I’ve only run into Linda Berglin a few times.  The long-time Legislative insider – nine years in the House, thirty more in the Senate – always seemed to me, an admittedly jaundiced observer, to be one of those legislators that sprouted roots in the Capitol.

Or, more accurately, sprouted roots in the majority caucus at the Capitol – where the power is.

Like Ellen Anderson last spring, Berglin has apparently tried life in the minority, and found it wanting.

State Sen. Linda Berglin announced Monday that she will leave the Legislature on Aug. 15, in the wake of her new job with Hennepin County.

The piece – from Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib’s Hot Dish blog – lets out one “moo” for which there is just not enough cow:

Berglin has served in the Legislature since 1972 and is one of the Capitol experts on the state’s health and human services system. She had a hand in shaping the system that created one of the healthiest states in the nation. For decades she has been respected and feared by both sides of the aisle and in the health care industry.

People like Rachel Stassen-Berger keep saying that like it’s a good thing.

Berglin was truly the mother of the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services as we have known it for the past thirty years; a place with bounding, skyrocketing spending, the place that has truly given baseline-budgeting a bad name and turned it into Target Number One for the GOP’s reform movement this past session. HHS’ increases have always been in the double-digits, biennium over biennium, while Berglin was one of its key legislative benefactors.

And since Stassen-Berger chose to phrase her piece the way she did, I have to ask; did the bureaucracy that Berglin helped build “create” Minnesota as a healthy state, as opposed to Minnesota’s fairly healthy ethnic majority (Minnesota and the low-tax, low-“service”, Berglin-free Dakotas perennially vie for healthiest states in the union) and better-than-average standard of living?

Correlation does not equal causation.

Well, it’s all water under the bridge now.  Like her fellow legislative Ozymandias, Anderson, Berglin has decided the view from the basement – and being out of absolute power – doesn’t become her:

Since the last election, she was marginalized as Democrats lost the Minnesota Senate for the first time since she joined the Legislature…Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk said Republicans and Dayton administration officials were discussing the final health and human services legislative proposal.

“The governor’s office called and said ‘[Senate Majority Leader] Amy Koch wants you out of the room,'” Bakk said. “Linda doesn’t know why. But she’s incredibly knowledgeable.”

And, more germanely, she was part of the DFL’s no-ideas, all-stalling approach to the “negotiations”.  She had no place in the discussion, because she was there to add absolutely nothing.

Still and all, with all that “incredible knowledge”, Hennepin County residents should be immortal soon.

Bon voyage, Sen. Berglin.

UPDATE:  A legislative insider messaged me: “It’s no coincidence that this was the first time in 30 years Berglin wasn’t involved in HHS negotiations and there was reform.”

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, July 25th, 2011 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Health Care, Minnesota Politics, MN Legislature, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.