Senate terms

All Minnesota senators will be on the election ballot in November. That is not what was intended by the drafters and adopters of the Minnesota Constitution who thought they were providing for staggered Senate terms. Nor was it the practice for the first couple of decades after statehood. That ended in the 1880s, courtesy of an Attorney General Opinion (requested by the Senate itself, of course).

I spent the first few months of retirement researching this quirk of Minnesota history. I finally got around to submitting the paper writing up my research, How the Minnesota Senate Lost Its Staggered, to SSRN. It’s been posted and is available in an ejournal, Political Institutions: Legislatures (link to my article here) that I didn’t even know existed.

All of my previous submissions to SSRN had been of articles published by “real” journals (i.e., ones that produce actual paper copies, such as State Tax Notes). The good folks at SSRN, though, hunted down and found an ejournal that actually fits the subject of my paper. The beauty of cheap Internet publishing and SSRN. The one glitch was that even though I changed my SSRN account long ago to reflect that I retired (now for almost 15 months); that status does not show up for the posting. It looks like I still work at House Research. Oh, well.

A longer version of the piece with source documents as Appendices and more detail on why I think the AG’s opinion misinterpreted the constitutional language; background on the Attorney General, W.J. Hahn; my speculation on the effects on legislative behavior and the partisan composition of the Senate; and so on is available here on the Minnesota Legal History Project website. I recommend starting with the shorter version, which itself isn’t short at 15 pages.

Now, I’m waiting for the Minnesota History Center library to reopen so I can get back to my project on the enactment of the Minnesota inheritance tax – it took four decades and multiple tries (and five court cases) for the legislature to succeed.