The Minnesota Legislature will kick off the 2025 legislative session on Tuesday. Or maybe not. Tight margins and historic acrimony between the two parties has cast uncertainty over who’s going to be in charge for the next two years and whether legislators can do any business at all pending a pair of special elections slated for late January.

Hopes for bipartisan comity at the state Capitol this year — forced upon the Minnesota House by the voters, who sent 67 Democrats and 67 Republicans to the Capitol — are already crashing. House Democrats are mulling not showing up for the first two weeks of the legislative session to prevent the chamber from achieving a

Republicans argued Gov. Tim Walz called for a special election too early and asked for a halt ahead of the legislative session.

A lawsuit challenges a decision by Gov. Tim Walz to schedule a Jan. 28 special election after a November winner was deemed ineligible to take office in the House on Jan. 14.

In a pair of news conferences on Monday, both parties took jabs at one another, as Republicans claimed an “organizational majority," and Democrats threatened to not show up on the first day of the legislative session unless Republicans honored a power-sharing agreement.