The Year in State Politics • Changing of the Guard

The GOP has controlled all three branches of state government since Snyder became governor in 2008, but in 2019 former lawmaker Gretchen Whitmer became Governor; Michigan saw a new Democrat Attorney General, Dana Nessel; and Secretary of State Joycelyn Benson also secured a position – all three won by large margins.

This year Republicans still have a 58-52 majority in the State House and a 22-16 margin in the Senate after the election, and the “non-partisan” Michigan Supreme Court still has a solid Republican majority; however, the executive branch is all Democrat and run by strong charismatic women. Because the Republicans do not control 2/3 of the House of Representatives they cannot override a gubernatorial veto. Many voters prefer divided government because gridlock slows down statist policy making, while most partisans would prefer unified government (so long as their side is in control).

The year started off with the new Governor eliminating the entire Medical Marijuana Licensing Board, which had proved itself to be partisan and dysfunctional during its first year. This was an early exercise of the Governor’s Executive Order power, and the Republicans wisely acquiesced in this move, which put a new Marijuana Regulatory Agency (MRA) in charge of issuing licenses. The big administrative change broke the log jam in licensing, as Saginaw’s own Appeals Judge Steven Borello, acting as Court of Claims, kept the industry alive with injunctions preventing the government from closing unlicensed “temporary facilities.” Once the new agency took control April 30 the backlog started to ease, and the state became and has remained a reliable partner in the industry.

Also, the new Attorney General Dana Nessel took on 2018 legislation over citizen petition initiatives and the Line 5 Commission by issuing blistering AG opinions essentially nullifying those lame duck laws. She issued an AG opinion in March ruling that amendments to the legislation’s language transferring power over the tunnel from the Mackinac Bridge Authority to the Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority were unconstitutional because the title of the bill did not match its content as required by the so-called “Title-object” rule of the state constitution.

The governor immediately backed that opinion up by issuing another executive order for state departments and agencies to halt work on anything to do with the matter, and the Republicans again acquiesced in this political power-play.  AG Nessel started a lawsuit in June to ultimately decommission Line 5 without a replacement pipeline in favor of renewable forms of energy, questioning the common notion that Michigan even benefits from Line 5, which is a public utility. She stated that most of Line 5 brings Canadian gas into Michigan through the straits of Mackinaw, then goes right back to Canada though Port Huron, and that Michigan only gets about 15% of it. She says this means there is not much downside to closing the pipeline, since in her opinion it would take 7-10 years to replace the pipeline with an underground utility tunnel, and by then our economy would not be dependent on fossil fuels. Therefore, she claims the risks of a potential oil spill outweigh the benefits of continuing to operate the pipeline.

Next, AG Nessel tackled the lame-duck legislation to stifle Michigan’s citizen initiative petition process whereby citizens sign petitions to amend the constitution or initiative statutes. State legislators naturally dislike the petition initiative process because it cuts into their turf of making laws and have been especially adverse to petition drives ever since 1992, when petitions were used to enact term limitations on legislators. The new law created signature distribution requirements that were intended to render  statewide petition drives untenable in practical terms, and added warnings to petition forms that were unconstitutional. Her opinion has been adopted by Secretary of State, Joycelyn Benson, but it could be  subject to court intervention if petitions that are pending do not meet the requirements of the law.  Other states have imposed the signature distribution requirements in a thinly veiled attempt to thwart petition drives and gotten away with it.   

In May the Governor signed Senate Bill 1 with dramatic bipartisan reforms to the auto insurance system by guaranteeing lower rates for drivers for the next 8 years by preventing health care providers from overcharging for auto-related injuries, giving consumers choice of coverages, adding some consumer protections by stopping the practices of using ZIP codes, credit scores, sex, marital status, occupation, education attainment, and property ownership to set a person’s insurance rates.

In March the Governor announced that she wanted to nearly triple the state's gas tax to raise about $2 billion per year for roads. Governor Whitmer said, "I ran on fixing the roads ... I ran on cleaning up drinking water." She proposed a new gas tax that would have raised revenue, but it died when it became apparent that money shuffling would end in fund diversions for other purposes and not result a big net gain for road repairs and infrastructure.  The 45-cent increase would have brought Michigan's gas tax to 71.3 cents a gallon, potentially the highest in the nation. Senate Republicans immediately rejected the tax hike and by August it looked like the plan was dead.  Politicians worried that If a budget agreement wasn’t reached by the end of September, state government would shut down.

Negotiations went back and forth, then broke down completely, so the legislature passed a budget on its own. On the last day of September Whitmer signed all 16 state budgets and issued 147 line-item veto – including $375 million of the $400 million in one-time road and bridge funding Republicans had added into to the budget after the two sides postponed negotiations over a long-term road funding plan in order to separate them from this year’s budget process.

Now, as we go to press, the legislature tentatively approved bills on December 4 to re-appropriate $575 million of the $1 billion that Gov. Whitmer had line-item vetoed last month. This would return funding for charter schools, rural police patrols, isolated school districts, county jails, autism programming and rural hospitals, among others. Also, transfers Whitmer made through the State Administrative Board in October would be reversed, which is a probably sticking point in on-going negotiations.

The Flint Water Crisis has continued throughout 2019, with the new administration shifting direction and doing a policy and enforcement reset.  In 2014, after Flint pulled out of its water supply contract with Detroit, available corrosion-controls were not used, and this let rust, iron and lead to end up in home water supply pipes, leaving residents exposed to high levels of lead. Several officials at the state and local level were charged with crimes over the failures to protect the public. In June, on the recommendations of solicitor general Fadwa Hammoud and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy, the Attorney General dismissed all the pending criminal cases and wiped the slate clean, in order to start the investigations over under Democrat leadership.

