AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Students returned to classrooms at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Tuesday for the first time since a gunman killed two children and injured 21 other students and parishioners at a mass there. Tuesday was also the day voters filled the seat left vacant by the murder of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman. Speaker Emerita Hortman was shot in her home earlier this summer, the same night state Senator John Hoffman was also shot and injured in his home. Now Governor Tim Walz says he wants a special session of the legislature to address the state's gun laws. Republican Lisa Demuth is Minnesota's current House speaker, and she joins us now. Welcome.
LISA DEMUTH: Thank you, Ayesha. Good to talk with you.
RASCOE: And on the other side of the Capitol and the aisle is state Senator Erin Murphy, a Democrat. Welcome to you, as well.
ERIN MURPHY: It's good to be with you.
RASCOE: So for both of you, I mean, so much has happened in your state in the last few months, how are you both doing?
DEMUTH: In Minnesota, that is such a common question that we get, and I fail to come up with the correct answer. I don't know that there is a right answer, but I think as we continue to heal, we are resilient, but it is a very painful time.
RASCOE: And Senator Murphy?
MURPHY: I think the best answer I can give is I'm doing well enough today. And I'd served with Speaker Emerita Hortman for all of my career, and she was well known and deeply loved. The recovery for all of us is going to take some time.
RASCOE: Speaker Demuth, I know you had a special and a close relationship with Melissa Hortman, as well.
DEMUTH: I did. When I first came into the legislature in 2019, Speaker Emerita Hortman was the speaker then. She is the only one that I served under until we came back this year in the tie, and I became speaker of the House. But our working relationship really developed in 2023, when my party was in the minority. Speaker Hortman, at the time, they were in the full majority in the state. And yet as a new minority leader, she reached out to me and said, I want to meet weekly with you.
And she didn't need my votes, but it was important to her that we would develop a working relationship. Even though we didn't agree politically, we found common ground what could we get done or kind of where we were both at on issues, but also things outside of that. Her love for gardening. Her love for dogs. Common things - talking about just being parents. And so that relationship and the way she led as a leader has really formed the way I do my work as speaker of the House now.
RASCOE: Talking about working across the aisles, like, if Governor Walz does call a special session on gun violence, what realistically could be accomplished?
DEMUTH: The way that we are looking at it in the House, specifically House Republicans, is it's broader than that. We have to look at mental health. We also have to look at keeping our schools safe and then punishing criminals. There was a tragedy in my community, in my schools, in 2003, and I had children in the building. And so I don't just say this as an elected official or speaker of the House. It is a much broader issue of mental health and how we treat each other.
RASCOE: And just to follow up on that. So your own children were affected by a school shooting, and it was in Cold Spring, Minnesota, in 2003?
DEMUTH: That is correct. I had two high school students in the building at the time, and then I had two elementary students that were just across the parking lot. And so as a family and as a community, we've lived that. So I understand it from a little bit different perspective, and that's what I bring into the work that we do in the legislature also.
RASCOE: Did someone die in that shooting?
DEMUTH: There were two students that lost their lives. One that day and one just a short two weeks later.
RASCOE: Well, Senator Murphy, what do you think the approach should be?
MURPHY: I'm - my background, I'm a nurse and come to this discussion through a lens of prevention and well-being and health. And with Speaker Demuth and the governor, went to the funeral for Fletcher, one of the children killed in Annunciation. And then went to the funeral for Harper, a little girl who was killed in Annunciation. And feel the presence of their stories and their grief and their loss as I think about the work in front of us. We can't go into a special session and not talk about assault weapons. They are weapons of war, intended to harm, destroy and kill in rapid fire.
And what we saw happen at Annunciation to those families and to those kids was someone standing outside with a high-powered weapon, shoot and harm so many people in a short amount of time. And those children will tell you the story of what they knew. They knew because they'd been through drills that they needed to lay on top of the youngest kids to protect them. They knew what to do. And that by itself, to me, says our politics - something I believe so deeply in our ability in a self-governing America to solve our hard problems. Our politics are failing right now on this issue.
RASCOE: I do feel like what we're seeing in the conversation we're having right now is what happens, seems to happen over and over again after shootings. Republicans saying, harden the schools, focus on mental health. And then you have Democrats saying, focus on the type of weaponry. Like, how does anything get done?
MURPHY: We don't agree necessarily on this issue, but I do believe that it is possible for us to find a path forward. As we negotiated probably one of the hardest budgets that I ever have back in June, that was a hard-fought compromise, and we all gave things up. But we got our job done because we all agreed that we shouldn't fail Minnesota.
DEMUTH: In the House, right now, we are tied 67-67. And what that has done this year is it has required that we work together in a bipartisan fashion. And what that meant is we have co-chairs in every single one of our committees. So Democrats and Republicans have already proven this year that through deliberative legislative action, we can get things done. They're not fast conversations. They're not do this and hope it works but really, really deliberative.
RASCOE: I want to talk about the heated and divisive political climate we're in right now. I mean, each side is calling the other side evil. We have to be honest about that.
MURPHY: What I feel alarmed about, Ayesha, is the thing that I watched happen on the day that Melissa and Mark were assassinated and John was wounded. And again, on the day of the school shooting, and again, on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed. There were efforts in social media to drive a narrative and ascribe blame for what happened from a partisan perspective. And it feels like the extremism that is experienced around the world, it's finding its way into the day-to-day work of legislating.
A number of my colleagues, but one in particular, has experienced over the course of this last weekend a number of death threats coming not just from Minnesota but from other parts of the country, and they are crude and violent in writing threats. That doesn't serve Democratic governing at all. We can't lead in America if we are operating under that kind of fear. Yes, we disagree, and we should be able to say that. Yes, we have free speech rights, and we should speak what we believe. But we shouldn't turn it into such a personal attack that it becomes weaponized.
RASCOE: Speaker Demuth, do you feel that partisanship has blinded people to others' humanity?
DEMUTH: In Minnesota, with the hard things that have happened, one of the things that we have talked about with some of my colleagues is people express their grief differently, and we need to give grace in grief. As far as the partisanship of politics, we have to work together and get things done for the greater good. And it takes each one of us individually to try to tone down the way we speak or speak more with kindness, even while there's a strength in getting things done.
MURPHY: I think Americans need to start looking up and seeing each other again because the path forward for our country, every time we've been in a bad corner like this, is with each other. And I have faith that when we see each other for who we are as people, we will find our way forward.
RASCOE: That's state Senator Erin Murphy. Also, we heard from Lisa Demuth, speaker of the Minnesota House. Thanks to you both.
MURPHY: Thank you.
DEMUTH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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