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Michigan Republicans Inoculate Themselves from Recall in Lame Duck Marathon
What do you do when you aren’t representing the people and they’re starting to get wise to you? You make it harder for them to recall you.
That’s what the Michigan Republicans did this morning.
Amid a flurry of lame duck ALEC based legislation they passed, including allowing concealed weapons in schools, churches, arenas, hospitals and more (that they passed this on the eve of the Connecticut elementary school shooting tragedy appears to have caused no shame), weakening abortion rights, restricting medical marijuana, and taking away collective bargaining from unions, Michigan Republicans also passed legislation aimed at creating a safety net for their theft of democracy.
It is now harder to recall your lawmakers, the governor and local officials, as if it isn’t hard enough already. There is both a shorter time for signature gathering and you now have to have a primary with an opponent rather than an up and down vote on a recall.
Michigan Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D-East Lansing) asked Republicans, “Why are you making it more difficult to recall an officeholder? We are willing to work on this with you. Yet you jam it through in dark of night on the last night of a lame-duck session… You’re trying to inoculate yourselves from a recall.”
This move echoes the propaganda Republicans sold in Wisconsin, that recalls are not the way to “express” yourself. “Recalls shouldn’t be used for disagreeing with a vote.”
Yes, that’s true. But that is not why people wanted to recall Governors Walker and Snyder.
Both men ran on ONE thing and turned around and did quite another. They misled the voters. Deliberately.
Both men subverted the democratic process in order to pass Koch brother-funded, ALEC-based legislation that was not the will of the people, nor was it designed to address specific matters in the state.
Both states faced financial problems, and those problems were used to justify legislation that many didn’t agree with. But it’s not a matter of the actual policy, even, but a matter of process.
If you have to violate the democratic process, if you have to violate Open Meeting Laws, if you pass things in the dark of night without debate, if you have to lie to the people about your intentions, if you mislead people deliberately, then you should be subject to recall.
Republicans like to make this about the actual policies. The policies are bad enough, especially since they are not designed for the specific needs of those states. They may dress the policies up as “tough” choices for hard fiscal times, but that is not their real agenda – how could it be, when the nationally distributed legislation was written to benefit wealthy billionaires who have their own global agenda.
It’s not about the policies. It’s about the democratic process.
And that’s why Michigan Republicans just took more of that process/freedom away from the people. They don’t want voters to be able to make their displeasure known, so they simply moved the goal post of the recall.
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31 Responses to Michigan Republicans Inoculate Themselves from Recall in Lame Duck Marathon
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galactus6
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 3:28 pm
I guess we need to use Second Amendment Remedies!
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Right. Your going to stop tyranny with your gun. Against the national guard and police right?
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:39 pm
No you wouldnt. You would rather be intelligent enough to live another day. This is not cowboy days. My only point is if you have a bunch of people who decide to start shooting at a shooter, more people stand the chance of dying. Think of people in the batman theater and 10 of them deciding to start shooting at the shooter. Think of shooting in a crowded mall.
I think you would rather live for your family
D. W. Skinner
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
all of this is going to come back to haunt the party that is committing slow motion suicide. The republicans are now either a joke or a curseword.
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 3:40 pm
I agree. They are still wondering why they lost the election in looking for what went wrong. The one thing they are not looking at is how they’ve treated people, minorities, women and workers all across this nation at the local state and federal level. They will not, I repeat not, look at their own actions as the cause of their own defeat. And in not doing that they will spiral down into the abyss. They wonder why they lost the election and now you have Snyder showing us why they lost the election. The problem is, they just want take the hint
Victoria S.
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Thats what you get for electing republicans…they are not for the general population of folks…they are only for the rich and big business. I don’t know what part of that you folks in Michigan don’t get? You got what you voted for…betrayal!
Peter E Simpson
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 4:52 pm
You pick self serving people to run your government and you get just what they’ve proven to do regularly. Theft of control, opposite of the peoples wishes and even opposite their votes.
Kenfolk
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 5:18 pm
I am writing this as a liberal Michigander who went to Lansing on Dec. 11th to protest the GOPs policies and went to Ohio (Toledo) to work for President Obama and Senator Sherrod Brown. To equate Rick Snyder with Scott Walker and accuse Snyder of deliberately misleading the voters is not accurate. Snyder tried to avoid the extreme policies of his party for 2 years. Unlike his 3 opponents in the GOP primary in 2010- who were all right wing ideologues- Snyder was a moderate. The problem with Snyder is not that he deliberately misled the public-it is that when pushed into a corner by the crazies in his party, he failed to exhibit the courage necessary to stare them down. He was more afraid of a primary challenge by the far right in 2014 than he was of the general election. Hopefully in 2014 we can show him that he made the wrong choice. It would also help greatly if we can get an independent commission to draw district boundaries (state and federal!) so that the GOP is prevented from winning more districts than warranted by the actual number of votes they receive. The gerrymandering of state legislative districts is at the root of much of the problems Michigan has suffered from these past few weeks.
