February 21, 2012 6:56 AM

America: Where democracy is alive and well...except in Michigan

On January 20 the progressive think tank Michigan Forward and the Detroit branch of the NAACP sent a joint letter to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder expressing concern over Public Act 4, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act. Signed into law in March 2011, it granted unprecedented new powers to the state’s emergency managers (EMs), including breaking union contracts, taking over pension systems, setting school curriculums and even dissolving or disincorporating municipalities. Under PA 4, EMs, who are appointed by the governor, can “exercise any power or authority of any officer, employee, department, board, commission or other similar entity of the local government whether elected or appointed.”

Imagine living in a world in which your vote means nothing. Imagine living in a world in which a politician who wasn’t elected and is accountable only to your state’s Governor has absolute power. Imagine that person having the legal right to invalidate the decision of any elected official AND to replace that official without recourse or explanation.

Now imagine that this is happening right now here in America. Hard to imagine, right? Yet, in GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s Michigan, that’s exactly what’s happening. Democracy is being usurped, one man/one vote has been rendered meaningless, and ultimate (and virtually unaccountable) power is vested in the whimsy of one person. And it’s all legal…at least insofar as Michigan’s Public Act 4, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act is concerned. This law, signed by Gov. Snyder in March, 2011, gives the Governor the right to appoint an Emergency Manager to take over any financially struggling municipality.

This disturbing article by Chris Savage, who runs the excellent Michigan-based blog Eclectablog, provides a glimpse of the America Republicans are working to create. If it an happen in Michigan, it’s no stretch to imagine it happening here in Oregon, or Texas, or….

In April the Benton Harbor EM, Joe Harris, decreed: “Absent prior express written authorization and approval by the Emergency Manager”—himself—“no City Board, Commission or Authority shall take any action for or on behalf of the City whatsoever other than: i) Call a meeting to order, ii) Approve of meeting minutes, iii) Adjourn a meeting.” The move in effect abolished Benton Harbor’s elected City Commission and replaced it with an unelected bureaucrat, perhaps the first time this has happened in US history.

The implications went beyond Benton Harbor. “Since the beginning of your administration, communities facing or under emergency management have doubled,” Michigan Forward and the NAACP wrote to the governor, citing a “failure of transparency and accountability” in the process of determining which jurisdictions need an emergency manager. The financial review team assigned to Detroit, for instance, had recently met in Lansing, nearly 100 miles away—“a clear example of exclusion and voter disenfranchisement,” according to the authors. On February 6 an Ingham County circuit judge ruled that the Detroit team’s meetings must be held in public.

Of Detroit’s 713,777 residents, 89 percent are African-American. The city of Inkster (population 25,369), which recently got an EM, has a black population of 73 percent. Having EMs in both cities would mean that more than half the state’s black population would fall into the hands of unelected officials.

Think about that for a moment. More than 50% of Michigan’s African-Americans have been disenfranchised. They have no voice, no say, and no recourse. The Emergency Manager can do virtually anything while being accountable only to Gov. Snyder. Republicans in Michigan can offer all manner of justifications for disenfranchising more than half of their state’s African-Americans. That doesn’t erase the reality that Public Act 4 is a textbook example of the sort of “Big Government Overreach” that “small government” Conservatives (allegedly) despise. Never mind that Public Act 4 is exactly the sort of anti-democratic despotism that Republicans devote so much bile and energy accusing President Obama of.

Yeah, right; when a Democrat does it, it’s the worst sort of anti-American, anti-democratic Big Government overreach imaginable. When a Republican does it, it’s creative and inspired leadership doing what needs to be done in order to restore fiscal sanity and responsibility.

Democracy won’t be destroyed with a sledgehammer. It will be- and is being- destroyed slowly by those willing to subvert the Constitution and the democratic process in order to exercise absolute power. Just like Rick Snyder is doing in Michigan.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on February 21, 2012 6:56 AM.

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