DETROIT – Democrats often complain, and rightly so, that one of the biggest consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency will always be the three justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
That almost certainly led to Roe vs. Wade being overturned, blanket presidential immunity being granted, as well as other important decisions, with more to come. Elections, as they say, can have far-reaching consequences beyond particular candidates.
Well, something very similar has happened with Michigan’s highest court — but in reverse. Michigan Supreme Court justices are normally placed on the ballot by the two major parties, and for years, the Republicans had a 5-2 majority. But now, Democrats have a 4-3 majority, and that led to a stunning decision at the end of last month.
That decision means about a $2 per hour increase in the regular minimum wage for most workers in February, to about $12.30 an hour, and a huge increase over the next five years in the minimum paid to workers who depend on tips, like restaurant servers.
Their minimum wage, not counting tips, will go from the current $3.93 an hour to $15 an hour by early 2030. That’s what it will be for other workers as well, meaning there will no longer be a difference in the minimum wage, and all workers will be the same.
That ruling, which came on a fairly unusual, 4-3 party line vote, has restaurant workers ecstatic and restaurant owners howling it will ruin them and demanding the legislature fix this — something highly unlikely as long as Democrats are in control.
Additionally, the state’s highest court ruled that all employees of any business, not just restaurants, get at least 72 hours of sick time.
Here’s how and why this all happened:
Back in 2018, when Republicans still controlled the legislature and there was a GOP governor, two ad hoc groups collected signatures to put two proposals on the ballot. One did what the court just mandated about minimum wage; the other, sick time.
Under Michigan’s constitution, the legislature can prevent a referendum from happening if they adopt what it is trying to do first. So the lawmakers quickly came up with two bills that did so, passed them, and Gov. Rick Snyder signed them.
Why did they do that? Those who sponsored and passed the bills were dead set against what those bills aimed to do — and believed with good reason that the voters would have passed them.
So they resorted to a tactic called “adopt and amend.”
They passed the bills, and then, right after the general election, “amended” them to make them meaningless. Democrats protested, but there was little they could do… until one day they sued.
And the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that what the Republicans had done was underhanded and unconstitutional.
Justice Elizabeth Welch, in her majority opinion, wrote that when the legislature amended the laws it had just passed, “it obstructed voters’ ability to exercise their direct democracy rights through the initiative process … adopting the initiative petitions and then amending them in the same legislative session deprived the people of access to the process that is guaranteed them under Article 2” of the Michigan Constitution.
What that means is that when the Republicans passed the laws that the initiatives were proposing, they were legally unable to change them in the same session, meaning they had accomplished the precise opposite of what they meant to do.
Bill Ballenger, the 83-year-old dean of Michigan political analysts, and a Republican legislator more than half a century ago, more or less pooh-poohed restaurant industry leaders who predicted dire consequences. In his weekly Ballenger Report, he quoted Tom Lennard, a lobbyist for the Michigan Innovation Exchange as saying “scare tactics by corporate business lobbyists should be called out for what they are — weird, weak and wrong.”
“We won’t know the truth for months or years into the future,” he said. True, the legislature could now legally do what the Republicans illegally did, and modify those laws in any way. But as he said, “there is ZERO chance legislative Democrats” will do anything to roll back the extra money and sick time workers will get.
The moral of the story, he said, was that “Republicans have only themselves to blame for frittering away their Supreme Court majority … with weak, ill-funded candidates.”
“Elections have consequences,” he repeated. They do indeed, as those in both parties who don’t bother to vote when they find all the candidates to be less than perfect eventually tend to find out.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
