Minneapolis (AP) – Americans are constantly talking about how their country is politically divided into the middle. Melissa Hortman lived this every day as a member of Minnesota House.
Her unique perspective on politics came from her job as a top democrat of the house and his unusual challenge. She had to defend liberal priorities in a chamber, said 67-67 between Democrats and Republicans, while working on the fact that the uniform separation did not prevent the legislator from financing the state government.
She and her husband were shot as an act of political violence in the areas of the authorities in Minneapolis early Saturday. Another prominent legislator in the region, Senator John Hoffman, was shot and wounded with his wife in her house about 15 minutes away.
Hortman worked as a spokesman for the House of Representatives for six years when the Democrats elections cost their slim majority in 2024. From mid-January, she led Democrats to house sessions for almost a month to prevent the GOP from using a fleeting vacancy in a democratic place to cement control over the chamber, and forced the Republicans to share power.
She wanted to protect the state health insurance for adult immigrants who live illegally in the USA. A liberal policy that was issued on her watch as a speaker in 2023. As the only budgetary agreement that she died brokers, a GOP calculation to reduce this report was made available to the only democratic coordination in the house, so that the state government remains financed for the next two years.
“She fought violently, but never let herself have an impact on the personal bond that we developed as Caucus leader,” said GOP House spokesman Lisa Demuth in a statement. “I broke into the heart beyond their loss.”
The legislature is strongly divided into politics, but is united in mourning
The shootings shocked a state that proudly opened its politics as “Minnesota Nice”, despite higher partisan tensions in recent years.
Minnesota looks blue for outsiders. The state has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, and all nationwide officers are Democrats.
But the legislator is now almost evenly divided, and the Democrats cling to a 34-33 majority in the Senate. The Republicans are still frustrated about how the Democrats used their slim majorities in both chambers in 2023 and 2024 to roll them and enact a comprehensive liberal agenda.
In 2023 the Democrats had an ambitious wish list and passed practically everything, with Hortman being a key player. The measures included extended abortions and transit rights, paid family vacation, universal free school lunches, childcare loans and other support for families.
But on Saturday the grief for Hortman, Hoffman and their families was non -partisan.
The wounded senator is the chairman of a key committee
Hoffman, 60, is the chairman of the Senate Committee for Human Services, which monitors one of the largest parts of the state budget. He lives in Champlin in the northwestern part of the Minneapolis region and has an advisory company, and he and his wife Yvette had a daughter.
Before that, he was marketing and public work manager for a non-profit provider of labor services for people with mental illnesses and intellectual and developmental disorders and supervised a juvenile criminal investment in Iowa. He was elected to the Senate for the first time in 2012.
In 2023, Hoffman supported the budget legislation, which the state Minnesotacare Health program on immigrants who live illegally in the United States from this year. On Monday, he voted against a law to end this reporting for adults on January 1 – a GOP target that was an necessary part of the budget agreement that Hortman helped with the broker.
Last year, Hoffman sponsored a law with which courts are supposed to prevent people with disabilities in the adoption of children, and in 2023 he proposed a change in the state constitution to create a fund to pay long -term care by burdening the social security benefits of the shifted residents of the state.
Hortman had served as a democratic leader for nine years
Hortman has worked as a leader of the House Democrats since 2017 and as a speaker for six years from 2019. As part of a power sharing deal, your title spokesman Emerit.
She and her husband Mark lived in Brooklyn Park, another suburb in the northwestern part of the area of ​​Minneapolis. They had two adult children.
As a lawyer, she lost two races for the house before she won her seat in 2004. The US Senator and Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar remembered the election campaign TO this year with Hortman, as the clobe, the chosen chief attorney for Hennepin County, including Minneapolis.
Klobuchar praised Hortman’s support for free school meals, women’s rights and immaculate energy and called her “a real public servant to the core”.
The State Secretary of Minnesota, Steve Simon, who visited the legal faculty of the University of Minnesota with Hortman, said: “She was smart, versed, strategic, friendly, funny, brave and determined.”
Hortman’s skills as legislators are praised
Hortman became part of the Democrat’s legislative leader in 2007, at the time the domestic minority leader in 2017, before the Democrats recaptured a majority in 2019.
Her suggestions included state emission standards such as the products imposed in California and a ban on selling products that contain mercury.
It also suggested that the feasibility of the end of government investments in companies with fossil fuels. Demuth, the current Republican spokesman for the Republican House, said Hortman was a nationally recognized expert in energy policy.
“She was not just a manager – she was a damn good legislator, and everywhere the Minnesotans will suffer from this loss,” said Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a former chairman of the state of Minnesota Statea and a friend of Hortman’s.
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Hanna reported on Topeka, Kansas.
