When I woke up yesterday and heard that there had been another mass shooting, this time in California, there was something I instantly knew would be true.

I knew nobody would do anything about it.  I also strongly suspected nobody would even suggest doing anything about it.  Sadly, I was right on both counts.

Nobody is suggesting we actually enact sane gun control.  Nobody is even suggesting we expand background checks for anyone who wants to buy a weapon, or that we make guns harder to get for the mentally disturbed.  Gavin Newsom, the matinee-idol politician just elected governor of California, said “We cannot allow this to be normalized.”

Guess what?  This form of mass murder has been normalized!  That happened soon after the Sandy Hook shooting six years ago, when 20 six and seven-year-old children were murdered in their classrooms, their tiny heads exploded by high-powered bullets.

Six adults also died before the shooter killed himself, as most of these cowards do including the latest one. After Sandy Hook, President Obama tried his hardest to at least get Congress to expand background checks. Nothing happened of course, and we might as well face the reason why. The National Rifle Association, and perhaps some other irrational pro-gun fanatics, owns our politicians.  They contribute to their campaigns, and threaten to defeat them if they do anything to limit the ability of anyone to get all the murder weapons they want.

So nothing will happen.  You probably aren’t used to hearing the facts put as starkly as this, but you need to.  We value our guns more than we do our loved ones’ lives.

I am fully aware, of course, that millions believe they need guns for self-defense, either against burglars or against the mythical black helicopters sent by the United Nations to destroy our freedoms, or whatever the current right-wing fantasy is.

Well, yes.  There are a few actual cases of people using their guns to kill bad guys.  There are, however, even more cases of gun-toting homeowners who accidentally shot a family member or themselves in response to real or imagined danger.

There are cases like that of Theodore Wafer. Five years ago this month, a disoriented and intoxicated teenage girl banged on his front door in the wee hours, evidently trying to get help after a car accident.  You might think the thing to do would be to call 911.

Wafer thought the thing to do was blow her away with a shotgun.  Oh, he did say he was sorry later, but is now serving thirty years in prison.

One impetuous moment with a gun; two lives ruined.  Last year, at least 15,549 people died by gun violence in this country.  When you add in the suicides, the total is more than double. You will sometimes hear it said that if we enact tough gun control laws, the good guys would lose their guns and the bad guys still have theirs.

Japan, which has a little over one-third of our population, has very strict gun control laws. Nevertheless, there are still murders committed with guns in Japan.

Want to guess how many? Last year, there were three.  Not three hundred, not three thousand. Three.  We evidently think 15,000 needless deaths are worth it.  Yesterday, I heard a reporter on TV say this was the first mass murder in this country … in twelve days.  There will be another soon, and another. Someday, maybe we will care enough to do something.

My guess is that will be the day after a gunman goes into a daycare center where the grandchildren of Congressmen are.  In the meantime, I suggest you don’t allow any guns in your homes, and vote against anyone who takes any money from the gun lobby.

That’s the least you can do.

DETROIT – So you think the much-awaited “blue wave” fell short of expectations?

Nationally, that might appear to be the case, especially when you look at how Republicans actually gained seats in the U.S. Senate.

Democrats failed to win the governorship in neighboring Ohio, for example, where their impressive and progressive candidate, Richard Cordray, lost to Mike DeWine, a shopworn former U.S. Senator in his 70s.

But in Michigan, it really was a blue day that left Democrats feeling anything but sad. In fact, Democrats scored their biggest sweep in the state in decades:

*  Gretchen Whitmer, a former minority leader of the state senate, took back the governorship for the Democrats by easily defeating Bill Schuette, the state attorney general, by an impressive nine points and nearly 400,000 votes.

* For the first time since the early 1990s, Democrats will control all the major statewide offices, as Jocelyn Benson easily was elected Secretary of State and Dana Nessel won the race for attorney general.

Not only is this the first time that the “big three” top office holders are women, it was notable in two other ways.  Ms. Whitmer’s selection of African-American Garlin Gilchrist as lieutenant governor meant that, for the first time ever, none of the top four office holders are white men. (Sob) Additionally, Dana Nessel is not only Michigan’s the first openly gay statewide official; she has a wife and two sons.

* U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow won a fourth term over GOP newcomer John James, a decorated African-American veteran of Operation Desert Freedom, but by her smallest margin since she was first elected to the Senate.

Democrats also gained two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, which will give them a 7-7 tie in the delegation.

