Imagine

that the Detroit Tigers somehow, by a miracle, get into the World Series next year,

and against all odds, dramatically win the seventh game in the bottom of the

ninth inning.

How would you react if the other team then said: “Not

so fast.  We want the Commissioner of

Baseball to change the rules to make this a best five-out-of-nine series.”

Everybody would rightly regard that as outrageous.  Well, how would you react if, having lost an

election, the outgoing political party decided to change the rules to

significantly reduce the powers of the people who were just elected.  In a sense, that would be even worse.

Politics and government are a public business.

Baseball is private enterprise.  But

that’s exactly what Republicans in the current lame-duck session of the

legislature are trying to do.  The only

questions are whether outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder will sign some of their bills.

First, a little background.  Republicans have controlled the governorship,

both houses of the legislature and had a majority on the state supreme court

for the last eight years, years in which Flint was poisoned, pensions were

taxed, and they failed to fix the roads.

Well, whatever happened nationally in November, there

was without a doubt a blue wave in Michigan. Democrats easily won the races for

governor, secretary of state and attorney general. They defeated an incumbent

Republican Supreme Court justice, and took two seats in Congress away from the

GOP.  Democrats also won a majority of

the popular vote for both the state house and senate, but because of outrageous

gerrymandering, Republicans kept control of both bodies, though the Dems gained

five seats in each chamber.

But as soon as the results were known, Republicans

called a lame duck session of the legislature and began an orgy of passing

bills that they hadn’t dared to pass before, and which they know would never

have a chance of becoming law in January. Earlier this fall, they had cynically

passed bills that would have increased the minimum wage, especially for tipped

workers, and which would have guaranteed all workers sick time.

They did this to prevent ballot proposals that would

have done these things from going before the people, because they feared the

people would have approved them. Once the election was over, they passed new

laws making conditions for workers as bad or worse than before.

Rick Snyder happily signed them. The lawmakers and

Snyder also approved a bill to somehow put the dangerous oil-carrying Line 5 on

the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac into a concrete tunnel, though it is

clear a majority of the people want it shut down.

But the real outrage is in ongoing attempts to

infringe on the powers of the executive branch of government and future

lawmakers. They did abandon an attempt to take away oversight of campaign

finance laws from the secretary of state.

But there are still attempts to curb the powers of the

attorney general, but giving the legislature the right to intervene in any

court proceeding in the state, and to prevent the governor from enacting any

environmental standard stronger than the federal standard.

These bills are anti-democracy, possibly

unconstitutional, and certainly wrong. Most of them will reach Governor

Snyder’s desk, and in the next twelve days he will have to decide whether to

sign or veto them.  He has always said he