"In a glorious way that makes it easier to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties into only four districts. Is there anyone on our side who doesn’t recognize that dynamic?" - Michigan Republican congressional aide Jack Daly, in a 2011 email describing the Republican strategy to solidify control of most of Michigan's congressional seats.
When the Republican state legislature redrew the state's 14 US House seats in 2011, it gave the work of drawing new borders to the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and other consultants. Publicly, the Chamber says it only seeks fairness and doesn’t support gerrymandering. Privately of course, it cheerfully assures Republicans, "We’ve spent a lot of time providing options to ensure we have a solid 9-5 delegation in 2012 and beyond." And the Republican party's State Leadership Committee isn't at all shy about boasting of their ability to gerrymander, noting, "Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress." It should also be noted that the state legislature itself is heavily gerrymandered, with large Republican majorities elected in 2012 despite despite the fact that voters preferred Democratic state legislative candidates over Republicans by an 8-point spread that year.
This is nothing we haven't seen in other Republican-led states. In Michigan however, stealing control of the state legislature and the state's congressional majority was not nearly enough for Republicans. In recent years Michigan Republicans have gone a long way towards concentrating unprecedented power in the hands of the state's Governor. And they've done so in a way that is deeply racist (surprise, surprise). From staff blogger Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos,
"Republicans therefore concocted a scheme to circumvent elected local governments by having the state appoint so-called "emergency managers" to take control of local financial decisions. It was a perfect display of cynicism: Republicans in the state capital have spent years starving Detroit and other cities financially, thus paving the way for these emergency managers to swoop in and undermine pensions, promote education privatization, and dismantle public services.
The emergency manager law proved so unpopular that Michigan voters repealed it at the ballot in 2012. In response, Republicans, with their gerrymander-protected majorities, simply passed the law a second time, and added a small fiscal appropriation that rendered it immune from a ballot-box veto. (Spending laws can’t be overturned by voters via referendum.) And that’s not the only case where Republicans have over-ridden the the public’s will: They recently passed—again, with a fig-leaf appropriation—a repeal of straight-ticket voting that would likely lengthen voting lines in urban, heavily minority precincts. Guess what? Voters had previously rejected precisely such an effort at the ballot box, just as they did with emergency managers.
So what do these anti-democratic measures have to do with Flint’s current crisis, where lead has poisoned children and made tap water unusable for 100,000 people? It turns out that (Republican Governor) Snyder’s government had installed an emergency manager to usurp Flint’s fiscal policy authority. At the state’s direction, that emergency manager made the decision to switch from Detroit’s water system to contaminated Flint River water, even though the move would not save money. Instead, it would help undermine Detroit’s water system and pave the way toward its eventual privatization."
The Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded in 2017 that the emergency manager law is intrinsically discriminatory, and that it deepens the disparity between poor urban and affluent suburban communities. The Commission said, "If you live in Michigan, there is a 10 percent chance that you have lived under emergency management since 2009. But if you are a black Michigander, the odds are 50/50," "In short, the EM law as applied far too often addresses the problems of already financially stricken governments in second-class communities, segregated based on race, wealth and opportunity, by appointing an emergency manager whose toolbox is filled with short term solutions that are contrary to the long term interests of the people living there."
Despite all this, there's hope for a better future. Merrit Kennedy of NPR noted in late 2016, "Michigan's attorney general has announced felony charges against two former emergency managers of Flint, Mich., and two other former city officials. The charges are linked to the city's disastrous decision to switch water sources, ultimately resulting in widespread and dangerous lead contamination." Current polls also show that Democrat Gretchen Whitmer has a strong chance of being elected Governor this year. I wonder how Republican-dominated areas in Michigan feel about a new Governor abolishing home rule in their towns in favor of "emergency managers"?
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