No override pressure this time for Republicans

• Rep. Rod Hamilton

Rep. Rod Hamilton R-Mountain Lake

Talk about it

ST. PAUL — Rod Hamilton says his decision last year to help override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a tax-raising transportation bill showed his willingness to take a tough vote.

However, the Mountain Lake Republican said, it is not a tough decision to stick with the governor this year in opposing another vetoed bill that would raise taxes.

“We don’t know what it would do,” Hamilton said of a $1 billion measure that increases income and alcohol taxes and directs the revenue to schools, hospitals and nursing homes.

Republican representatives such as Hamilton, political moderates, are the targets of Democrats who want to override Pawlenty's tax veto. They say pressure from organizations facing cuts will be so strong that some Republicans may feel forced to override the veto.

Republicans appear united as lawmakers near their Monday midnight constitutional adjournment deadline.

“It’s too late,” Rep. Morrie Lanning, R-Moorhead, said. “There will be no override.”

The tax bill, which Democrats may attempt to revive in the legislative session’s closing days, does not fix inequities in how rural health-care facilities are funded, Hamilton said. That is a concern in his southwestern Minnesota legislative district, Hamilton said.

Hamilton, a center of attention during last year’s transportation tax debate, said he is not getting pressure from people back home to raise taxes as a way to set a new state budget and erase a $4.6 billion deficit.

Republicans say that while their preference is not to leave budget-balancing to Pawlenty, Democrats who control the Legislature sent him bills that leave the budget out of balance.

“I am upset, but what choice did we give him?” Hamilton asked.

Pawlenty said Thursday that if the Legislature is unwilling to work with him to reach “reasonable budget solution,” he will balance the next two-year budget on his own by cutting spending to match revenue.

When asked about whether he had any concerns about Republicans sustaining his tax bill veto, Pawlenty said: “No.”

With just three days remaining before the Legislature’s midnight Monday deadline, Democrats say pressure will build on Republicans who have stood with the governor but may reconsider after seeing how those spending cuts could affect their local communities.

Democratic-Farmer-Laborites on Friday distributed a list of hospitals around Minnesota and the amount of state payments they could miss out on as a result of Pawlenty’s line-item veto of $381 million from the health-care budget bill.

“The governor’s own actions ... make a lot of members of the Legislature nervous, bipartisanly,” House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, said.

Wente works for Forum Communications Co., which owns the Daily Globe.

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