The Democrats won a special election of the Chamber of Representatives of Minnesota on Tuesday night, The Associated Press was screened, restoring a draw in the Chamber and ending an power fight of months in the state legislature.
The victory in the district of the Reliable State 40b Chamber, in the suburbs of the northern St. Paul, means that the control of the camera will be tied, with Democrats and Republicans each with 67 seats, and that it is likely that a shared power agreement reached between the two parties in February will be probable.
According to the projection of the AP, Democrat David Gottfried defeated Republican Paul Wikstrom in the special elections.
The special election was scheduled after a state court ruled that the Democrat who had won the race in the district in November, Curtis Johnson, had not met the residence requirements and could not feel sitting. (Johnson defeated Wikstrom in November). Johnson’s departure had given Republicans a temporary majority of a seat in the State Chamber.
Gottfried’s victory prevents Republicans from counteracting democratic priorities in a stronger way in the State Government, with the Democratic Party that currently celebrates the Government and a close majority of a seat in the state Senate.
The special election on Tuesday is the last chapter in an unusual drama in the legislative policy of Minnesota that has included a democratic strike that became a boycott of a week of the legislative session, as well as the judicial ruling that kept the empty seat for months.
Republicans came up with a plan to take control of the camera after their temporary majority of a seat obtained after the court ruling against Johnson. But the state democrats of the House of Representatives organized a strike in January to deny the Republicans the necessary quorum to advance with that plan. The legislators of the party refused to appear for the first day of the legislative session on January 14. (Later, the Supreme Court of the State blocked the attempt of the Republicans to convene their own session).
The state democrats of the House of Representatives boycotted the camera for almost three weeks.
In February, the Democrats and Republicans settled in a new agreement to share the power that presumed that the Democrats would win the special elections of March 11 and result in a 67-67 draw in the Chamber.
Under that agreement, the Republican state representative Lisa Demuth will be the speaker over the next two years. The parties agreed to co -deputy the committees of the House of Representatives, and each committee requires an equal number of Democrats and Republicans.
Another part of the agreement was that the Republicans of the State Representatives Chamber said they would not take measures to eliminate the state representative Democrat Brad Tabke, whose limited victory of 14 votes in November was questioned when the electoral officials discovered that they accidentally threw 21 absent votes without counting them.