Minnesota’s Single Subject and Title Clause has the potential to protect the integrity and transparency of the Minnesota Legislature. But will the courts allow it to be undermined?
When Minnesota State Auditor, Rebecca Otto, first considered suing Wright, Becker, and Ramsey counties back in 2016, she wanted to fight a provision that allowed counties to use private auditors instead of her office. Her case also drew the attention of social justice organizations across the state, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota (ACLU-MN).
The ACLU-MN along with seventeen other organizations who signed on to an amicus curiae brief filed today, were not drawn to the case out of concern for the merits of state auditing. Rather, Rebecca’s case dredged up concerns about an often overlooked but critical clause in the Minnesota State Constitution: the “Single Subject and Title Clause.”
When the Minnesota state legislature voted on and passed a provision back in 2015 allowing counties to hire private auditors, they did so by adding it on to an unrelated omnibus finance bill. Auditing was not the only disparate provision in the omnibus bill—it also included provisions related to continuing education requirements for cosmetologists and other beauty care practitioners; racing season determinations for horse racing; and new rules for the use of federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at farmers’ markets.
That is where the Single Subject and Title Clause comes into play. The Minnesota State Constitution, Article IV, Section 17, reads: "No law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be expressed in its title."
Minnesota’s provision has two clear directives: (1) laws should focus on one subject at a time and (2) the subject should be clearly stated in the title of the bill. And while it should be an otherwise simple provision to enact, it is rarely and loosely enforced. The Supreme Court has adopted a “mere filament” test to determine if a bill is compliant with the clause—vaguely asserting that subjects need only to be related by a “mere filament” to meet the single-subject requirement.
Earlier this year the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled against Otto and the ACLU arguing that that cosmetology, horse racing, SNAP benefits, and county auditing requirements are connected by a “mere filament”—and therefore not in violation of the single subject clause. This interpretation renders the Single Subject and Title Clause devoid of any substantial meaning.
The practice of adding extraneous provisions to unrelated bills is something that people in the United States may be all too familiar with. State and federal legislators have been combining several items into a single bill in order to force negotiations and swiftly pass legislation without proper debate for decades—and it is slowly but surely eroding government transparency and public participation.
There is no explicit single subject rule in the United States Constitution, which means every year Congress sneaks in unrelated “riders” to federal omnibus and appropriations bills in order to bypass voting on these provisions individually. It also adds pressure on legislators to strike deals, as voting no on any single provision in the budget omnibus bill could mean rejecting the budget as a whole, leading to potential government shutdowns and significant delays in funding.
These riders are not always attached to budget bills, either. A few years ago Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) proposed to add an anti-abortion rider to the National Flood Insurance Program Extension Act, stalling a Senate vote on an otherwise noncontroversial bill. It is a commonplace practice lawmakers use to move forward otherwise unpopular legislation that would elicit controversy from their constituents or be unlikely to pass on their own. Even when legislators seek merely to expedite or streamline processes with multi-subject bills, unrelated riders undermine the constitutional foundations of government and limit people’s ability to not only know what their legislators are voting on, but also to have a voice in that process.
States, on the other hand, have sought to prevent the deliberate undermining of our legislative arm by enacting single subject rules. In fact, 41 out of 50 states include a single subject provision in their state Constitutions, Minnesota included. Unfortunately, without enforcement, the Single Subject and Title Clause will continue to be undermined.
Public distrust is at historic lows—with only 20 percent of people reporting that they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” Now more than ever we need to protect the integrity of the legislative process and restore trust in the Constitution and the systems that uphold it. That is the intention behind the Single Subject and Title Clause. And that is what is at stake in Otto v. Wright.
The Minnesota Court of Appeals denied the appeal earlier this year, and now the case will be heard at the Minnesota Supreme Court. The ACLU of Minnesota and the 17 other organizations that signed on to the amicus curiae brief are hoping that the judicial branch finally hold the Minnesota legislature to the standards and integrity that our founders intended. Because if Rebeca Otto loses, we all do.
Photo Courtesy of MN House Public Information Services