First they take several months before taking the state budget deficit seriously. Since January they have stalled, played around, ignored, put off and generally just procrastinated about this serious issue. Ultimately their goal was to attempt to force Gov. Pawlenty into raising taxes, thus breaking his pledge to voters to not do so.
Secondly, they decide they're going to go into hyper-speed mode, forcing through spending bill after spending bill, in a continued attempt to get the Gov. to raise taxes. At the very least they thought they could force a special session where they believed they could extract some sort of a tax increase.
Well, this morning we read that Pawlenty won't call a special session but will instead balance the budget by line item veto and unallotments. This has really ticked off the DFL legislative leaders.
Margaret Anderson Kelliher, the Speaker of the House, calls Pawlenty "Governor Go-it-alone". The DFL party calls his "King Tim". I'm sure behind the scenes they have many other names for him.
One just has to shake their head at how childish these people are when they don't get their way. It has been their goal in life to get Pawlenty to raise taxes. They so badly want to put out "told ya so" commercials and mailings and every time they think he's going to have to give in he turns the tables on them.
Pawlenty simply owns these guys.
