DETROIT – Right after last year’s midterm elections, someone tweeted a picture taken in the wee hours of the next morning. It showed several slightly disheveled and stunned people in a room filled with laptops and coffee cups. One had a hand over her mouth.
They were Democrats who had just realized that their party would control every top position in state government for the first time in 40 years. Most importantly, they had the governorship and both houses of the legislature. While the governor and other statewide officials had won by landslides, their legislative majorities were as thin as could be: 20 to 18 in the state senate, and 56-54 in the house.
While the Democrats had thought they had a shot at senate control, thanks to the state’s switch in 2020 to an anti-gerrymandering independent redistricting commission, both parties thought Republicans might keep control of the house.
The narrow margins by which Democrats won control led some to predict they would go slow on enacting their agenda. There were expectations that newly elected rural Democrats might not go along with moves to repeal right-to-work or adding protections for gay and transgender people to Michigan’s civil rights law.
No prediction could have been more wrong.
Democrats immediately began ramming important bills through the legislature, faster than anyone imagined. No governor had signed a bill into law in the first month of a legislative session since 1947. But before January was over, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had signed a complex $1.1 billion supplemental appropriations bill that included money for everything from affordable housing to job training to funds to prevent water shutoffs.
And they’d only just begun.
Before the end of March, they had passed ten major bills or packages of bills, many of which repealed legislation Republicans passed when they were in complete control of Michigan government from 2011 to 2019, when Rick Snyder was governor.
Whitmer soon signed into law another $1.3 billion bill that contained economic and business development incentives. They restored the so-called “prevailing wage” law, which requires union-scale pay for workers on state government construction projects.
They indeed added strong LGBTQ protections to the state’s Elliot-Larsen civil rights act. They repealed (this time, with some GOP support) a 1931 ban on virtually all abortions, even though that law had become meaningless because of a state constitutional amendment passed by voters last year, which essentially legalized abortion in Michigan for any reason whatsoever.
They repealed a law requiring third-graders who couldn’t read up to a certain standard to repeat that grade. And, in perhaps their most controversial move, they repealed Michigan’s right-to-work law.
Right-to-work laws essentially say that workers in a union-organized shop can opt out of paying union dues and still get the benefits that unions negotiate for workers. Republicans suddenly and unexpectedly made Michigan a right-to-work state by ramming such a law through a lame-duck legislative session in 2012.
Some thought pushing the repeal early in the session might have been a political mistake, but Jim Hoffa, the recently retired president of the Teamsters Union, disagreed.
“When you get a majority, you have to do things like this as quickly as possible,” before you lose momentum, Hoffa said. The repeal doesn’t take effect until March 30, 2024.
What was more controversial, however, was the governor’s decision to go back on her promise not to sign any bill that had an inappropriate legislative appropriation attached.
Michigan’s state constitution says that any bill voters don’t like can be repealed by the voters, if enough signatures are collected to get it on the ballot. However, this doesn’t apply to bills that appropriate money. This was done to prevent anyone causing chaos by trying to repeal things like the various state budgets.
However, Republicans in the last decade began attaching token small appropriations to other bills they wanted to push through, but didn’t think would be wildly popular with the public.
Gretchen Whitmer, who spent 14 years in the legislature, harshly denounced Republicans for doing that before she took office. When she was elected governor, she vowed never to sign such a bill.
But the right-to-work bill passed by Democrats last month did contain such an appropriation. Did Whitmer sternly refuse to sign it unless the inappropriate appropriation was removed?
Nope. She went back on her word and signed it.
Democrats moved other bills through as well, including one moving the state’s presidential primary from March to Feb. 27, something that presents a problem for Republicans, whose national rules say they will be penalized if they have a primary before March.
Nor are Democrats done. They plan to pass, among other things, some of the strongest gun control and gun safety laws in the nation, plus a bevy of new civil rights and labor bills.
Michigan is normally, however, a closely divided state politically. When Democrats rammed through a huge temporary tax increase in 1983, the last time they held total control, voters promptly recalled two Democratic state senators, ending their majority.
Could that happen again this time?
The answer is … probably not. The public has showed little to no outrage over what Democrats have done, and the Republican Party is divided, more than $460,000 in debt, and in disarray.
Instead of using their Lansing headquarters, new party chair Kristina Karamo has been using a post office box in Grand Rapids for official mail, and quarreling with previous party leaders.
Elections, as a gleeful Republican told me when right-to-work passed in 2012, have consequences. Indeed they do, and members of the GOP in Michigan are now finding that out for themselves.
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