As Minnesota lawmakers hammer out a budget bill ahead of a Monday deadline, a Ramsey County judge is considering a challenge to last year’s spending package. A gun rights group argues that a ban on a certain type of trigger that DFLers added to the sprawling 2024 tax plan violates a prohibition on multi-subject bills.
Guns equipped with binary triggers can fire a round both on the pull of the trigger and its release. While they don’t turn a semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun, they effectively double the rate of fire.
Last year Minnesota banned binary triggers after a Burnsville man used a rifle equipped with one to kill two police officers and a paramedic. The shooter — Shannon Gooden — died by suicide. His girlfriend later admitted illegally purchasing that gun and several others for him.
A firearms rights group alleges in a lawsuit that the ban is illegal. But the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus isn’t arguing the case on Second Amendment grounds. In a Ramsey County courtroom Tuesday, plaintiff’s attorney Nicholas Nelson said the Minnesota Constitution prohibits legislation that addresses more than a single subject. The DFL-led Legislature included the binary trigger ban in a massive tax bill at the end of the 2024 session.
“If one were trying to come up with the most spectacular violation of the single-subject clause you could, you would do something like the Legislature did here,” Nelson said. “The big question in this case is whether the courts are going to take the single subject clause seriously, whether the courts are going to take the Supreme Court's warnings about this seriously.”
Not only does the 2024 budget bill run in excess of 1,400 pages, Nelson notes that the measure includes a wide variety of subjects from combative sports to construction codes, and the bill’s title alone takes up six pages.
The Minnesota Supreme Court warned lawmakers against this practice 25 years ago when it stripped a prevailing wage provision out of a similarly gargantuan tax bill after a contractors’ group sued. David Schultz, who teaches political science at Hamline University and law at the University of St. Thomas, is a critic of what he calls legislative logrolling.
Schultz points out that in 2000, former Justice Paul Anderson proposed scrapping the entire tax bill at issue, but the full court appeared reluctant to interfere with the legislative process.
“So from that perspective, it really does give the Legislature all types of incentive to say let’s keep doing this because we’re not being punished too often, and when we are punished, it’s only going to be to see the offending fragment separated from it,” Schultz said.
Assistant state Attorney General Anna Veit-Carter argued in court that the Gun Owners Caucus filed its case too late — after the revisor of statutes took all of the bill’s various elements and put them into Minnesota’s law books.
“It resolves the issue. It takes the problematic piece out of this omnibus bill and it places it in the statute that’s provided, in a single subject that provides notice to everyone,” she said.
Veit-Carter asked Judge Leonardo Castro to dismiss the lawsuit on timeliness grounds, and if he’s unwilling to do that, she urged the judge not to scrap the entire 2024 spending plan.
Castro promised to issue a ruling soon.