Elissa Slotkin, a former acting assistant secretary of defense, beat two-term incumbent congressman Mike Bishop, and Haley Stevens, chief of staff for President Obama’s auto industry rescue team, won a seat held by a retiring Republican.

Democrats also gained five seats in both houses of the Michigan Legislature, but failed to win control of either, in large part because GOP gerrymandering has made that next to impossible.

They did, however, knock off an incumbent state Supreme Court justice, Kurtis Wilder, with a little-known attorney named Megan Cavanagh, the first time that has happened in a decade.

They won a majority on the Oakland County commission, for the first time since at least the 1970s.

And beyond that, in what may prove to be the most politically significant development of all, Michigan voters opted to end partisan gerrymandering forever, amending the state constitution to take redistricting away from the legislature.

Starting after the next census, both congressional and legislative districts will be drawn by an independent commission of four Republicans, four Democrats and five independents.

This happened after a true grass-roots and bipartisan citizens’ committee calling themselves Voters Not Politicians gathered signatures, fought court battles and got this on the ballot.

Republicans, who were in favor of leaving redistricting to the legislature (naturally, since they control it), flooded the airwaves with often misleading ads – but the amendment passed anyway, with an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote.

Another amendment that makes it easier to register to vote and allows anyone to vote an absentee ballot passed even more easily.

Michigan voters also decided to make it legal to use recreational marijuana (still illegal under federal law) and adopted an amendment that sets standards for its use and distribution.

Why did Democrats do so much better in Michigan than in most places? To be sure, Donald Trump is less popular in Michigan than in many states; his narrow victory in 2016 was his smallest in the nation.

But to an extent,

Gretchen Whitmer will take office on New Year’s Day, having pledged to fix the “damn roads,” as she has said, and improve education.  She will have Democratic colleagues in the two other main statewide posts, Attorney General and Secretary of State.

That’s something the last Democratic governor never had. But her party failed to win either house of the legislature, though they made gains in both. So there’s a big question as to how she expects to get things done and her agenda passed.

The governor-elect says her many years in the legislature taught her how to work constructively with members of the opposition party, meaning the Republicans.

But we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s also a ticking time bomb in that a road repair budget that was passed some time ago is scheduled to soon start carving $600 million a year out of the cash-strapped general fund.

That would seem to hint at further cuts to things like education and child care, which is the opposite of what Whitmer wants.  You can probably expect some major battles ahead.

How they will turn out, none can say.  But here’s something we do know.  The next time the state senate is up for election, in 2022, it will be a very different ballgame, thanks in large part to the passage of Proposal 2, the anti-gerrymandering amendment.

Every state has to draw new district lines based on population shifts every ten years.  The U.S. Census will count all of us a year from April. Lansing will get the results towards the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021, and then, a whole new set of boundaries for legislative and congressional seats will have to be drawn in time for the 2022 elections.

But this time, instead of the legislature doing it, a new bipartisan and nonpartisan panel of four Republicans, four Democrats and five independents will draw the new lines.  That should lead to fairer and more sensible districts, made up of people who have things in common.

Had districts like that been in place yesterday, Democrats probably would have taken both houses of the legislature yesterday. Instead, now we will see whether Governor Whitmer can give us bipartisanship, or whether we are doomed to Granholm-era gridlock.

I have a hunch that Whitmer may actually be more successful.  First, we need to see what happens in what may well be a frenetic lame-duck session between now and the end of the year.

Republicans will attempt to pass all sorts of bills before they lose the pen of a friendly governor who they can count on to sign them.  Governor Rick Snyder is going to be trying to cement his deal with Enbridge to put Line 5 the oil-carrying pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, in a concrete tunnel, ownership of which would then be turned over to the Mackinac Bridge Authority, many of whose members don’t want anything to do with it.

They also know that Attorney General-elect Dana Nessel, whose manner is often not conciliatory, will try to do anything in her power to shut down Line 5 the day she takes office. You can expect big-time fireworks indeed.

There is some good news in that turnout was considerably higher in Michigan this year, despite the rain. People genuinely care about their government, it seems.

Now, we will find out if the new government they elected cares about them –and if has the ability to improve their lives and get things done.

It’s hard to find a political slogan that hasn’t been used before. Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon’s was, “This time, vote like your whole world depended on it.”

It was a good slogan, and in fact, enough people did vote for Nixon to give him a narrow victory. Less than six years later, some of those people had come to believe that the world needed Nixon tossed out of office, and they helped pressure him to resign.