Ingrid Buxton
Dec. 19th, 2012 at 8:46 pm
We need some kind of legal remedy to the gerrymandering done in many states.
djchefron
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
They also passed a bill saying that grocery store owners do not have to honor food stamps because of moral objections they have to the Federal government subsudizing food.I know I had to do a double take to.But its true and here is an explanation from one of the grand drogons and I quote
State Senator Rob D. Poor defended the measure this morning at 4:00 a.m. when contacted at his suite at the East Lansing Marriott Residence Inn. “Listen,” he said, “hard working people should not be required to subsidize lazy, unemployed bums with their tax dollars just because the Federal Government is currently headed by a dedicated Marxist determined to turn this country into a socialist hellhole.” He went on to add that “if people refuse to work they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to feed them or their kids with our money. Where I come from I call that extortion.”
This doesnt even rate a WTF!!!!
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Bullshit. All you do is open the door to more people dying from people shooting at the shooter. Think for gods sake
Find ways to keep all guns out of public places. People go into malls and kill right now not caring for a second if someone is armed in there. All you want is more death. Anyone who is going to kill masses of people could care less who else is armed because they plan on dying anyways
Ben Plewes
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 6:52 pm
What a moron.
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:02 pm
I guess if you have nothing to say, or arnt smart enough to have a take, you call people names
Right?
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:03 pm
No, I am right and you know it. Hurts doesnt it
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:11 pm
You would be on the ground with everyone else. You are quoting hypothetical situations. You would be the not a coward who sticks his head up and gets shot. The best part of valor is not shooting back but determining how to make yourself safe
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Sorry. It hasnt happened so far and millions of people carry. Your theory is wrong
Fedup
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 6:55 pm
Why does it seem that all these plutocrats have had this type of a take over for sometime which failed federally, and now at least by an end run thru the state governments. If the federal government doesn’t start looking into this it may happen right under there noses. If one was looking from the outside you’d get the impression the plutocracy is taking control of the country state by state. We all talk and read about what’s going on in i.e. MI currently, but the federal government better stop worrying about there political future and sitting on the sideline and start doing something, I just hope you’re watching a.k.a.the Koch Bros. Is this treason or what? I know there is no act of war literally, but this is an act of middle class warfare.
Ingrid Buxton
Dec. 19th, 2012 at 8:50 pm
All the national polls are against the Koch bro and ALEC agenda. They could see down the road that it was the end for their agenda. But they had the money and the Supremes let them spend it to buy the states as a last ditch effort to grab what they could. it will take the people decades to undo what has happened.
Ingrid Buxton
Dec. 19th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
there is this www.rateyourrisk.org/
basically, if you are not a criminal, dont associate with criminals, dont do drugs and dont have guns in the house the chances of being a murder victim is nil.
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Link please. You and I know thats BS
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 8:42 pm
Im sorry, but thats just hilarious
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 9:02 pm
Yes hilarious. The link is not credible.
next, I am not anti gun. I am a gun owner. But I am not a rabid dog like you
You have madew a ton of assumptions here that make no sense.
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Whats truely hilarious is you think gun crime is all criminal activity. The most gun crimes are performed by people who are related, acquaintances or crimes of alcohol. Which has nothing to do with gun sales except there more guns around
Its so funny to watch you think people dont shoot people beucase they are afraid that gun sales have went up
djchefron
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Concealed Carry Killers
www.vpc.org/ccwkillers.ht...
djchefron
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 9:03 pm
I’m not delusional nor have called you crazy,yet.Been reading your post and the impression I got was that you are a patriotic macho man who will defend his 2nd amendment rights to the death.I just have one question.Are you a veteran if yes thank you for your service.If not why not?
Ted
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Anon, your first link’s sources are at least 19 years old. Your second link is riddled with conflict of interest, and both it and the 3rd link commit the fallacy of false equivalency. Correlation does not equal causation. For instance: your rape statistics could easily be attributed to the rise of access to pornography, also it fails to mention that the same trends are present for non-violent crime which has nothing to do with guns. Hilariously, your final link commits the same error as your first, only some of the data is only 13 years old. Kindly take your shit and shove it back up your ass from whence it came. Your head surely needs some company up there.
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 14th, 2012 at 10:45 pm
Stop the swearing Anon
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 15th, 2012 at 12:00 am
Sorry, I thought you were more intelligent than that. I was wrong again. Please move along
You have no idea what freedom of speech is. You do not have the freedom to say whatever you want on others property. You see, the owners freedom of speech is to not allow you to do it.
Your defense of guns is admirable, I just wonder how many have to die to make a man out of you.
Now beat it
Shiva (Moderator)
Dec. 15th, 2012 at 12:30 am
It still has an owner who determines whats what. Please leave. And while your gone, read up on freedom of speech
djchefron
Dec. 15th, 2012 at 10:32 am
Doing ALEC’s Job, MI Passes Laws Allowing Guns In Schools
www.youtube.com/watch?fea...!
Laurenceofberk
Dec. 16th, 2012 at 4:16 am
START REGISTERING VOTERS NOW!!!
Polls show that non-voters are way less likely to vote Republican. Especially poor non-voters.
So go NOW to poor neighborhoods, stores, clinics, and unemployment offices. Register people, and keep them in touch with progressive organizations, and with marches and rallies.
If this becomes a mass movement, as Occupy was, the Republican mafia will be smothered.
DON’T MOURN, ORGANIZE!!! Do it now.