipartisan vote in their body. The House, somewhat reluctantly, eventually went along. We can’t give any credence to House Speaker Kurt Daudt when he said his House broke the gridlock. Not quite.

Bakk did his share of chest pounding on this, calling out the GOP in public about what he would or wouldn’t do. We feel a little discretion and common courtesy on the part of both parties would take away the need for brinksmanship.

It would also get things done. That’s what voters want.

 

— Mankato Free Press, March 25