Minnesota Supreme court ruled that a quorum was a majority of the districts not a majority of the members
The clear language of the constitution as well as any Minnesota precedent on the subject constituted that a quorum was a majority of members and that members were defined as meeting the qualifications and being sworn in. The Democrats pushed the theory that three other states have their quorums defined by total number of possible members, and apparently that was enough for the six Democratic Judges to rule for the Democrats. The seventh recused themself. Apparently the other 26 states and the Federal Government who have the actual same definition are all wrong in suggesting that you only need a majority of the actual members. Either way, it was clear from oral arguments that they were going to rule in favor of Democrats all along.
But this leads to another problem. Previously the Minnesota high court suggested that because Congress had not agreed to waive the wait period for a special election, that Walz had to wait till X number of days after the start of the congressional session to schedule a special election. He promptly scheduled it for March 5th, which was the earliest available based on the date that the congressional session was scheduled to start. Only problem is that now the same court has declared that no congressional session was ever actually started, due to a lack of quorum, leading to another potential lawsuit. Now, we will see the mental gymnastics of how the court reconciles their ruling that Republicans have been illegally in session (due to a lack of quorum) while allowing the special election to be scheduled as if there is a current congressional session taking place. Perhaps there is some idea that the session started when Republicans were sworn in on that first day, but how is that reconciled with the idea that you can just willy nilly swear yourself in at any time as the Democrats did. By that logic, didn't the session start when Democrats swore themselves in with a retired Democratic Judge?
It was the Democratic Secretary of State who declared there was no quorum on the first day for Republicans to call congress to session. The court upheld that logic. It will be interesting to see how they get themselves out of this mess.
Comments