The DFL loathes One Big Beautiful Bill. But what do Minnesota legislative Republicans think?

As Congress raced to send the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to President Donald Trump before the Fourth of July, Erin Murphy pounced. 

“If you cut health care to give tax cuts to the wealthy you should have to bathe and care for the seniors, sick and disabled you hurt,” the Minnesota Legislature’s DFL Senate majority leader posted on X. 

In an interview this week, Murphy vowed to have the Senate hold hearings on the Trump policy bill in the coming months even though the Legislature is out of session. (This is perfectly legal, so long as convening committees do not take action on legislation.) 

“We have to be really clear about what is in the bill and share that information with Minnesotans,” she said. 

That Murphy rang the alarm on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is important. It is also predictable. 

Far less predictable is how Republican state legislators have responded. While Minnesota congressional Republicans put out bullish statements explaining their “yes” votes, House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, and Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, have not drawn attention to the bill in social media posts or press releases. 

It is not like Demuth and Johnson are on digital detox retreats. Each sent out news releases the past week on topics like Gov. Tim Walz billing the state $430,000 in legal fees in preparation for his appearance before a congressional committee. 

To be sure, opining on federal laws is not a job requirement. Especially if that means discussing in a blue state a Trump-orchestrated law that 61% of Americans oppose, according to a CNN poll. 

“It strikes me as unusual for state legislators to feel a need to weigh in on federal legislation,” said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver who focuses on state legislatures. 

Still, what Minnesota Republicans have said about the bill shows nuance and a diversity of views in the party, which hasn’t recorded a victory for a statewide office since 2006. It may also show a crack of daylight between themselves and Trump. 

The party line …

Demuth and Johnson declined interview requests, but did give written statements. 

Demuth and Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey and the GOP floor leader, provided a joint statement that concluded, “On balance, this bill appears to benefit Minnesotans.”

“While we’re still looking at the broader impacts of the bill, there are a lot of great policies included for Minnesotans including extending low and middle-income tax cuts and reducing the federal tax on tips and overtime so people can keep more of their hard-earned money, increasing the child tax credit, and implementing requirements that ensure that those on Medicaid who are single and able to work are doing so,” Demuth and Niska state. 

Related: Republicans’ win on domestic agenda makes winners of some Minnesotans, losers of others 

Johnson wrote that, “The reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill protect both our safety net and federal budget. In contrast, Minnesota Democrats turned an $18 billion surplus into a projected $6 billion deficit – while raising taxes by over $10 billion.” 

Complimenting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as fiscally sound could prove wrong over time. An early Congressional Budget Office analysis projected the law would add $3.9 trillion to the national deficit. 

Johnson also stated that “Work requirements for welfare remain broadly popular, fraud prevention is a top public concern, and no one who truly needs help will be denied the safety net they depend on.”

The GOP Senate leader is alluding to childless, able-bodied adults of working age on Medicaid, demonstrating that they are working, volunteering or in an educational program. There is evidence to support Johnson’s claim that the work requirements are popular. 

The Center for the American Experiment, a conservative think tank based in Minnetonka, polled 500 Minnesota voters in late May and asked if they supported “proposals to require nearly all working adults to be working or looking for work in order to have health insurance through Medicaid.”

Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would support such a proposal, while 40% would oppose it. 

This tracks with nationwide views. A KFF poll found that 62% of adults surveyed support work requirements for Medicaid. 

… But what do other state Republicans say?

Here’s where things veer off script. 

One state House committee co-chair said he had no specific knowledge of the bill. Another said he used xAI’s Grok chatbot to understand the bill and then had to start over when realizing  that “literally two-thirds of the information was completely fabricated coming from articles of dubious quality.”

That lawmaker – Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine, and co-chair of the Children and Families Finance and Policy Committee – noted that one of the measure’s key parts is quadrupling the cap on the state and local tax deductions (commonly referred to as the SALT deduction) people can write off on their federal taxes from $10,000 to $40,000. 

The provision could help states like Minnesota with higher tax rates retain wealthy residents, West said, since those taxpayers can deduct much of their Minnesota taxes from what they owe the feds. 

“Blue states should love this,” West said in an interview. 

West, meanwhile, expressed astonishment that erasing taxes on tips made it into the final bill. 

“I can’t believe they were able to actually pass the tax tip deduction,” he said. “I just thought Donald Trump said that because he wanted to win Nevada.”

Another state lawmaker, Sen. Andrew Mathews, R-Princeton, defended the sunsetting of solar and wind energy tax credits. 

Mathews, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy, Utilities, Environment and Climate Committee, pointed out that the bill “keeps full tax credit support for things like battery storage, geothermal and nuclear projects through 2033 followed by a gradual phaseout, so the federal government is still giving producers tools to reach carbon-free goals.”

New administrative work

The biggest issue causing consternation for DFLers Murphy and Gov. Tim Walz has been the new Medicaid work requirements. 

“The work requirements are going to require a lot of additional staff and new technology,” Murphy said. “It will be a tremendous outlay of expense and red tape. But it is a really great talking point for Republicans.”

Walz said in an interview that he is already holding briefings on how to logistically comply with the requirements. 

Republicans willing to talk conceded the point that verifying the work status of Medicaid recipients is a lot for counties and the state Department of Human Services to take on. 

“There will be drastic changes that will need to be done in the way we administrate Medicaid,” West said, adding that he supported changes targeted at people “who should be working.”

Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers, also said that those who can work should. But he is wary of counties effectively tracking hours worked. In fact, Nadeau sounded a bit wary of the entire bill. 

“The federal government is adding at least a trillion dollars in deficit spending,” he said. “And unfortunately the trade off is that the big bill is making cuts at the expense of our most vulnerable population.”

Minnesota GOP lawmakers’ next moves

In the past year, Walz has called Trump a tyrant, a bully, cruel, weird, creepy and reckless, among other names. 

But in an interview this week, Walz made clear that his hostility toward Trump does not extend to Republican state legislative leaders like Demuth, Johnson, Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanksa, and Rep. Greg Davids, R-Preston, all of whom the governor worked with to complete a state budget. 

“I would argue that if national Republicans showed a little bit of what some of the folks here have done, we’d be in a much better place of holding Trump accountable,” Walz said. 

Asked if the difference between those state lawmakers and Trump is strictly presentation or more substantive policy disagreements, Walz said he was unsure. 

“The fact of the matter is at the end of the day, I don’t see any of them here criticizing Donald Trump,” Walz said. “What do they think about this bill?”

The answer to that question is multifaceted, and includes acknowledging that incorporating federal spending cuts into state budgeting is tough.

“I don’t know what the fiscal impact is going to be, but it’s going to be significant and challenging,” Nadeau said. “Minnesota is going to make some hard choices.”

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Editor’s note: This article first appeared on MinnPost and was written by Matthew Blake, MinnPost’s state government reporter. It is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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