The Minnesota Legislature is underway and we can only imagine to what end the lodge will go this year to break the bank. They don’t have an almost $18 billion surplus to squander, but that’s not the same as believing they will settle for thrift and responsibility.

Already heavily shadowing their campus is the $729 million State Office Building project, which came into being last session without a single vote in the House or Senate. It is not needed and represents the second-worst example of wasteful spending right behind the devoured surplus. They will get better chairs and nicer furniture and perhaps a gilded outdoor balcony, where they can frolic on nice days and sail paper airplanes made of your money onto the destitute crowding their magnificent front doors with the big brass knockers.

Could we please get an accounting of how many state workers still work from home? We need that right now and if the answer is more than two, you don’t need a new building.

A great reckoning is forthcoming. You can’t blow $18 billion, screw up even the paltry rebate program, not lower taxes while all the while building yourself a new glass house, without dire consequences. This is not sustainable.

To be charitable, which pains me, we have concluded only the first week of the session and so far, only millions have been thrown around, not yet billions. Some of the kids throw their wishes at the wall, hoping something might stick. Rep. Leigh Finke, a DFLer from St. Paul who occasionally skateboards around the Capitol, has proposed spending a million of your dollars to help LGBGTQ people who are in the process of moving to Minnesota. Finke successfully championed legislation last year to make Minnesota a safe haven for children wanting to change their gender.

According to Alpha News, Rep. Emma Greenman, a Democrat from Minneapolis, co-authored the bill asking for $1 million, HF 3386, and Erin Maye Quade, a Democrat from Apple Valley, has it covered in the Senate.

The money would be distributed to various nonprofits to help those moving here or already here, maybe providing them with bike path maps. We have no idea.

By this ridiculous reasoning, we can probably expect DFL legislators to seek millions for relocating bongo players, arc welders and ranch hands.

A reckoning is forthcoming.

I used to think there might be an awakening that could forestall a reckoning, but we have jumped straight to reckoning. Minnesotans are not awake and show no signs of stirring. If you can’t see what’s happening to the public purse, then apparently you wish to be awakened when it’s over, when you’ll be lucky to catch one of those paper airplanes sailed off their new deck.

A governor who could read more of the room than a few select urban ZIP codes would be helpful. Tim Walz could have stopped that unneeded office building but with one fist pounded on the table. He shirked that duty.

And Walz could occasionally wander up to the likes of Finke and the other radical wastrels and say, “Leigh, let’s cool it. Your idea makes no sense and could lead to other absurd requests.”

The DFLers could be doing something useful, like coming up with clarity regarding what school resource officers can and cannot do to control kids who break into slug fests. But the deliberations are slow, being no help to the schools, because many DFLers are predisposed to look darkly at police officers.

What they might approve is a magical intervention that better not even wrinkle the shirt of the kid who just punched his teacher.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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