Consolidating power under a dysfunctional city council and dismantling our state’s constitutional checks and balances is a blueprint for centralized chaos.
If the current Presidential administration has taught us anything, it’s that structural checks and balances are rarely appreciated until they are gone. We shouldn’t need a reminder, we’ve been living with consequences. In the world of political activism, institutional speed bumps are often viewed as annoying obstructions to progress. But to those of us who have had to manage budgets and protect public assets, those speed bumps are the only things preventing the car from driving off the cliff.
Today, we are looking at the “Democratic Representation” section of the newly published Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) political platform. The demand has two very distinct, radical components:
“Dissolve the Minneapolis Park Board, Board of Estimate and Taxation, and Charter Commission, and transfer that power to the City Council. Replace the state senate and house with a single, proportionally elected unicameral body.”
On paper, this is framed as an attempt to streamline democracy and make it more responsive. But when you look at it through a realistic lens, it reveals a deeply troubling desire to centralize control, eliminate independent oversight, and upend the structural stability of both our city and our state. Let’s look past the high-minded rhetoric and unpack the real-world consequences of these proposals.
The Local Reality: Centralizing Power in a Functional Vacuum
Let’s start with the local component. The DSA wants to eliminate three distinct, independent bodies within the Minneapolis city government: the Park Board, the Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET), and the Charter Commission. They want to hand all of that specialized, independent authority over to a single political body: the Minneapolis City Council.
To understand why this is a textbook example of a political power grab, you have to understand why these separate bodies exist in the first place.
Take the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. Created in 1883, it was intentionally designed as an independent, independently elected body to keep the city’s park system insulated from standard ward politics and backroom City Hall wheeling and dealing. It is precisely because of this structural independence that Minneapolis has consistently been rated as having one of the absolute best urban park systems in the United States.
The Board of Estimate and Taxation serves an equally critical, unglamorous role: it manages maximum tax levies and protects the city’s long-term bond ratings from reckless political overspending. The Charter Commission acts as a neutral citizen gatekeeper for structural changes to our local constitution.
The DSA wants to strip these safeguards away and hand total, unilateral control over your parks, your tax levies, and your city charter to the City Council.
And what does that City Council look like right now?
We don’t have to look far for an answer. Local press reports have revealed that the Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey have just entered into a multi-year, taxpayer-funded contract worth nearly $1.4 million running through 2028 for professional executive coaching, leadership development, and workplace mediation.
Let that sink in for a moment. Our city’s elected leaders are currently undergoing what amounts to institutional group counseling because they are so deeply dysfunctional, divided, and paralyzed by infighting that they cannot interact civilly. The mediation contract explicitly had to establish basic playground behavioral norms for these adults—such as a formal agreement to engage in “no personal attacks, whether that’s in public or in private,” and to “pick up the phone before you pick up your mic.”
The council has spent years clashing over public safety, cabinet nominations, and eviction extensions, grinding the gears of city government to a halt. To suggest that we should reward this jaw-dropping level of administrative dysfunction by dissolving our independent fiscal and park safeguards and handing them total, unchecked control isn’t just a power grab—it is institutional malpractice. If a governing body requires $1.4 million in professional mediation just to speak to one another without launching personal vitriol, they have absolutely no business absorbing the independent checks and balances that protect our city’s fiscal health and public lands.
The State Level: The Dangerous Allure of a Unicameral System
Now, let’s look at the state-level demand: abolishing the Minnesota House and Senate and replacing them with a single, proportionally elected unicameral body.
The authors of the platform are correct about one thing implicitly: a unicameral state legislature is technically possible. But there is a reason why only one state out of fifty operates with a single chamber. Nebraska transitioned to a unicameral system back in 1934 under the leadership of George Norris.
However, the DSA’s proposal has a massive, highly partisan twist that makes it completely different from the Nebraska model. Nebraska’s unicameral body is strictly nonpartisan; candidates do not run with party labels, and the system was built to foster rural consensus and efficiency.
