Democracy dying in Michigan?

Great Debates
1

I was on Reddit this morning and someone linked to this clip from Rachel Maddow. It’s 15 minutes long, plus a second clip that’s about a minute and a half long so I’ll try to write a short summation for those without the time to watch it.

In the clip, Maddow talks about recent Republican legislative antics in Michigan. Their constitution requires that all bills take effect 90 days after the end of the session which passed the law. Since a session could conceivably go all year, there’s a good chance that a bill passed in January of 2011 wouldn’t take effect until just a month ago. Since, however, sometimes bills need to take effect immediately, a clause allows for them to bypass the wait with a 2/3rds majority vote.

With the 2010 elections, republicans took control of the legislature and the governorship and have passed something on the order of 566 laws, most of which have also been passed under the immediate effect clause. A number of these bills, according to Maddow and crew are like something out of 1984. An emergency leader bill allows the state to appoint a manager for a given Michigan city who is not answerable to the city council, the mayor or the populace of the city but rules, essentially by fiat. The, in Maddow’ words, thuggish graduate student union put forth a proposal to relax strictures on membership in their union only to have the Michigan legislature pass and enact a law forbidding grad student unions an hour and a half before the appropriate committee was to hear the proposal, a proposal which, I understand they were expecting to allow.

The kicker appears to be that the republican party, while it controls the legislature, does not have a 2/3rds majority. They need at least 12 democrats to vote to pass their bills under the immediate effect clause. The democrats claim that they’re not being allowed to exercise their right to vote and that the presiding congressperson simply pretends that a 2/3rds majority exists for these bills and are currently suing the state government to allow them to vote. A lower court placed an injunction against many of these laws such as the emergency manager law and the prohibition of grad student unions and the republican response was that the lower court was acting out of bounds.

Maddow says this is essentially a direct attack on our status as a democracy, that the Michigan republicans are creating an autocracy and no one seems to care. I certainly hadn’t heard about this and after watching the clip, it seems pretty cut and dried that the republicans are up to some hijinks at the very least. My question, and the reason I put this in GD is, do you agree with Maddow? Is Michigan an early warning sign? Or is she stretching and there’s a much more reasonable explanation for all this. They played a clip of a portion of a congressional session where they called for passing a bill under immediate effect and the presider’s eyes flicked over the crowd for a moment and then he banged the gavel and announced they had the 2/3rds they needed. It didn’t look much to me like a legitimate vote but I’m not all that up on civics. What say you all?

I apologize if this has been discussed earlier. I did not see another thread.

2

I was reading about this yesterday from Kevin Drum. There are some updates since and if they are accurate the issue seems to be that both parties have used voice votes to put laws into immediate effect. Thus Democratic lawmakers have been slow to object to the current situation. What has changed is that the GOP now has a 2/3 majority in Michigan State Senate (where questionable voice voting laws into immediate effect hasn’t been allowed). Before there was a check on the process since Democrats could slow bills in the Senate. Now they can’t and they can’t get the Republican Speaker of the House to recognize them to request roll call votes on immediate effect.

If this information is accurate this is a pretty clear abuse of power by the Speaker and potentially extends far beyond the current controversy. If all points of order can be ignored simply by having the Speaker fail to recognize those who rise to them then the minority or even a majority can be effectively silenced. But at the same time the Republican Speaker has to maintain his position with the Republican Majority and they ARE a majority. If they feel that strongly they could pass the bills anyways. So it seems likely that for the time being the issue is limited to laws going into immediate effect.

3

Regarding the state appointing financial managers for cities, this stems from the fact that finances in some of Michigan’s cities are completely fubar. To make a long story short, cities and towns have given generous contracts to unionized employees and spent big on all kinds of stuff. Meanwhile the tax base has eroded as the state’s economy slumped and productive workers moved to greener pastures. Now they’re just plain running out of money and often on the edge of bankruptcy. Once a certain point is actually reached, the state may appoint a manager.

Is it true that the managers are not answerable to the city councils? Yes it is. That’s by design, because it’s the only way to defeat the public employee unions. The unions will not accept any deal that involves any cuts to their pay or benefits. This means that in practice, they will not accept any deal that avoids bankruptcy.

Are the managers a good solution? No, but given the hole that the cities put themselves in, there simply aren’t any good solutions out there.

(Here’s some reading on Detroit’s financial crisis and the mayor’s unwillingness to negotiate. There’s been a deal of sorts in just the last couple days, but I don’t know the details.)

4

The point here is not the merits of Michigan’s “emergency manager” law, it is that it was passed improperly, and should not have taken immediate effect.

5

Inner Stickler seemed to be wondering about both the contents of the bill and the legitimacy of the vote that passed it as an emergency bill.

6

My “phony equivalency” sense is tingling – a legitimate voice vote (where there is no serious doubt raised, either at the time or afterwards, that there was in fact a 2/3 majority) is not comparable to the current situation.

