Imagine that the Detroit Tigers somehow, by a miracle, get into the World Series next year, and against all odds, dramatically win the seventh game in the bottom of the ninth inning.
How would you react if the other team then said: “Not so fast. We want the Commissioner of Baseball to change the rules to make this a best five-out-of-nine series.”
Everybody would rightly regard that as outrageous. Well, how would you react if, having lost an election, the outgoing political party decided to change the rules to significantly reduce the powers of the people who were just elected. In a sense, that would be even worse.
Politics and government are a public business. Baseball is private enterprise. But that’s exactly what Republicans in the current lame-duck session of the legislature are trying to do. The only questions are whether outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder will sign some of their bills.
First, a little background. Republicans have controlled the governorship, both houses of the legislature and had a majority on the state supreme court for the last eight years, years in which Flint was poisoned, pensions were taxed, and they failed to fix the roads.
Well, whatever happened nationally in November, there was without a doubt a blue wave in Michigan. Democrats easily won the races for governor, secretary of state and attorney general. They defeated an incumbent Republican Supreme Court justice, and took two seats in Congress away from the GOP. Democrats also won a majority of the popular vote for both the state house and senate, but because of outrageous gerrymandering, Republicans kept control of both bodies, though the Dems gained five seats in each chamber.
But as soon as the results were known, Republicans called a lame duck session of the legislature and began an orgy of passing bills that they hadn’t dared to pass before, and which they know would never have a chance of becoming law in January. Earlier this fall, they had cynically passed bills that would have increased the minimum wage, especially for tipped workers, and which would have guaranteed all workers sick time.
They did this to prevent ballot proposals that would have done these things from going before the people, because they feared the people would have approved them. Once the election was over, they passed new laws making conditions for workers as bad or worse than before.
Rick Snyder happily signed them. The lawmakers and Snyder also approved a bill to somehow put the dangerous oil-carrying Line 5 on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac into a concrete tunnel, though it is clear a majority of the people want it shut down.
But the real outrage is in ongoing attempts to infringe on the powers of the executive branch of government and future lawmakers. They did abandon an attempt to take away oversight of campaign finance laws from the secretary of state.
But there are still attempts to curb the powers of the attorney general, but giving the legislature the right to intervene in any court proceeding in the state, and to prevent the governor from enacting any environmental standard stronger than the federal standard.
These bills are anti-democracy, possibly unconstitutional, and certainly wrong. Most of them will reach Governor Snyder’s desk, and in the next twelve days he will have to decide whether to sign or veto them. He has always said he is willing to put people above party, when it was a question of doing the right thing. Whether that is true is something we soon shall see.
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