Well, this time you need to vote, because our whole world really does depend on it — or at least the survival of democracy in America. Let’s face facts: Donald Trump is not like any President we have ever seen before. He is a reckless demagogue who knows everything about campaigning and next to nothing about governing.

Nor does he know, or care, about this nation’s history and traditions, about the Constitution, about what this nation is supposed to stand for, or common human decency.

He appears to have virtually no compassion for his fellow human beings, no grasp of diplomacy, of the delicate world order he inherited, and the perhaps even more delicate world economy, a network of created by decades of careful negotiations.

This is not to say that things or treaties can’t be improved. But a hysterical know-nothing beating on a piano with a club is not about to give us a better interpretation of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

We now have an administration which finds stirring up racism natural, and a President who, without any justification, has called a black candidate for governor a thief.

A President who shows no respect for the truth. According to fact-checkers for the Washington Post, Donald Trump has been telling an average of 30 lies a day over the last seven weeks. All politicians, even the best of them, shade the truth some, especially during an election campaign. But what Trump has been doing is not of the same category.

Curiously, he isn’t bragging much about the good economy. Instead, he has been vilifying Democrats in the most outrageous terms, calling them traitors and saying they want to open the nation’s borders to dangerous and diseased illegal aliens.

He has misused our military for political reasons, sending thousands of soldiers to our southern border, allegedly to prevent members of a ragtag “caravan” from getting into this nation.

His own military estimates that they are weeks away and no more than a few hundred are likely to make it to the border. But Trump couldn’t care less about the facts.

This is, by the way, a President who has tried twice now to eliminate all funding to restore the Great Lakes. We need people to oppose him who have a positive vision for the future, But first, we need to restore balance and decency to our political system.

Forget party labels.

If you think fairness counts, if you think we have too much economic inequality in this nation, vote.  If you think we owe it to ourselves to protect our environment and make it possible for our children to get a decent education, vote.

If you think we owe something to Viola Liuzzo and Medgar Evers and the many martyrs who died so we could all have the right to cast a ballot, vote.

Because if you don’t vote, you are still voting in a way:  You are showing you don’t care enough to protest what they are doing to you.  You have a chance to show how you feel today.

Use it.

This may sound odd, but when I think of Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, I often think of President Gerald Ford.  They were both star athletes who went on to success in other walks of life before having power unexpectedly thrust on them.

Neither ever expected to get the top job — but ended up in the roles they did in large part because of corrupt former leaders who had damaged and tainted the institutions these men loved and respected. Both Ford and Bing found themselves forced to make difficult decisions; knowing doing the right thing would be politically damaging, even fatal.

They both rose to the challenge.  Gerald Ford was in some ways probably the least likely president we’ve ever had.  Eleven months before he took office, he was a congressman from Grand Rapids who never dreamed he would ever be President.

But then the vice-president resigned and he was appointed to that position, and a few months later, his lying and obstruction of justice totally exposed, Richard Nixon resigned in order to avoid being impeached and losing his pension. Ford took over, and told America “our long national nightmare is over.” He was greeted warmly and enthusiastically.

But then, he pardoned Nixon – and instantly lost much of that goodwill.  Two years later, trying to get elected President on his own, he lost a close race to Jimmy Carter.

Everybody knew the pardon was the biggest reason he was defeated.  Today, most historians agree pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do. Not because Nixon deserved it, but because the country needed to move on. President Ford told me twenty years later that he knew the pardon might cost him the election, but that he had to do it for the good of the nation.

Dave Bing also stepped up when he didn’t have to, announcing ten years ago that he was going to run for mayor after the city’s long nightmare ended when Kwame Kilpatrick resigned.

People had been pressing him to run for many years, but he had given back to the community in other ways, learning the steel business, starting a company, making it successful and employing workers. But in 2008 Detroit was on the ropes.

Bing felt the city needed someone from outside the conventional political circles. But he had to fight hard to win both the special election and the full term.  He told me once that it took him months to figure out what the city’s finances really were; the numbers he’d been left by the Kilpatrick administration were largely fictitious.

Mayor Bing succeeded in restoring honesty and decency to the office.  But he couldn’t deliver prosperity, or keep Detroit out of bankruptcy. He became mayor at the time of the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The city already had been in decline for decades. Four years before Bing became mayor, Joe Harris, Detroit’s auditor general told me the city was headed for bankruptcy regardless of what anyone did.

When the state took over Detroit and appointed an emergency manager, Bing could have been a demagogue, played the race card, and maybe made himself a popular symbol of resistance.  Instead, he was a statesman, doing what he could to help.