7

ITR Champion, do you have any cites that show that the fubar-ness of Michigan cities is due to overly generous union contracts? From my reading, Michigan is screwed because the population and tax base as shrunk by something like 50 percent over the past 25 years and the government has not shrunk to keep pace. This is hardly the fault of the public service employee unions, so i am wondering if you have some information I don’t or if you are just trotting out one of the conservative bogeyman.

8

Something not quite right here, in about a million ways. Why would the Pubbies turn aside a poll of votes to prove that the 2/3 majority was present and voting? Seems that would be something they would approach with gleeful nose-rubbing solidarity.

And if they didn’t have that magic threshold, why would it take the divine Ms Maddow to point it out? What, Dems can’t count? Its a bit like the Sherlock Homie case of the dog that didn’t scream bloody murder in the night.

I remember when she first reported on this, way back, there was a side plot, the refusal of a small town to sell its park and recreation space to rich developers so they could build a golf club that the residents would most likely not be admitted to. And lo and behold, that gross civic irresponsibility has been overturned, now that sensible adults are in charge.

And again, why would it take her to bring it up, aren’t the Dems screaming their heads off? And if not, why not? WTF?

9

Is Detroit the future for American cities? The city is almost insolvent-and the tax base continues to decline.
If the state stopped subsidizing Detroit, it wold fold in weeks.

10

The blogger that 2sense linked to asked the same question, and has some insight in the updates to his post.

If I’m understanding it correctly, the house has a tradition of not taking the 2/3rds immediate effect rule very seriously. The speaker can call for it, make a show of surveying the results, and declare it to have passed. The minority party can ask for an official tally to be taken to verify if it really did pass, but the speaker can deny the request, leaving the minority party no recourse but to bend over and take it.

The Democrats, through a combination of professional courtesy, apathy, and perspective (all that’s really happening is that a law that will take effect anyway takes effect a bit sooner), let this slide for a while, under the assumption that the same 2/3rds rule would have to be met in the Senate, where tallies are required by the state constitution.

However, the Republicans now have a legitimate 2/3rds majority in the Senate, so they can do their official tally over there, log a “fake” tally in the house, and get all of their laws to take effect immediately.

If I understand that correctly, this whole thing seems ridiculous and not really all that big of a deal. The real problem is that the House isn’t required to tally all of their votes, which may have made sense when the constitution was written and vote tallying an unruly mob of lawmakers would have presented a technical challenge, but cripes, put buttons on everyone’s desks and just log the votes peoples. Problem solved.

11

In the House, they DON’T have the 2/3 majority. That’s why they’re deliberately not counting.

They have screamed, now. There’s a lawsuit in court and the Court of Appeals granted an injunction against the practice (which the Republicans are now screaming about.) The question is why the Democrats took a whole year to file suit; apparently they tried reasoning with their Republican colleagues first.

To be frank, I live here, and Maddow’s report was the first one I’ve seen that spelled out exactly what the hell is going on in Lansing. I’d seen a couple of vague articles about Democrats complaining that the Republicans weren’t letting them vote, without going into detail about the significance of the 2/3rds majority and the immediate effect rule. There used to be good newspapers, there used to be good local news around here. Not any more, apparently.

The Benton Harbor issue of the recreation area is mostly an explicit example of the kind of threats Michigan’s emergency manager law poses. An emergency manager under the new law(there was an old one that granted less autocratic power) has at his/her disposal the power to remove or ban any or all locally elected officials from accessing any government or organizational property or resources, control all aspects of the budget, sell off city assets, hire or fire anybody they want, and under certain conditions, modify or terminate any existing contract, or taken to its extreme, dissolve the municipality entirely. A beneficent EM may in fact do nothing with that kind of power except attempt to improve the city or district’s lot with the least possible imposition on the citizens, but in truth the citizens are completely at the EM’s mercy.

Then there’s the fact that the ending of such a term of emergency manager-ship for a municipality or district is pretty much at the whim of the emergency manager.

You’ll get your right to elect your leaders back when the person running the city decides and the state approves, and not before.

Last June a lawsuit was filed challenging the constitutionality of Public Act 4; AFAICT it is still pending. And the petitions to put a repeal of this law on the ballot in November are being reviewed right now. If enough signatures are ruled valid, the law will be suspended until the vote. People haven’t been idle, but as Michigan residents our hands have been tied.

12

I thank you for the clarification, and only wish that clarification was more often encouraging. Sadly, no.

13

The allegation certainly seems to be violative of the Michigan constitution:

If the Speaker is simply ignoring this, the courts can and should put a stop to it, since it’s a rule of constitutional dimension.

14

So in short, Michigan got Palpatined.