The DSA, by contrast, demands a proportionally elected unicameral body. Under a proportional representation system, voters don’t vote for an individual human being representing their local community; they vote for a political party list. Seats are then handed out based on the statewide percentage of the vote that each party receives.
This creates several severe structural hazards:
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The Loss of the “Cooling Saucer”: The entire reason our founders—and the framers of the Minnesota Constitution—built a bicameral system (a House and a Senate) was to create a deliberate speed bump. As the old political adage goes, the House represents the immediate heat of public passion, while the Senate acts as the saucer that cools the hot tea. A unicameral system allows a razor-thin, emotional majority to ram through sweeping, irreversible statutory changes overnight without a second chamber to force reflection, debate, and compromise.
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The Erasure of Regional Greater Minnesota: Because seats would be awarded based on statewide proportional voting percentages rather than geographically bound local districts, all political power would instantly shift to party bosses and dense metropolitan population centers. A candidate living in International Falls, Moorhead, or Marshall would become irrelevant. Political parties would stock their candidate lists with urban loyalists, effectively silencing the agricultural, industrial, and rural voices of Greater Minnesota overnight.
The Insurmountable Hurdles of Enacting a Unicameral System
Even if we ignored the severe democratic deficits of a proportional unicameral body, the practical and legal mechanics required to enact such a system in Minnesota make the proposal an absolute pipe dream.
To dissolve the state legislature and build a single chamber, you must pass a comprehensive amendment to the Minnesota Constitution. Under state law, this process requires two incredibly high hurdles:
[DSA Unicameral Proposal]
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[Hurdle 1: Legislative Majority]
Must pass a simple majority in BOTH the MN House AND the MN Senate.
(Requires politicians to vote to eliminate their own jobs)
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[Hurdle 2: The Electorate Wall]
Must win a majority of ALL ballots cast in a general election.
(Leaving the question blank counts as a automatic "NO" vote)
First, the amendment must pass by a majority vote in both chambers of the existing legislature just to get on the ballot. Think about the reality of that requirement. You are asking sitting Minnesota State Senators to look in the mirror and vote to permanently dissolve their own chamber, eliminate their own jobs, and erase their own political districts. It is a level of political self-sacrifice that simply does not exist in the real world.
Second, if it somehow cleared the legislature, the amendment would hit Minnesota’s brutal constitutional ratification barrier. Since 1900, the Minnesota Constitution has required that an amendment must be approved by a majority of all voters voting in that election—not just a majority of people answering that specific question.
This means that if a voter goes to the polls to vote for President or Governor, but leaves the unicameral amendment question blank, it counts automatically as a “No” vote. Historically, this strict rule has acted as an absolute graveyard for radical constitutional overhauls. The odds of convincing a broad majority of the entire state electorate to completely discard their historic form of representative government are practically zero.
Conclusion
When you peel back the layers of the Twin Cities DSA’s democratic representation platform, you find a recurring theme that connects all of their proposals: a desire to dismantle the traditional, distributed architecture of our democracy.
Whether it is erasing the independent boards that keep our parks beautiful and our city debt manageable, or trying to rewrite the state constitution to strip Greater Minnesota of its geographic voice, these demands are built on a dangerous premise. They assume that consolidating power into fewer hands makes a system more democratic.
In reality, streamlining power simply makes it easier to abuse. True democratic wisdom lies in protecting our checks and balances, respecting regional differences, and ensuring that our elected leaders can actually learn to work together civilly before we ever dream of handing them total, unchecked control over our lives and our institutions. In our next column, we will continue this realistic analysis with another core pillar of the DSA platform.
Article Reference List
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Democratic Socialists of America Platform: Twin Cities DSA. (2024). Twin Cities DSA Party Platform. Retrieved from the Minneapolis Times Archive.
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Primary Source: Minneapolis City Leadership Mediation Coverage: FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul. (2026). Minneapolis spending $1.4M for mayor, city council counseling. Official journalistic record detailing the multi-year workplace mediation contract, behavioral norms, and ongoing inter-governmental clashing through 2028. Can be accessed via FOX 9 Local Politics News.
