The View from Up North: Nobody Gets Both Keys

Tuesday decided who gets to ask Minnesota voters for the keys this fall. After watching both parties with unified power, I’m starting to think a little inconvenience may be the point.

I spent part of Tuesday afternoon at the county fair trying to get twenty dollars out of a cash box.

This was harder than you might think.

The fair board keeps one of those heavy metal boxes with two locks on it, and the arrangement is that the treasurer gets one key and the secretary gets the other. That sounds very responsible right up until you need twenty dollars for change and the secretary is somewhere across the fairgrounds dealing with a problem involving the livestock barn and, from what I gathered, a goat that had developed strong opinions about personal freedom.

“I only need twenty,” I told the treasurer.

“I know.”

“You have a key.”

“I do.”

“And the money is right there.”

“Also true.”

There are moments when a person begins to understand why revolutions happen.

The treasurer was unmoved. He said the two-key rule had been around for years, ever since a former board member found an unbelievable closeout price on commemorative coffee mugs and bought several hundred without asking anybody.

Nobody stole anything. The mugs were perfectly good mugs. Apparently it was, in fact, an unbelievable price.

The problem was that nobody had ever expressed a desire to commemorate the county fair with 480 identical coffee mugs.

They are still giving them away.

So I stood there waiting for the second key and checked the primary results on my phone.

Minnesota voters had settled the big November matchups: Amy Klobuchar and Lisa Demuth for governor, Peggy Flanagan and Michele Tafoya for U.S. Senate. And it occurred to me that Tuesday mostly decided who gets to ask for the keys.

November decides how many anybody gets.

That has been on my mind lately because we’ve had a couple pretty good demonstrations of what happens when one political party gets the whole ring.

Minnesota Democrats had the governor’s office, House and Senate in 2023 and 2024. They had waited a long time for that opportunity, and once they got it, they went to work. Paid family and medical leave became law. So did the requirement for carbon-free electricity by 2040. There was a long list beyond that. Some of it struck me as worthwhile. Some of it seemed awfully ambitious. Some of it made me wonder whether anybody in St. Paul had remembered that enthusiasm and wisdom are not quite the same thing.

But here’s what interests me now: they didn’t much need Republican votes.

That’s the great selling point of unified government. You win the election, you have the votes, and you can finally get things done.

It’s also the part I’m becoming a little suspicious of.

Minnesota voters then managed to produce a 67–67 House. And if you remember how that started, you might reasonably say this is not an advertisement for anything. There was a fight over control of the chamber, Democrats stayed away, courts got involved, and for a while it looked like our elected officials had discovered a way to make sitting in a chair controversial.

Eventually, though, the two sides had to share power. Most House committees got co-chairs. Bills needed support from people wearing different jerseys. And when budget time came, Republicans and Democrats negotiated a compromise that neither side particularly loved and ultimately produced a roughly $66 billion two-year state budget without shutting down state government.

That’s not nothing.

It was late. It was messy. People got mad. Everybody had to give up something.

In other words, it looked a little like governing.

Now Washington is trying the other experiment. Republicans control the White House and Congress, and last year they used that power to pass one enormous reconciliation package covering taxes, spending and a good share of their domestic agenda. In the Senate it took a 50–50 vote and the vice president to break the tie. In the House it passed 218–214, with every voting Democrat opposed.

You can like that bill. You can hate it. That’s not really my point.

My point is that when you’re making decisions that large, maybe having to convince one fellow who did not arrive at the meeting already wearing your team jacket isn’t the worst burden democracy ever invented.

I’ve heard all the complaints about divided government, and most of them are true. It can be slow. Politicians can obstruct things merely because the other party wants them. Necessary work can get trapped in bargaining over unrelated nonsense. Sometimes you really do need twenty dollars and the woman with the other key is apparently three barns away negotiating with a goat.

I don’t want government tied to a chair.

But after watching both parties when they don’t particularly need the other one, I am developing an appreciation for making somebody ask.

Not because Republicans are always right when Democrats have the votes, or Democrats are always right when Republicans do. Good ideas do not become bad merely because one party has enough members to pass them.

It’s because people get enthusiastic.

Fair-board members get enthusiastic about discounted coffee mugs. Legislators get enthusiastic about programs. Presidents get enthusiastic about mandates. Political parties get enthusiastic about finally having their turn.

And the rule wasn’t invented for the day everybody agrees.

It was invented for the day somebody gets an idea.

The secretary eventually came back from the livestock barn. She put her key into one lock, the treasurer put his into the other, and I got my twenty dollars.

Before she left, she handed me one of the old county-fair mugs.

“Take two,” she said.

Then the treasurer shut the cash box.

Click.

Click.