We all remember how the DFL spent the first two months of the Legislative session, traveling around Minnesota "listening"  to their constituents talk about how terrible Governor Pawlenty’s budget was, without proposing any solution of their own to the State’s $6 billion deficit.  When asked the reason for this strange lack of progress at a town hall meeting, DFL Rep. Phil Sterner said he "might say it was due to obstruction by the minority party."  That caused a few stifled smirks in the room among those who thought the more likely cause was that the DFL was simply up to its old tricks, waiting for the last days of the session to announce huge tax increases and then playing political games of brinkmanship with the Governor.

So here we are, nine days from the end of the session, and the DFL has announced and passed a huge, job-killing tax increase, attempting to sustain yet another unsustainable and unconscionable increase in State spending.   It is not a surprise, of course; it was as certain as death and taxes that the DFL would try to raise taxes, in a down economy, to continue  their wasteful spending.  The surprise is that Rep. Sterner, who ran on a record and promise of fiscal responsibility, actually voted with his big-city DFL leaders, and put special-interest DFL spending ahead of the family budgets of millions of Minnesotans.