Legislative Evaluation Assembly of Minnesota

LEA reports on 2025 sessions, announces honorees

Download the 2025 LEA report press release.

Download 2025 LEA Report (.pdf)

2025 Honorees:

Senators Cal Bahr, Steve Drazkowski, Steve Green, Keri Heintzeman, Jeff Howe, Bill Lieske, Eric Lucero, Andrew Mathews and Nathan Wesenberg

Honorable Mention: Senator Bruce Anderson. Representative Drew Roach.

St. Paul, MN, December 12, 2025 — Legislative Evaluation Assembly of Minnesota (LEA) is releasing its report on the Minnesota legislature’s 2025 sessions. The 2025 LEA report rates the votes of all 201 legislators on 16 selected bills. The report summarizes these bills and analyzes them in more depth and detail than seen in the popular press.

The tone for this year’s legislature was set by the irresponsible walkout of the House DFL caucus.  They insisted they had a right to parity even though one of their winning candidates was ineligible.  

The Minnesota Supreme Court’s bizarre ruling that quorum wasn’t effected by office vacancies made a power-sharing agreement inevitable. The legislature continued the same bad trends of consolidating more legislation into fewer omnibus bills and having more legislators checking in remotely as became prevalent during the COVID years. Even worse, this legislature stripped from their rules any reference that tied remote participation by legislators to emergency use. The Senate even instituted per diem payment eligibility for legislators participating remotely. The House put in their rules that an election contest could not be heard in the legislature until the courts have made a determination, abdicating the powers granted to them in the state constitution that gives members the right to decide eligibility of fellow members, and then only if the equally-split ethics committee makes an affirmative recommendation to allow a contest to proceed.

Given that amount of concession, it is not surprising that the House did not end up divided on very many consequential bills (aside from the omnibus human services budget and the phase-out of government health benefits for adult illegal aliens). The Senate was more divided. Of course, it is easier for many Senators to vote NO on various budget bills when they are in the minority and their votes do not necessarily impact passage, but our 2025 report also features many non-budget bills where this pattern of principled dissent is evident only in the Senate.  This led to the absence of House members in the LEA’s top scorers.  

Six of the 2025 Honorees (Senators Cal Bahr, Steve Drazkowski, Steve Green, Bill Lieske, Eric Lucero, and Nathan Wesenberg) were also honorees last year.  They are joined this year by Senators Keri Heintzeman, Jeff Howe, and Andrew Mathews.