He quietly declined to run for reelection, and returned to private life.  I think we still don’t realize what a positive difference his decency made.

When Jimmy Carter gave his inaugural address, he turned to President Ford and said “I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal this land.”

Mike Duggan should have said something like that to Dave Bing.

Old politics writers have long memories. Back in 1990, there was much less suspense about the governor’s election in Michigan than there’s been this year.

That was before term limits, and Governor James J. Blanchard, better known as Jim, was running for a third term against the Republican leader of the state senate.

Blanchard had been popular most of his time in office. He had won a second term four years before by a staggering landslide.  The election was on November 6th, same as this year, and nationwide, indications were that it would be a good year for the Democrats.

The final polls came out that weekend, and Blanchard was ahead by 54 to 40 percent, a bigger margin than Gretchen Whitmer has today. So the election was, essentially over.

Except that it wasn’t.  Turnout was exceptionally terrible, especially in Detroit, where Mayor Coleman Young had been feuding with Blanchard. Suddenly, on Election Day, the exit polls were saying the race had become dead even. At four the next morning, Blanchard looked at the figures with his top aide, and his face went white. He had lost.

John Engler would be the next governor of Michigan, and over the next dozen years would radically change this state. I am not saying that is going to happen this year. People are still not certain why that tremendous upset happened. When one embarrassed pollster took another survey after the 1990 election, his results still indicated Blanchard should have won.

On the same night, also running for reelection, Senator Carl Levin made short work of his challenger, a young congressman named Bill Schuette.

Polls are usually pretty accurate these days, but all they really measure is where the wind and the shifting sands are at a particular moment in time. Blanchard probably would have won in 1990, had the expected three million voters shown up, instead of barely two and a half million.

Rick Snyder won by a margin close to what had been forecast both times he ran. Gretchen Whitmer probably will win this year, if the final polls are close to being accurate.

But we just don’t know.  Seventy years ago this very day, newspapers had the headlines set in type before the first votes were cast: Dewey Defeats Truman, the Chicago Tribune’s said.

The Democratic Party had split into three factions. President Harry Truman had no chance.  On Election Night, Truman essentially ran away to face what was coming alone. Two Secret Service men drove him to a secluded bed and breakfast and checked him in under an assumed name.  He had a sandwich, drank a glass of buttermilk and went to bed.

Few other political figures slept that night. At 4:30 in the morning, the Secret Service woke the President up and had him turn on the radio. Truman had won the biggest upset in the history of American politics, and it wasn’t even that close.  That’s a pattern that has been repeated more times than pollsters care to admit.

But they will tell you that had a few hundred Florida Democrats voted back in 2000, or had one percent of those voting for Ralph Nader that year voted for Al Gore instead, this would be a different world, one in which we would never have invaded Iraq.

You’ve got four days to figure out your schedule for Tuesday. Whatever else you do, make time to vote.

 

I have a lot of respect for Rabbi Michael Moskowitz, but I think he wasn’t completely right this week when he said, “An attack on any synagogue is an attack on Jews and Judaism itself.”  What he ought to have said is that it is also an attack on America, on our Constitution, and on real Americans of every flavor.

We don’t attack and demonize and murder and kill our fellow Americans who don’t look like us or speak other languages or have different religions. When we do, it defeats the whole purpose of America. I am well aware we haven’t always lived up to our ideals.

This nation’s original sin was slavery, a horrendous mistake, one we are still reaping the consequences of daily.  Even before that, the European colonists treated the Native Americans so poorly it amounted to a form of de facto genocide. Following that, we discriminated against nearly every group that came to build a new life on these shores.

John F. Kennedy, possibly the closest thing to a natural aristocrat to occupy the White House in modern times, was only two generations removed from “no Irish need apply.”

The Ku Klux Klan attained great power in the north as well as the South in the 1920s, preaching messages of hate against Catholics and Jews as well as blacks. And yet we’ve always been better than that because our ideals and our founding principles were better.

We’ve had a black President now, and very nearly elected an Orthodox Jew vice president.

But tolerance ebbs and flows in this country, and we now seem to be in a particularly ugly and evil time.  Some of this is due to uncertainty and stress. We live in a frightening world. Geography, the thing that saved our homeland from being devastated in either world war, no longer is any protection, as Americans found out on September 11, 2001.

However, what is most wrong is at the top.   Presidents of the United States are supposed to be our leaders, to remind us of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

They are meant to be parental figures, in a way. We needed George W. Bush to reassure us on 9/11, just as we needed Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, and Ronald Reagan to address the nation after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.