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Minneapolis Government Structure and Charters: City of Minneapolis. (2026). Charter Commission, Board of Estimate and Taxation, and Park Board Independent Authority Summaries. Operational tracking of municipal checks and balances can be verified through the City of Minneapolis Governance Portal.
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State Constitutional Amendment Frameworks and Legal Statutes: Minnesota House Research Department. (2019/2026). State Constitutional Amendments: History and Legal Principles Brief. Nonpartisan legislative summary outlining the dual-chamber passage requirements and the strict “all ballots cast” voter ratification threshold can be read via the Minnesota House of Representatives Research Division.
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Minnesota Electoral Data and Ratification History: Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. (2024/2026). Constitutional Amendments Data and Article IX Historical Interpretations. Historical analysis of how blank votes function as an automatic “no” vote under the 1898 constitutional shift can be cross-referenced via the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
Related: The Socialist Agenda: What the Twin Cities DSA Demands for the State’s Future
A good piece in “Readers Write” in the Strib today.
https://replica.startribune.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=0531de83-5564-4d40-94e0-3853f336230d&share=true
As I read the article “Klobuchar makes business-friendly bid” (July 20), which discussed the “Democrats mov[ing] left,” I was left confused over how “left” is defined.
If you look at the textbook definition of a democratic socialist, you see their goal is to replace capitalism with socialism.
By contrast, a social democrat — which is what we see in Sweden — embraces capitalism but understands it has limits (for example, in the need for providing national health care).
The DFL needs to clearly define itself as social democrats. The current confusion over who “the left” is allows the Republicans to define DFL candidates using the radical language of democratic socialism.
A vast majority of the state — and the nation — does not support the democratic socialist goal of replacing capitalism with socialism. Nor do they support the goals of banning the police, prisons, the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, etc. (See the Democratic Socialists of America website for details.)
The DFL must embrace the “Swedish model” of governing. It must embrace capitalism. It must support the police and prisons. It must promise it will root out fraud and corruption.
But it also must stand for democracy, fighting climate change, supporting legal immigration and unions, reasonable taxation and making the state friendly to both small and big business.
The goal of the democratic socialists is to take over the Democratic Party to advance their goals. The DFL would be better off making a clean break with them, and deny Republicans the opportunity to paint them as socialists who are weak on crime.
JIM PIGA, Mendota Heights
David, your thoughts on the perils of streamlining the application of legislative power are on point. To get a small taste of what would change with a unicameral legislature (never mind the “proportional” part), one need only look at the downside of the otherwise positive “DFL Trifecta Session” of 2023-24. Some background: Like many of the DSA folks today, I, too, used to be young, idealistic, and impressionable. And I stayed that way until I was older than many local DSA’ers are today. Not proud of that, but it is what it is… I used to harangue my longtime State Senator, Jane Ranum, advocating that the DFL, when it had majorities in both houses, should sit down (either just leadership or en masse), between the election and the opening of Session, decide everything, and then go through a clean and straightforward process of passing stuff in both chambers, not waste time in one chamber passing stuff that could not pass the other, and so on. Jane, God bless her, would respond by saying simply “Jim, that’s not how it works.” If I was persistent enough, I could get her maybe to raise her voice.
Well, in the 2023-24 Trifecta session, that WAS how it worked! Somehow our DFL legislators came around to the way of thinking advocated by “90s Jim”. Some of the results were great! Just as I had thought! They got a huge amount of legislating done, and there was very little wasted time. The problem, though, is that the *quality* of many of the Bills was degraded, because to be that efficient, they had to subvert the committee process. Sure, there were still committee hearings – lots of them! But where those hearings had once served to weed out problematic Bills, improve flawed ones, drive compromises, etc., in the 2023-24 session they were mostly formalities. Citizens and lobbyists showed up, testified, and pointed out flaws in Bills, but since the Bills had already been hammered out by Leadership, and because the rank-and-file members had all committed personally, to their colleagues, that they would vote for the agreed-upon Bills, *as written*, very little was fixed or changed – even when flaws were pretty obvious. It was argued, of course, that the flaws could be fixed and the poor structures could be improved in the next session, but… well… the Trifecta didn’t *get* a next session.
