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“Let us pray,” intoned Senator Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing) shortly after midnight this morning. Anthony got directly and succinctly to the point with her invocation after the Senate gaveled in a new session day some twelve hours ago.
“Dear God, help us pass this budget,” she said. “Amen.”
And, with or without divine guidance, more than two days past the deadline, the Michigan Legislature very, very early this morning finally approved a bipartisan budget for the new fiscal year.
That was after missing the July 1 deadline set in state law and missing the constitutional deadline on October 1, which is when the state is required to have a balanced budget with the start of its new fiscal year.
School districts can’t change their July 1 budget deadlines, but they had to watch and wait while Lansing did exactly that.
The midnight October 1 deadline came and went. So, the governor and the Legislature (after toying for a few hours with just spending money without a budget in place) moved the deadline to October 8. (Gongwer News Service’s Zach Gorchow joined the pod this week to try and explain what the heck that was all about).
It was all infuriating to K-12 school districts, public universities and community colleges that do not have the option of just rewriting their calendars.
“To be clear, Michigan’s schools have been harmed throughout every step of this unnecessary, Lansing-made crisis and the lack of accountability as lawmakers continued to obstruct a budget from moving forward will not be forgotten,” emailed Robert McCann of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan. “Lansing owes our parents and schools an apology for this broken process.”
Senator Anthony told Rick that “we’ve already been brainstorming ways” to keep this from happening again next year, when it will be essentially the same players at the bargaining table.
“The reality is that this was a totally manufactured crisis and we could have in April been starting to come together in a more civil way to negotiate a budget that worked for everyone,” she said.
Maybe that was implicitly aimed at House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township), whose pugilistic leadership style had Democrats (and some Republicans) wondering if an on-time budget even mattered to him.
Hall, for his part, said he has no regrets about missing the October 1 deadline to get the budget deal he wanted.
“I think this budget is really about value for the dollars, whether it passed before or after,” he said. “But I’ll just say that this year, if I had surrendered to the Democrats and allowed all that pork in this budget, the voters would not have preferred that budget.”
And Hall and House Republicans did succeed in getting transparency measures into the budget such as advance and public notice of legislator-requested earmarks. That ball got rolling by an explosive story broken by The Detroit News’ Beth LeBlanc that a Whitmer fundraiser used a $20 million state grant on some questionable expenditures, including a $4,500 coffeepot and international travel.
Now, as the budget bills make their way to Whitmer for her signature, her budget staff will work to fly-speck the legislation and have it ready to sign (possibly with line-item vetoes).
We should mention, absent the deadline-pushing drama, the final budget bills should be a testament that a truly bipartisan deal is possible with pretty widely disbursed wins and losses.
Whitmer said, well, she hopes an earlier start to negotiating next year will help avert a similar budget imbroglio. (And an election year wouldn’t add more complications to that equation, right? Right?) Whitmer also harbors some hope that tempers will cool over time and once dollars start rolling out the door.
“It is a challenging environment and we've got shared government now – you know, split government,” she told Rick just a few hours after the House and Senate gaveled out.
“Now, I hope we don't ever repeat this,” she said. “We should try to make sure that next year we get this done earlier… But, I understand the frustration that our educators have had. I hope that they see the result of the budget and can see, okay, it was worth waiting because we'll continue our historic investments in education. We'll keep feeding our kids and supporting our teachers, and all of those are really important things for them to get their jobs done.”
A couple of political notes (you are, after all, reading the It’s Just Politics newsletter): One is the awkward positioning of Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt (R-Porter Township), who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor in next year’s election to replace Whitmer. He voted against the budget, basically saying House Republicans did the best they could under the circumstances, but it wasn’t enough.
Kind of steps on Hall’s message that the GOP scored big wins for conservatives. (Let’s not forget that Hall at one point did call for cutting the minority caucuses out of direct discussions, and even suggested that the Speaker and Whitmer could just hammer out a budget deal on their own.)
Also, one of the biggest flashpoints was part of the deal to raise more road funding, which is the new 24% wholesale tax on marijuana. Some Democrats and Republicans had problems with changing the rules on Michigan’s cannabis industry legalized by voters in 2018. While the tax got majorities in the House and Senate, it did not win supermajorities. That could run afoul of the Michigan Constitution’s supermajority requirement to change a petition-initiated, voter-approved law. Hemp industry folks are considering a legal challenge, which could punch a $420 million hole in this brand new budget.
Now, maybe you weren’t paying attention to all this.
Maybe you were less interested in the budget deadline and more interested in the fact that Taylor Swift’s new album dropped precisely at midnight. Rick could hear people on the House and Senate floors listening on phones, tablets and computers while they were still waiting around for a budget deal to drop.
Maybe Taylor Swift could teach Lansing a thing or two about hitting deadlines.
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Rick Pluta & Zoe Clark
Co-hosts, It’s Just Politics
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