Busy older men sometimes do forget little things. For example, it is quite easy to forget that you happen to have a few million bucks worth of prime real estate in the Virgin Islands.
And who can be expected to remember that you had some of the folks under you, all staff members on the state payroll, notarize documents when you sold $7.2 million worth of land while in office?
That’s what Bill Schuette, Michigan Attorney General and governor wannabe did recently, and I think it is just outrageous that people are picking on him. True, he had said that all his assets were in a blind trust. But millions in resort properties are different.
Why, forgetting you own and sold them could happen to any guy in Melvindale, or Brightmoor. Stuff like that happens to me all the time. Why, once I asked Carol Horn, my wonderful secretary at Wayne State University, to bring me back a cookie from a lunch meeting I couldn’t go to, and then I forgot all about it.
Technically, I probably shouldn’t have used her time to get me that extra cookie, especially since she had to walk over to the tray to get it. I probably shouldn’t have eaten it either, since I wasn’t at the meeting. But that’s me — callous abuser of public property.
In any event, I’d forgotten about that for years.
So it certainly isn’t fair to fault our state’s top law enforcement official for selling millions of dollars in prime resort real estate in the Virgin Islands, and using state employees to witness and notarize the transactions. Nor was he really lying about it when he denied it.
What most insensitive people fair to understand is that Trust Fund Babies have to be held to more permissive standards than the Rest of Us. Bill Schuette’s stepdaddy was chair of Dow Chemical Co, proud makers of napalm, and he left him a bundle.
But anyway, here’s what happened, comrades, for those of you, who like me, still believe in America enough to care:
Back on May 10, during one of the many “candidate forums,” Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley, Schuette’s main rival for the nomination, accused the attorney general of selling the property out of his office and using state workers to witness and notarize it.
Bill Schuette’s every instinct told him just what to do:
He lied.
“I don’t even know what he’s talking about,” the man who wants to be governor told reporters afterwards when he was asked if he had assets in the Virgin Islands, “but it’s nonsense. It’s false.”
Later, he said the same words to a Detroit News reporter who asked Schuette if, by any chance, he might be, say, a registered agent for a company that sold real estate in the islands.
According to the respected Gongwer News Service, the state’s top law enforcement officer again said, “I don’t even know what he’s talking about.” Well, memory lapses can hit us all, can’t they?
The truth is that Schuette is in fact a registered agent of not one, but three Michigan-based LLCs – Limited Liability Companies – that have been used to transfer Virgin Islands properties.
Possibly the attorney general forget about things like records that show what real estate transactions took place, and who carried them out. The fact is that Schuette, on more than one occasion during his first term in office, sold Virgin Islands real estate.
Not only that, he sold the property out of his Lansing office, using at least six members of his staff — state employees — to notarize and sign the documents on the state’s time.
We know this, because property transfers are public record (you might have expected an attorney general to know this) and the Calley campaign soon had copies.
This made the reality harder to lie away. Once the evidence was presented, the Schuette campaign changed tactics.
Why, Andrea Bitely, his press secretary told the press, finding notaries isn’t always easy. (It’s so hard, in fact, that the last time I needed one, I had to walk into the front door of my credit union.)
Besides, she added, it only took state employees about 30 seconds to sign and/or notarize the documents, etc. etc.
Gov. Rick Snyder’s press secretary, Anna Heaton, didn’t see it that way. “The governor does not bring personal financial documents to work, not does he ask his staff who are paid by taxpayers to sign personal documents,” she told Gongwer.
Schuette, by the way, had said all his assets were in a blind trust, which they clearly weren’t.
Be that as it may, Jim Hines, a long shot candidate for the GOP nomination, may have put it best: “Not only did he fail to disclose, he repeatedly lied to the press about his knowledge of this property.”
Bingo. If Bill Schuette is willing to lie about something so easy to expose and relatively non-controversial as this … what other darker and more ominous things might he try to get away with were he to be elected governor? Think about it.
Novel way to rein in campaign spending
For years, people tried to do something about controlling campaign spending.
That was all effectively ended in 2010, alas, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that there could be essentially no limits placed on political spending, because doing so restricted free speech.
That was in a case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Since then, people have muttered about hoping a new Supreme Court would reverse that decision, or about getting a U.S. Constitutional Amendment to change it.
Realistically, however, neither of those things is going to happen in our lifetime. But might be another way of doing it:
The most expensive campaign spending is always for broadcast TV and radio commercials. Nobody has the right to tell anyone what they can print or put on the internet. But over-the-air transmissions can be strictly regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, usually known just as the FCC.
The airwaves are public property, just like the national parks. In past years, the FCC required all stations to provide programming in the public interest, which meant news. Until 1987, the FCC also enforced something called the Fairness Doctrine, which assured to a great extent that what was presented was really fair and balanced.
What if a future FCC were to issue a decree calling for strict and equal limitations on broadcast campaign advertising?
This wouldn’t apply to cable TV or satellite radio, because it is not broadcast over the air. But most cable news stations are aggressively partisan to begin with; few liberals place ads on FOX.
This might not be a perfect solution, but it could do a lot to redress the balance in a nation where balance is an endangered species. Ronald Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine partly by appointing FCC commissioners who would do just that.
Just imagine the commissioners someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would appoint. Patience may be needed.
But this battle may not be over yet.