I opposed many of the second President Bush’s policies.  Yet I am proud to note that within days of the 9/11 attacks, he delivered a major speech defending Muslims in America and around the world, calling Islam a religion of peace. President Bush noted that millions of American citizens were Muslims, and pointedly saying that “women who cover their heads on this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.”

That’s what presidents are supposed to do. We don’t have that now; instead, we have an occupant of the Oval Office who seems more interested in dividing and attacking us.

He did a little better, belatedly, in a speech after Pittsburgh. But for two years, he has spoken as if it was fine to demonize those you disagree with, maybe even physically attack those who are not like us, an attitude that is totally un-American.

We are better than that. Our role model should be the head of the hospital where they took the Pennsylvania shooter after he was captured. That doctor led the medical team that treated Robert Bowers. He was, by the way, a Jew and a member of the synagogue he attacked.

Afterwards, Dr. Jeff Cohen said “my job isn’t to judge him, my job is to care for him.” That’s the kind of nobility, and leadership, we need in America today.

 

I was talking to a psychologist earlier this week about Halloween, and she noted that these days, real people were scarier than Dracula or Frankenstein could ever be.

She was right, of course.  I think many parents of young children, perhaps especially Jewish parents, are having a hard time this year celebrating a holiday dedicated to being scared of monsters when there are so many real monsters on the loose in the world.

We are living in an age of anxiety, to put it mildly. But then I remembered that we always have been, to an extent. The custom of “trick or treating” didn’t really become established until the 1930s. That was during the Great Depression, and you have to wonder who then could afford to give out candy, or much of anything else.

I wasn’t around then, nor during World War II, when the monsters were also real, and daddy might have been off many miles away trying to kill them.  But I was a child during the Cold War. Halloween when I was ten came just days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we came as close as we ever did to being incinerated in a nuclear war.

But none of that seemed to touch Halloween.

I never saw, nor heard of, a kid back then who dressed up as an H-bomb or Nikita Khrushchev for Halloween. I think there was an unspoken rule that Halloween belonged to the pretend monsters and that we had enough of the real ones the rest of the year.

But I think there was something else going on, too: I think we believed in ourselves and our fellow Americans in a way we don’t anymore. Yes, we had divisions back then, and a few of us  were killing each other in a fight over civil rights.

But no matter what side we were on then, we were confident that somehow America would win through in the end.  We had done so, after all, just a few years before. Vietnam was a tiny cloud far off on the horizon. Nobody had ever heard the term Watergate.

Nobody worried that someone would shoot up our elementary school. We are living in a different world now, one that is technologically far superior.

There are lots of other good things going on too. Detroit is now getting better, not worse.  When it was getting dark last night, I drove over to see some real heroes when the sun was going down; the men and women of Detroit Blight Busters, getting ready to start their patrols and having a fast dinner at their  fabulous Artists’ Café next to the old Redford Theater.

For years, they have saved lives, millions in property, and their city’s honor by cutting down arson with their “Angels’ Night” patrols.  Mayor Mike Duggan had told them their services were no longer required, that the city no longer had to worry about a new flair-up of the orgy of arson fires that back in the 1980s made Devils’ Night synonymous with Detroit.

Duggan may have been right. But I am glad John George and his troops didn’t listen.  Showing your love by patrolling your neighborhood once a year to keep it safe is an act of the profoundest patriotism. It sends a message that the good guys are here to stay.

So let’s start believing it, and banishing the monsters. Or as Detroit’s motto says speramus meliora; resurget cineribus.  That’s already happening.

Even when the monsters appear, try not to forget.

 

It’s sometimes said that the ethics of practicing medicine all flow from four simple words: First, do no harm. Those words aren’t actually in the famous Hippocratic oath.

But they are good words to live by. Not sufficient for every situation, but a good place to start.  You could translate that into a modern street version, something to the effect of: “Don’t screw with it unless you can fix it, with its corollary, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Well, enough semantics – you get the idea. Some might say that I shouldn’t go expressing an opinion about what the City of Detroit should do about its charter, since I don’t live there.  Indeed, I don’t have the right to vote in Detroit.

And nobody has to listen to anything I say.  But the First Amendment means we all have the right to express our feelings about everything, and I do care about Detroit.

And what I think about the revision of the city charter is this: It is really too soon to do this all over again.  The city had a major charter revision less than seven years ago. Someday, Detroit will probably need to revise the charter again in a major way.  But it is too soon.

