Nine years in the Minnesota Senate teaches you plenty. You see good ideas rise, bad ones fall and a whole lot in between.

But lately, the thing that keeps jumping out at me is that more and more laws from the last few years aren’t surviving in court.

The pattern is hard to miss. A controversial bill flies through the legislature. Party-line votes shove it across the finish line. Headlines roar and political points are tallied. Then it ties up the courts for months or sometimes years before finally getting tossed as unconstitutional.

A fast legislature can pass laws. A thorough legislature passes laws that hold up.

Recent court rulings make the point.

In 2023, under Democrat control, the legislature passed a law cutting off funding for private religious colleges in the state’s Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program if those schools required students to sign a faith statement. Read that again. That’s religious discrimination, written straight into law.

In the Senate, we worked out a bipartisan fix to remove that provision and protect religious liberty for students and institutions. But like too many bipartisan ideas, it was used as a bargaining chip and was stripped out at the end of session behind closed doors, when power and decisions consolidate into the hands of a few leaders and the governor.

So Crown College and Northwestern University went to court. They didn’t wait. They sued to defend religious freedom and stop discrimination before the damage spread. And they won.

That’s good news. But the bigger point is that whether it’s religious liberty, education, or the Second Amendment, we shouldn’t be passing flimsy laws that collapse under constitutional scrutiny. The Constitution isn’t a suggestion. It’s the foundation. It was written to outlast the whims of any single legislature or party in power.

Another case recently got some attention.

A Ramsey County judge just struck down a law banning binary gun triggers, a provision tucked into a 1,400-page omnibus bill unveiled only hours before the final vote. The judge put it plainly: “Lawmaking did not occur within the framework of the Constitution.”

Large omnibus bills are supposed to focus on a single subject. This one didn’t. The gun provision shouldn’t have been in there at all. In plain terms it was a shoddy way to pass legislation in the first place.

Rights don’t vanish because one party claims urgency. A law that violates the Constitution is still unconstitutional no matter how noble the author believes it is. And each time lawmakers pass bills that crumble in court, it erodes trust and wastes taxpayer dollars.

Good legislation takes thoroughness. It takes input from both sides. It respects limits on government power. That’s not gridlock. That’s how freedom is protected.

It’s time to slow down, take a hard look and remember that the goal isn’t just to pass laws. It’s to pass laws that stand.

— Rich Draheim represents District 22 in the Minnesota Senate