Melissa Hortman's legacy is a ‘Minnesota Miracle'

Washington Post

14-06-2025

Melissa Hortman, the former Minnesota House speaker felled by an assassin's bullet at her home on Saturday, really did understand what democracy looks like.
It is emphatically not about the vile arrogance of extremists so certain of their superiority that they bestow on themselves the right to snuff out the lives of their political foes.
Hortman lived her highly constructive life in politics in the knowledge that achieving change democratically requires painstaking work: planning, coalition-building, persuasion, conciliation, vote-counting. She achieved far more using these humble, but ultimately exhilarating, tools of self-government than any violent fanatic ever will.
Even before I knew the identities of the victims of Minnesota's seemingly politically motivated shootings, I shared with many a sense of mourning and horror over yet another episode of brutality in a moment already marked by too much of it. Then, I learned that Hortman and her husband, Mark, had been shot dead while another Democrat, state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were severely wounded.
With Hortman's death, the story suddenly became more personal. Almost exactly two years ago, I had an enlightening interview with her for a column I was writing about what progressives around the country were calling the 'Minnesota Miracle.' It was an outpouring of legislation made possible by the Democrats' narrow control of both houses of the state legislature and the governorship under Tim Walz.
I can't do full justice here to all that Hortman and her colleagues achieved, but a lengthy partial list can give you a sense of just how much they got done. The miracle included legislation for paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, driver's licenses for undocumented residents, abortion rights and voting rights.
Also on the list were background checks for private gun transfers, red flag laws, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, investment in affordable housing, big steps toward a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, new reading curriculums based on phonics, a $2.58 billion capital construction package, laws strengthening workers' rights, unemployment insurance for hourly workers, a refundable child credit for lower-income Minnesotans; and free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota K-12 students.
As someone whose politics lean in a progressive direction, I cheered these achievements. But what should be stressed about Hortman herself is how deeply she realized that nothing like any of this could have been accomplished without careful attention to the broad range of views among her colleagues.
She thus worked to bring together Democratic legislators from the metro Twin Cities, many on the left, and those closer to the center from rural and small-town areas. Preparing for efforts to enact progressive tax reform, Hortman told me, she appointed a staunch progressive from Minneapolis to chair one of the House's tax committees and a moderate from the increasingly conservative Iron Range to chair the other. 'If we couldn't get both of them on board, then it wouldn't be something our caucus could do.' That's a practical politician speaking.
Hortman also knew that to be sustainable, the program needed to be fiscally responsible. She noted to me that a budget surplus of $17.5 billion had set expectations 'very high' for what Democrats could achieve. But fully $10 billion of that was 'one-time money,' meaning that programs had to be funded and revenue raised for the long term.
And in an era when we have become numb to the claims of politicians — one in particular comes to mind — that they alone can repair what ails the country, Hortman was insistent on the centrality of working with others. In our conversation, Hortman spoke of how important it had been for her to work closely with Senate leaders to iron out difference between the two chambers' bills in advance.
These killings should make us think hard about the contrast between what an effective, serious and — I stress, again — democratic-with-a-small-d politics entails, and the profound dangers of movements and individuals so certain of their own righteousness and so convinced of the evil of their political adversaries that they are prepared to overturn all the rules, norms and obligations that undergird political decency. It speaks to their state's robust civic health that the entire Minnesota congressional delegation quickly issued a joint, bipartisan statement decrying the shootings.
Many years ago, Lawrence O'Brien, who was a close aide to President John F. Kennedy and later became commissioner of the NBA, wrote a memoir with a wonderful title: 'No Final Victories.' He paid tribute to the fact that in a democracy, there are no final victories, which also means that there are no final defeats.
Hortman used the opening she had to accomplish a lot because she knew the opportunity to do so might not come around again for a while — and she fully accepted the right of her opponents to win the next time. Whatever her killer's political or personal motivations turn out to be, his actions show that he understood none of these things. We can never allow this approach to politics to prevail.