I also used to harangue my Legislators to do, and insist their colleagues also do, a better job of looking for flaws in Bills – “work-arounds”, “loopholes”, and the dreaded “unintended consequences” (which take a lot of time, energy, and expertise to find). So, one way of looking at this is that the Trifecta Session did the first half of what “90s Jim” demanded – and did it at the cost of not even doing as good a job as normal on the *other* half…! I think the jury is still out on whether, on balance, this was a net “good” or a net “bad”. I, personally, was disappointed in the “big picture” result.
But that was just one session, and something never tried before. A unicameral Legislature would eventually become what that session became… on steroids!
This is a broad brush critique intended to show that all the different DSA proposals regarding government reform are bad without distinction. In my view, it is more complicated than that. For example, the city charter commission is an undemocratic, unelected body which has blocked and stalled amendment initiatives for which adequate petitioning had been filed. They are democratically unaccountable and not very obviously expert at anything. I agree that it should be abolished. (Electing it might make it worse.) On the other hand, the park board is elected and has a clearly defined task which is not particularly politically fraught and it takes an administration overload off the city council. I think it should be kept. BET is elected but most people (including me) are a little unsure what they do or who they are. Here is what my local AI says about it:
“The Board of Estimate and Taxation in Minneapolis sets the maximum property tax levy for the city and the Park Board, and it also authorizes the issuance of public debt, such as general obligation bonds. Additionally, it monitors changes to the city’s property tax base and advises on city borrowing.””
This seems like mostly staff work requiring professional expertise. The board was apparently put in place to put caps on various forms of taxation and borrowing but those capping functions might, it seems to me, be best carried out more conspicuously by the city council.
As for a unicameral legislature, I do agree that it is likely not to happen because of the many procedural hurdles. However the article paints an unrealistically rosey picture of the reason that bicameral legislatures were put in place and remain there in many jurisdictions and countries: The argument is that the “upper” chamber restrains the (implicitly unreasonable) “passions” of the “lower” chamber. In fact, historically the upper chamber has been in place to protect the privileges and, explicitly the property, of the upper classes and upper chambers continue to fulfill that role quite effectively in many places. Having two chambers definitely slows things down as evident particularly at the federal level recently in the US. In particular, our bicameral national legislature has been unable stop the national collapse to dictatorial facism despite clear polling evidence that the public doesn’t want it. So a unicameral legislature may be out of reach but it might be a good idea. (In some countries, like the UK, the problem has been handled by keeping the upper chamber (called, appropriately, the House of Lords) but reducing it to impotence. )
Woods Halley
I think someone needs to be in charge of charter changes and redistricting. It used to be the city council, but that was ugly. Then it became the charter commission, and that’s also now ugly. Abolishing the charter commission goes too far, but it needs some type of change.
Your House of Lords example is interesting. States used to appoint their senators (though a majority held direct elections by the late 1800s). Then the 17th amendment passed and the senate became all elected nationwide.
I think two houses is fine. The bicameral structure used around the world, from the US to Mexico to Brazil to India to Japan, so looking to the UK is one data point, but not entirely relevant given their monarchical history.
Is Civics class still taught in schools? I remember learning in high school about the different models of government (not just different types of democracy) and why the US chose a republic. These DSA people don’t seem to understand any of it or are just plain indoctrinated.
The DSA is saying the way to increase democratic control is to eliminate elected bodies like the Park Board and BET? Socialists have always believed in centralized power, which is at odds with them also saying they want grassroots democracy.
I will say the charter commission needs reform. It’s theoretically insulated from politics because it’s appointed by a judge (but the judges take recommendations from the mayor and other political players). As we’ve seen over the years, it’s a highly political body (denying ballot initiatives, gerrymandering city council wards and park districts) and no one knows who they are.
I wouldn’t trust this Minneapolis city council to run a non-profit lemonade stand.
AGREED!