To make her point she said, “I want to remind the people of Flint that justice delayed is not always justice denied and a fearless and dedicated team of career prosecutors and investigators are hard at work to ensure those who harmed you are held accountable.” In November the civil case against two engineering companies that advised the city of Flint about its water has been dismissed by a Flint court. The firms had maintained they warned the city government about corrosion issues that caused elevated levels of lead in drinking water but were ignored. Now the crisis is evolving again, as hungry personal injury lawyers and their celebrity spokespersons engage in self-promotion tours based on an “environmental justice for kids” theme.

Adult Use [AU] Cannabis sales rules were issued this summer, many months in advance of expectations, in order to give municipalities some reasonable expectations on what the business model would look like. Many towns that had opted-out of licensed cannabis businesses cited uncertainty as to the character of the new industry and wanted to see the new rules so they could determine whether the business would be manageable and appropriate in their community. . They may now wait to see how the businesses do in other towns, or until December 2021 when the highly restricted pool of eligible adult use applicants becomes virtually unlimited.

License applications started Nov 1 for companies that are already fully licensed medical facilities (except Class A 100 plant grow and Marijuana Microbusiness). First Sales Started Sunday December 1 in Ann Arbor Michigan with customers lined up around the entire block and $220,000 in sales with $35,000 in tax revenue.   Watch for many more to come in the next few weeks, and check out The Releaf Center and The River, both in Chesaning, which opened for Adult Use cannabis sales in Saginaw County.

In November, former local senator Roger Kahn and a group of former legislators-turned-lobbyists, gathered in another lobbyist’s office flanked by attorneys they had hired with funds from a source they refuse to disclose, to challenge Term Limits in court.  The courts have already ruled term limits to be perfectly legal, but there is a deeper strategy at play. They announced they were filing a lawsuit against the State of Michigan and its constitution, and now it is up to the Attorney General to fight for term limits.  These legislators/lobbyists, all of whom swore an oath to defend the Michigan constitution, are now asking a federal judge to set aside the vote of the People that established term limits in 1992.

The rationale is that Michigan’s term limits amendment infringes upon their rights as American citizens because it prevents them from running again for an office they have previously held for multiple terms. They claim the Term Limits has led to mediocre legislators due to lack of experience, and given lobbyists more power in state government and should be eliminated, but the claim falls flat when you consider that these plaintiffs are in fact lobbyists themselves and can hardly be believed when they claim to be acting against their own professional interests.

Roger Kahn is not even term limited – he has one last term available to him if he dared to run. In fact, he cannot deny that he would never have run in the first place without term limits creating an open seat for him to claim. If the court ruled in his favor, it would strike down every term limit in Michigan, including the Governor and the Attorney General, who is in charge of the defense of term limits, and around the country 36 governors, 15 state legislatures, nine of the ten largest cities in America, hundreds of counties and cities and other offices, would all go down because the radical argument in this lawsuit is that all term limits violate the US Constitution.

Such a ruling could logically even eliminate term limits for the US President. Their argument is that legislators start out as inexperienced lawmakers, not really up to the job until they get experience, and then it is time for them to leave due to term limits.

In fact, most legislative candidates do have prior state and local government experience, and it is unimaginable that any self-respecting candidate would ever ask for your vote by telling you they would try to be a good lawmaker on the job, but would probably be incompetent for most of their tenure in office. Term limits are necessarily strict because the power of incumbents to win reelection is a virtual certainty due to the unfair advantages of money, endorsements, and media attention that make challenges rare and futile.

Over time unchecked political power concentrates in the hands of a few leaders, and without term limits lobbying would once again become relationship-based instead of policy-based; big money special interests can afford to make long-term investments in the careers of cooperative lawmakers willing to parlay their long years of “experience” into influence peddling.

This is what is known as “soft corruption” because the quid-pro-quo is never openly acknowledged and is explained away as the exercise of 1st amendment freedom of speech rights. Starting with the new big-government Michigan Constitution of 1963, lawmakers went from seldom serving more than 2 terms, as was the practice for Michigan’s first 100 years, to remaining in office for decades. D. J. Jacobetti stayed in office for 39 years - he ran the appropriations committee, which coincidentally is the job plaintiff Kahn held. Nicknamed "King Jake" and the “Godfather,” he wasn’t criminally charged, but was forced to resign his powerful committee post due to his corrupt practices, but still died in office after a life spent feeding off the taxpayers.

Back then Michigan had the best government that money could buy, and public policy was efficiently doled out to the highest bidder. King Jake was the poster boy for the campaign in 1992 when the citizens voted to impose term limits.

While this lawsuit appears doomed to fail, it is part of a larger scheme to cheat Michigan citizens out of term limits. The plan is to soften the ground with this lawsuit, then get the legislature to place a watered-down term limit amendment on the ballot, all without having to run an expensive unpopular petition drive.

In 1992 citizens collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to put term limits on the ballot – and given the obvious conflict of interest,  legislators who want to weaken term limits should go through the same laborious petition process.

Finally, as we go to press the trial of State Rep. Larry Inman has begun in Grand Rapids. The trial  revealed text messages sent last year by Inman to affiliates of the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights, asking for $30,000 in campaign contributions per legislator to win the votes of those under pressure from Republican leaders to repeal a law that guaranteed higher "prevailing" wages on state-financed construction projects.

When the union didn’t deliver the “donations” Inman voted to repeal the law. A recall petition was circulated and submitted to remove him from office last month, but it was invalidated on a technicality because a word was missing on the petition. (https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/larry-inman-trial-highlights-blurred-lines-and-boozy-underbelly-michigan)