15

Truth be told, unlike some people I don’t entirely hold that Gov. Snyder is trying to carve out an Evil Republican Dictatorship for himself. It’s more complex than that. He’s a businessman. He’s approaching Michigan’s financial problems from the perspective of a businessman trying to correct a floundering system as quickly and efficiently as possible; the problem is, while in business the equivalent of an EM can take over a department, fire people, cancel contracts, reorganize, and say “Tough titties, we’re doing it this way,” you can’t do that in government without risking trampling on people’s constitutional rights. A business is not a democracy and anybody who doesn’t like what a company is doing has the option to quit their job and end their association with that business. You can’t just quit being an American citizen, and that’s a big part of why the process must be deliberately inefficient; to hear all sides and be fully considerate of citizens’ rights.

So while I think Snyder may personally only have the state’s best interests in mind, he’s willingly signed bills granting unreasonable and possibly unconstitutional power to a buncha people who don’t. The thing I find shocking is that there hasn’t been a mass movement by the state’s most conservative Republicans to pass all the anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive legislation they can, like in other states, while they still have this power. Though I admit I’m not fully familiar with all the bills in the pipeline right now.

16

Closer to Minnesota. Sane rays.

17

It looks like both parties in Michigan’s House have something of a tradition of claiming a 2/3 majority is present on a voice vote whether it existed or not. It hasn’t mattered much before since immediate effect could always be dealt with in the Senate. The thing that has changed is that the GOP now has a 2/3 majority in that body.

The House is required to tally votes if enough members request it. The problem is that the Speaker is ignoring points of order on the subject. Again, once you allow the Speaker to do this there is all sorts of mischief he can get into. Essentially he can do anything at all that doesn’t cost him the support of the members of his party in the House. Though as I said the problem is mostly limited to putting laws into immediate effect there are certainly more rules requiring 2/3 supermajorities in both houses. Constitutional amendments, perhaps. Those too could be ramrodded through in this matter. It seems pretty clear the GOP is overstepping their constitutional authority. But “the End of Democracy” in the state? Hardly.

18

Oh, there’s more. It involves those pesky state employees (both union and non-union) which everyone so loves to hate. Under the Michigan Constitution, the Civil Service Commission sets employee pay rates and schedules, negotiates with the unions, and so forth. Not the Legislature; that authority rests with the Civil Service Commission. Again, this is not just the law, but in the state Constitution. Well, about three years ago, the Legislature decided they wanted to cut employee pay, and imposed a 3% surtax on what they termed “possible future health care costs”. (Not that the money WOULD go toward health care costs, mind you, but it COULD. Maybe. If they felt like it.) Civil Service sued on the grounds that the Legislature was not vested with this authority. The courts agreed.
Did the Legislature care? They did not. They kept withholding the tax from employee paychecks despite being told by a succession of courts that they had no authority to do so and should refund the money. Eventually, when the matter got to a high enough level, they did refund it…without the interest, of course, that they earned by withholding our money for almost two years.
Regardless of what you think about employee compensation, these actions show a complete disregard for the rule of law in Michigan and a willingness to ignore even the Constitution when it suits their purposes. Not to mention the blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty they used to justify their thievery.

19

I couldn’t agree more. But their actions show a callous disregard for constitutionality, which is absolutely unacceptable for a legislative body.

20

Absolutely false, in that unions aren’t “given” anything. They negotiate to the best of their ability on behalf of their members. Contracts are not gifts. And the union members perform services for their pay, just like any other employee of any organization.

:rolleyes: Unions are not marauding hordes of barbarians or invading armies. They don’t require defeating anymore than merchants do.

Demonstrably false.
[

](Detroit unions agree to pay cuts amid city's financial crisis)That happened over 2 weeks ago, by the way (23 March 2012). How did it escape your notice? I mean, it was like the biggest story in the entire state for 2 days.
[Here’s one from January of this year:

](http://www.nilesstar.com/2012/01/26/niles-school-secretaries-take-pay-cut/)
Last year, firefighters in Muskegon agreed to cuts:[

](Firefighters Feel the Squeeze of Shrinking Budgets)
Firefighters in Allen Park also agreed to pay and benefit cuts in February of this year:
[

](http://www.thenewsherald.com/articles/2012/03/30/news/doc4f75bfc716057054331021.txt?viewmode=fullstory)
From 2011:[

](http://news.yahoo.com/michigan-teachers-unprecedented-salary-cuts-205800221.html)
[

](http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2011/07/21/news/doc4e276a6183397381333559.txt)
Here’s an article from 2007 detailing that public employees have been made the scapegoats and evildoers (by, IMO, unscrupulous selfish jackasses) since at least the early 1990s in Michigan: State employees: Under siege? Cut, cut and cut again, state workers feel stretched, anxious and uncertain.

For most of at least the last two decades, public service employees in Michigan have been trying to bend over backwards to help out their communities and the state, while others have just been trying to get them to bend over.

The notion that unions are thugs who simply declare what they will accept and then take it is laughably, ludicrously false.

The idea that union members aren’t part of the community they live in, and don’t care about it is demeaning, demonizing, and deceitful.

When you come back to this thread, bring more than bullshit talking points and unfounded, biased calumny.