Unless something dramatic happens in two legislative recounts over the next week, the Minnesota House will be tied with 67 Republicans and 67 Democrats for only the second time since the Legislature started using party designations for its members. The next legislative session starts Jan. 14.

House DFL and Republican leaders haven’t said much publicly since the day after the election, but we do now have an idea how the committees will be structured.

The Minnesota House Public Information service posted the 2025 committee schedule and said, “The membership of the standing committees and division will be equally divided and chaired by DFL and Republican co-chairs. Committee membership will be determined at a later date.”

That is significant because it means the committees will have co-chairs from each party and the same number of members, so compromises will be needed from the committee level up to House floor votes in order for anything to pass.

Still undecided is who will serve as speaker of the House. Democrat Melissa Hortman is in that role now and Republican Lisa Demuth is still House Republican leader. One of them is likely to be speaker next session, but what kind of power each will wield remains to be determined.

Gov. Tim Walz said this week he plans to meet with legislative leaders in the House and Senate this week to discuss the next session. It will be the first time since 2019 there will be divided government.

“The budget process is coming here in a couple weeks,” Walz said Tuesday, referring to a new budget forecast due out early next month. “It looks like we’re going to be back to where we were in 2019 where you had some power sharing, which in my opinion was pretty successful. We were able to cut taxes, fund education and get the budgets done on time.”

But first things first. Trying to divvy up power in the Minnesota House will take a lot of work and compromise, just like in 1979.

“We were able to work it out but it was not easy,” former DFL House member Lyndon Carlson told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS earlier this month. “That took several weeks basically from the time of the election in early November until well into December before we were able to resolve the issues between the two caucuses on how to share power.”

In fact, many of the details were still being worked out as the 1979 session began.