In Michigan, all eyes are on Gov. Rick Snyder.
A term-limited Republican, Snyder is hardly beloved by the Legislature’s Democrats. But as a lame-duck legislative session draws to a close this week, he has become their best hope to halt an effort by Republican lawmakers to lock their priorities into place before Democrats take over the governor’s office and other major state offices next month.
With the session set to end Thursday, Republicans have already sent legislation to Snyder that would make it harder for executive-branch agencies to issue regulations that are stricter than federal ones.
Michigan Republicans are expected to take up bills this week to strip campaign-finance regulation authority from the new Democratic secretary of state, give the Legislature an unchallenged voice in lawsuits overseen by the new Democratic attorney general, and prevent Democratic officials from forcing nonprofit political advocacy groups to disclose who bankrolls their campaigns.
In a state whose political traditions might be called radically moderate — George Romney and William Milliken are famous examples of Republican governors who bent over backward in search of compromises — the Legislature’s moves are unsettling to some members of both parties.
Some Democrats say it is no accident that the three state offices targeted by the male-dominated Legislature will all be occupied by women in January. The state’s incoming Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a former state Senate minority leader; the new attorney general, Dana Nessel, is a Detroit lawyer and LGBTQ activist. Jocelyn Benson, an associate law professor, will become secretary of state.
Republican leaders in the House and Senate, who did not respond to requests for interviews, have called the chambers’ actions politics as usual, albeit bare-knuckled. Yet even some veteran Republicans say the moves, which echo similar power plays by Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and North Carolina, shatter the old notion that losing parties should cede power gracefully.
“The political DNA is this country has changed so dramatically that if you’re in control, you’re going to use it to the utmost and beyond,” said Kenneth R. Sikkema, a Republican consultant who held leadership positions in both the state Senate and House.
Snyder has already signed other lame-duck bills that have infuriated his critics, including two that include increases in the minimum wage and in paid sick leave that the Legislature itself had enacted this summer. Republicans passed the bills to shortcut citizen initiatives that would have placed the issues on the November ballot.
Snyder has not tipped his hand on his views of legislation that would curb his successors’ power.
“People should not expect that I’m just going to sign things or I’m just going to veto things,” he said at an end-of-term news conference last week. “If I believe it’s in the best public-policy interest of the state, I’ll sign it, and if it’s not, I won’t.”
He dodged questions about whether Republicans were being overzealous in their rush to cripple incoming Democrats, but suggested that lack of comity was not confined to his party. “I think there’s a civility issue across the board,” he said, apparently taking a swipe at the crowds that have jammed the state Capitol to protest the Legislature’s actions. “One of the ways people are trying to convince me why I should veto bills or be against them is to come yell at me. I’m not sure that I follow the logic of it.”
The governor’s depiction of himself as a policy wonk who is above petty politics is vintage Snyder, but it is not without support.
Snyder is measurably less partisan and conservative than the Legislature’s Republican majority. He has been comparatively uninvolved in the state Republican Party organization, and refused to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2016. This year he even refused to back the Republican candidate for governor, Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Trump supporter whose high-profile investigation of the Flint water crisis led to criminal charges against members of Snyder’s administration, including his health secretary.
Snyder has also rankled Republican lawmakers with vetoes of pet measures large and small, from issuing anti-abortion license plates to allowing concealed firearms in places like day-care centers and sports arenas to an article of partisan Republican faith, stiffening the state’s voter ID requirements.
The bills coming to his desk now are no less politically freighted, the product of Republican legislators who moved rightward under Tea Party leadership early this decade, then lurched more sharply to the right after the 2016 election.
Michigan voters seemed to take issue with that in November, electing Democrats to the top three state offices over opponents aligned with Trump.
They also overwhelmingly approved three ballot initiatives with broad Democratic support. One legalized recreational marijuana use; two others overhauled election laws to make it easier to vote and shifted redistricting authority from the Legislature to a new nonpartisan citizens’ commission.
To its critics, the Legislature is essentially using the lame-duck session to settle scores with both the voters who refused to elect Republicans and the Democrats they chose.
One bill passed by the state House targets future ballot initiatives, imposing complex rules on petitions that would make it far harder to collect signatures required to bring an issue before voters.
Other bills place implementing requirements on the citizens’ redistricting commission and the new voting measure that the measures’ supporters say are unnecessary and potentially harmful.
But it is the proposals to rein in executive powers that have drawn the most attention.
“These guys have never not been in power. They’ve had all three branches of government the whole time they’ve been here,” said James Ananich, a Democratic senator from Flint who is the chamber’s minority leader. “They can’t grasp that the things they’ve been doing, most people don’t like, and so there’s got to be some way to protect the state from these horrible Democrats.”
Such objections are naive, some Republicans say.
“Is it partisan? I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” said Robert LaBrant, a Republican strategist, who defended the constitutionality of the measures.
“I wish we could conduct public policy under sterile lab conditions,” he said. “But we’re probably back to the 1880s as far as extreme partisanship goes.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.