“I hear guys talking about how this is a battle, so even if we’re at some personal risk, we have to be in the chamber doing the fighting,” she said. “I hear the women say, no, we’re the generals. We can’t go charging in without a plan because if we get sick we’re no good to anyone.”
Hortman, the Democratic leader in the Minnesota House, was shot and killed at her home in the early hours of Saturday morning, along with her husband Mark. She was 55. They were killed shortly after the alleged gunman had attacked state Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife Yvette, shooting them each multiple times.
Gov. Tim Walz characterized the killing of the Hortmans as a “politically motivated assassination.”
“We are shaken to our core by the horrifying news of the apparent assassination of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted killings of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife,” Tim Storey, the CEO of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said in a statement. “We cannot and will not accept a nation where elected officials are targets of violent acts.”
Hortman served as speaker of the Minnesota House from 2019 until Democrats lost their majority in last year’s elections. Along with other Democrats, she boycotted early sessions this term, hoping to deprive Republicans of power while they held a temporary majority. The chamber has since tied, but Republican Lisa Demuth is serving as speaker for the rest of the term.
In a statement, Demuth described herself as “heartbroken” by this “unimaginable tragedy.
“She has had a profound impact on this institution and on my own leadership,” Demuth said.
Speaking with Melissa Hortman
I had the chance to interview Hortman a couple of times, most extensively in 2020 for an article about what it was like leading a chamber during the height of the pandemic.
She was clearly proud of the House’s rapid response to its changed circumstances. “We left on March 16 and on March 26, we had our first really remote session, passing $330 million worth of assistance,” she told me. “We changed the rules and then figured it out.”
At first, COVID was all consuming but soon enough she had to do the kind of juggling and delegating common to all leaders. She helped develop a system of triage early on in terms of helping constituents respond to their own challenges, creating in effect a customer service department with specialists accustomed to working with the executive branch, rather than having each legislator have to deal with every one-off question about nursing homes and the like.
“Everything that was not COVID was on pause for about six weeks,” she said. “We started slowly putting non-COVID items on our possible list.” Legislators started dealing with issues such as the raising the minimum age to purchase tobacco or addressing the backlog of untested rape kits.
“Yesterday, we passed nine bills and eight of them are going to be signed into law,” Hortman said. “Everybody has got this extra spirit of just finding a way of getting it done and focusing on the pragmatic.”
Vivid Descriptions
She described Walz in ways that will sound familiar to people who witnessed his run last year as the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
“He’s our football coach governor,” she said. “He makes people feel good, that we’re going to have a plan, that it’s going to be hard — we’re down 14 points at halftime but we’re going to make it there. He’s the guy who makes us believe in the plan.”
When we spoke, it was late in the evening toward the end of session. Hortman praised the work of staff in getting the House up and functioning again but she missed the camaraderie and conviviality of a normal late session, with only about 20 widely spaced legislators showing up in person. She lamented that masks hid people’s smiles and created a “feeling of not being with people even when you are with people.”
I’m coauthor of a textbook on state government. I've already put her vivid description of sessions’ end in the next edition.
“The Legislature usually here at the end of session is boisterous and funny,” she said. “The House floor has a slight odor of Chinese food and people who have been awake too long and stale coffee. All of that is missing.”
