Michigan Republicans' lame-duck drive to hobble Democrats fails - mostly

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Michigan Republicans’ lame-duck drive to hobble Democrats fails – mostly

Bills to strip power from incoming officials failed or were vetoed, but the GOP still made changes that will affect liberal voters

Tom Perkins in Detroit
Sun 30 Dec 2018 12.58 GMT

A frantic lame-duck month in which the Republican-controlled Michigan legislature floated hundreds of bills concluded with the GOP largely failing to pass controversial laws that would have stripped power from incoming Democrats.

Two bills died during the legislative process just before Christmas, and on Friday outgoing Republican governor Rick Snyder surprised his party by vetoing a bill designed to shift power from attorney general-elect Dana Nessel to the legislature. He did so after a law designed to take authority from incoming secretary of state Jocelyn Benson failed to make it out of the state House. A plan to create a “shadow” state board of education controlled by Republicans met the same fate in the Senate.

Snyder did sign several bills that reduce voters’ power. They included significant alterations to citizen-initiated laws that mandated paid sick time and raised the minimum wage, and legislation to make ballot drives nearly impossible.

“They may not have taken power from incoming electeds but they did take significant power from people and that’s important to highlight,” Democratic state representative Yousef Rabhi told the Guardian, adding that he was stopping short of praising anyone in the Republican party.

“They were planning to set the house on fire so it’s sort of weird to applaud them for not burning it down,” he said.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/30/michigan-republicans-lame-duck-democrats-rick-snyder-veto

[catbyte]

1. I think some MIGOP pols realized that the state won't be gerrymandered by them after the

2020 census, so chances are they will be the minority party in the legislature after 2022. They would be cutting off their nose to spite their face. But they did manage to pass and Rick "The Dictator" Snyder signed, that vile law making it more difficult to get proposals put on the statewide ballot. Anti-democracy right down to the bitter end.