DETROIT – During Prohibition, one of the best speakeasies in Detroit was run by one Frank Kelley, who was a pretty good judge of human nature. Once, when his eldest son was thinking about going into politics, he gave him this sage advice:
“If you’re going to be in public life, and I urge you to, remember this: They stoned Moses, crucified Christ, and shot Lincoln. What do you think your chances are?”
Actually, his son, the former attorney general, did pretty well, winning no fewer than ten statewide elections and never once being shot, crucified or even stoned, though he was once burned in effigy.
But politics in Michigan is a lot worse now than in Frank Kelley’s day, for a number of reasons, including the harshness of partisan “news” shows and venom spewed on social media.
Bipartisan cooperation for the public good has pretty much vanished, except in the direst of circumstances – and then the parties work together only grudgingly.
After a lifetime of watching politics in Michigan, I can say without the least hesitation that government is badly broken. Michigan was generally well-run throughout the 1970s and 80s, with well-run state governments better than the national average.
Today, it is more or less a mess. Today’s hyper-partisanship is not, however, the worst culprit. Government is broken for two major structural reasons, one of which is getting fixed, and one not.
Those culprits are gerrymandering and term limits.
Gerrymandering, the art of designing more legislative districts to be utterly safe for one party or the other, is on the way out.
Three years ago, Michigan voters ignored howls of protest from state Republicans and enacted a state constitutional amendment that took reapportionment away from the legislature and the politicians and turned it over to a new citizens’ commission.
They are now busily at work designing new districts, something that by law has to be done every decade after the census. In previous decades stretching back to the 1960s, Republicans controlled the process because they always were in control when redistricting happened – and they drew lines to make sure they always would be, by packing Democrats into as few districts as possible.
In several elections since then, a majority of voters have chosen Democratic candidates for the legislature – and the state ended up with GOP majorities anyway because of outrageous boundaries.
Michigan’s Senate, for example, hasn’t been controlled by Democrats since 1983. But besides the unfair partisan advantage, gerrymandering has had utter corrosive effects on governments. When districts are drawn to always elect one party or another, that means the only real competition is in the primary elections.
Few voters traditionally turn out in Michigan’s primaries, which are held in August. Those who do turn out tend to be the more ideologically extreme. That has produced results, for example, like that when moderate GOP Congressman Joe Schwarz, a man deeply respected by both parties, was defeated by a former Bible salesman in a low-turnout primary some years ago.
Gerrymandered districts also often elect candidates who have no business being in government. Consider the case of State Rep. Brian Banks, a Detroit Democrat. He was reelected in 2016 despite having been convicted of eight felonies, mainly for things like bad checks, and after the state had to pay $100,000 to defend him against charges that he sexually harassed a male aide.
Soon after he was elected, he was charged with three more felonies, and made a deal where he quit so he wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Things like that helped persuade voters to get rid of gerrymandering, and by next year, we should have far more truly competitive seats. But Michigan government has also been crippled since the 1990s by one of the worst ideas ever enacted into law:
Term limits — possibly the worst term limits in the nation — have done more to damage government in Michigan than anything I have seen in my lifetime. Citizens can serve up to six years in the state house of representative and eight years in the state senate – and then are banned from service for the rest of their lives.
It takes more years than that to thoroughly learn how lawmaking works, and more years to build and cultivate the personal relationships, especially across party lines, that are necessary to solve problems and make government function in a crisis.
Term limits have led to the election of a former Speaker of the House who was a 30-year-old former Christian school employee, and a current Senate Majority Leader who wants government to “vigorously investigate” using horse dewormer to treat Covid-19.
Term limits have also made it impossible for any lawmaker to develop the kind of deep knowledge of a subject –say, education funding – that is essential for committee chairs. This has given lobbyists and special interests more power than they should have, which, of course, is why special interests wanted term limits in the first place, and helped fund the ballot drive that got them enacted in 1992. Perhaps worst of all, term limits have given lawmakers a huge incentive to sweep problems under the rug, instead of behaving responsibly and struggling to fix them.
What is too often forgotten is that the Founding Fathers enacted a system of term limits when they wrote our federal and state constitutions: They were called elections.
Michigan citizens rallied three years ago to beat the special interests and end gerrymandering. If they could somehow do the same for term limits, they might have a state that once again could intelligently act on what its citizens need.
-30-
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