Political scientists tell us that the reason the U.S. Constitution has lasted so long is that it is “elastic,” meaning we can amend it.  That’s true, but an equally important reason is that it is hard to amend. It has only been amended 17 times in the last 227 years, and two of those amendments – the ones establishing and then repealing Prohibition –canceled each other out.

I think the charter did need to be revised a few years ago, and I think the commission made some good decisions then, such as providing for some council members to be elected by district.  Normally, the voters are supposed to be asked every 16 years if they want to revise the charter. That’s the same frequency as we are asked whether to reopen Michigan’s Constitution.

But because the revisions occurred out of sequence, they had to ask again now, and by a margin of less than three-tenths of one percent, the voters opted to spend more than a million dollars to have a new charter revision committee. By the way, the number of those voting to do this was less than five percent of the population of Detroit.

That’s why turnout matters. Now, there’s two things to keep in mind: First, there’s no reason those elected to the commission next week need to justify their existence by overhauling  a charter than doesn’t need to be overhauled.  Second, and we need to remember this –they don’t get to make automatic changes. Detroiters get to vote on what they propose.

And if they don’t like it, they can and should just vote no.  Now, there may indeed be minor tweaks that need to be made to improve the charter.

But the only two ideas I have heard so far strike me as wrong-headed. One was to impose a limit of two terms on any mayor, and one would change the residency requirement for running for mayor from one year to four.   You might refer to these as the “we can’t beat Mike Duggan, so we will prevent him from happening again” amendments.

If there’s anything we should know by now, it is that term limits are a bad idea. Actually, I have a lot of faith in Detroiters to do the right thing.

As long as they remember that first rule, “first, do no harm.”

When he sets out to do something, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan doesn’t often lose. But he did last year, when he attempted to get the legislature to overhaul Michigan’s unique no-fault auto insurance system. His bill lost overwhelmingly in the House and never got to the Senate.

Now, Duggan is suing the state in federal court.  He blames our no-fault system for the fact that Michigan has the highest-in-the- nation auto insurance rates, and wants our present system declared unconstitutional, because he says it fails to produce fair car insurance rates.

Car insurance rates are the highest of all in Detroit, as many people know, and that has been a major impediment to getting people to move back to the city. Many who do live in Detroit have driver’s licenses that claim they officially live elsewhere, to keep their insurance rates low.

That means, of course, they can’t vote in Detroit, and are essentially living a lie. Well, I think Duggan has been a good mayor, and I entirely sympathize with his frustration here.

But I also think he is dead wrong. Michigan drivers all pay $192 per vehicle per year that goes towards the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Fund. That fund now has something like $20 billion – billion with a b – in it, and it guarantees that anyone racked up in an accident will get all the medical care they need, for life if they need it, no matter who is at fault.

The mayor wants to do whatever it would take to bring rates down, including, if, necessary converting Michigan’s system into one in which your coverage for serious injuries would be capped, and in many cases you would have to sue your insurance company, or the other driver and his or her insurance company, or both.

Such lawsuits can take years – and who would pay for the catastrophically injured plaintiff during that time?   Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson has been energetically pro-business his entire life.  On most issues and in most cases, he is more conservative than Mike Duggan.  But Patterson will never support the idea of ending our automatic catastrophic claims coverage, and there’s a big reason why:  He was very badly injured in a 2012 auto accident.

He was in a coma for weeks.  His driver survived, but is a quadriplegic who will need constant care for life, and who is relying on the catastrophic claims fund to do so.

Something like that could happen to you, or me, the next time we go to the grocery store.  Even if it doesn’t, if we eliminate the coverage we have now, innocent people are going to get inadequate care, see their families bankrupted by the system, suffer, and die.

Now, nobody is denying that car insurance rates in Detroit are too high. But people like lawyer George Sinas, a Lansing attorney who handles many of these claims, and Julie Novak, the CEO of the Michigan State Medical Society, say we are blaming the wrong culprit.

They think, as Novak wrote in a column published in the Detroit News, “we need to hold the insurance companies accountable for their unfair practice of using non-driving factors like gender, credit score and ZIP code to set rates.” Sinas thought the mayor should have asked the insurance bureau to determine whether the rate-setting practices were fair and equitable.

But that didn’t happen.  I think the state should commission some group like the Citizens’ Research Council of Michigan should do an in-depth study of this situation before anyone acts.

We’ve got the best catastrophic claims coverage in the world.  We should think twice before trading it away.