Mich. government shuts down (briefly): Who’s to blame?

When the clock struck midnight on the last day of September and the Michigan state government shut down for the second time in three years, residents of the state are left with one inevitable question: Who’s to blame? The short answer: Everyone.

There is more than enough blame to go around for the leadership of both parties, both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office.

Here’s why each bears a share of responsibility for this morning’s brief shut down.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm

The question we’ve all been asking ourselves for the past few weeks as the Oct. 1 deadline approached: “Where’s Gov. Granholm?” She has been largely absent from the budget fight. She released her own proposed budget — frankly, the only one in the ballpark of being reasonable — three weeks ago, but then did little to turn that proposal into reality.

Granholm’s proposed budget called for a combination of cuts and revenue increases in the form of a series of small niche taxes rather than a general tax increase. She would have roughly split the approximately $1.3 billion deficit left over after applying federal stimulus money, raising about $685 million in new revenue and cutting $572 million in spending. This was a reasonable and fair goal from the start, but she did almost nothing to get the legislature to go along with it.

The governor had several tools at her disposal but she used none of them. She not only holds veto power, she also has a line-item veto that allows her to strike out specific provisions — like drastic cuts to particularly crucial programs — but she made not a single public threat to use them. Doing so would have put pressure on legislators to get the job done and, quite possibly, forced them to take her proposals more seriously because she had the power to stop their agendas from becoming law.

It was not until Tuesday afternoon, with less than 36 hours before the government turned into a pumpkin, that the governor made her presence known on the House floor, meeting with the Democratic caucus and with House Speaker Andy Dillon. But by that time, the lines had long since been drawn by both parties in the legislature and the ship of state was already sailing into troubled waters. If Granholm had been more proactive and involved, this all might have been averted.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop

But Gov. Granholm is hardly alone in sharing the blame. Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop also garners his fair share for insisting from the start on a budget resolution with all spending cuts and no revenue increases. Such a plan was never realistically going to pass the Democratic-controlled House with such steep cuts and the chief Republican in the Senate had to know that.

In fact, some of the more controversial cuts were even difficult to get through his own chamber, controlled by his own party. As much as the GOP wants to pretend that they’re just battling the Michigan Education Association, cuts in per-pupil school funding are wildly unpopular with parents regardless of their political party.

Those kinds of cuts may play well to the anti-tax conservative base, but even for Republican legislators they are a tough sell in the home district to parents wondering why their kids’ school is cutting programs that their children enjoy participating in and get great benefit from.

The same is true of steep cuts in revenue sharing for municipalities. The anti-tax pledge sounds great when you’re hobnobbing at Mackinac Island with party activists, but when cities and townships have to cut police and fire services after losing millions in state revenue sharing, both Democrats and Republicans around the state are going to be unhappy about it. Like it or not, taxes pay for a lot of things that Republicans want too.

By insisting on a full $1.3 billion in budget cuts with no revenue increases, Bishop was riding a dead horse from the start. There was no way that plan was ever going to pass, and even if it did there was a good chance it would be vetoed by Granholm even if she didn’t publicly pledge to do so. If he had been more realistic and less inflexible throughout this process, this all might have been averted.

House Speaker Andy Dillon

But there’s also a good reason why Bishop might have thought he could get a budget with nothing but spending cuts passed: Because his counterpart, Democratic House Speaker Andy Dillon, actually agreed to use the Senate-passed budget bills as the starting point for negotiations for all of the state departments.

Rather than telling Bishop right up front that there was no way all those deep cuts were going to pass the House, Dillon cut a deal to try and get the full $1.3 billion in cuts and then come back after the budget was done and attempt to pass supplemental appropriations bills to raise revenue and restore some of those cuts — but without any assurance from Bishop that he and his Senate colleagues would give an inch in favor of any increase in revenues.

Cutting that deal angered many House Democrats, a fair number of whom publicly questioned Dillon’s judgment in trusting Bishop on the agreement. And like Bishop, Dillon was simply being unrealistic if he thought he could get enough House Democrats to go along with such steep cuts in programs they considered crucial with only a promise of possibly restoring them later on as collateral for their trust. Had Dillon been more realistic and less focused on appeasing Mike Bishop, all of this might have been averted.

Counterproductive on deadline

In the end, all three principals get their share of the blame because they seemed to be spending their time and effort trying to avoid blame, and project it onto the others, rather than embracing their responsibility to serve the people of Michigan in an honest and diligent way.

This is especially true of the Bishop-led Senate Republicans, who late on Wednesday decided to engage in the kind of political game-playing that can be so frustrating for observers. With less than an hour to go before the midnight deadline, the Senate GOP suddenly brought up for consideration a bill to boost the state income tax to 4.8 percent, a move that would raise $800 million in tax revenue.

They did this knowing full well that it would be defeated, for two reasons: Because Senate Democrats preferred a number of small niche taxes rather than a general income tax increase to raise revenue, and because even if every Democrat voted for the bill, no Republican would. And with Republicans holding the majority, there was no way the bill was going to pass.

So why bring up legislation that they themselves were going to vote against and prevent from passing? So that when they talk to the press and their constituents they can say, “See, the Democrats keep saying they wanted more revenue to restore some of those cuts, but when we gave them the opportunity to do that, they didn’t vote for it.” But this is all rhetoric, no substance. There was no chance that bill was going to pass anyway, so they were just wasting everyone’s time to get a cheap talking point. And they were doing this at 11:30 p.m., half an hour before the deadline to get a budget passed.

That wasn’t the end of the Senate games. Even after midnight, they were passing bills, then holding a vote to give them immediate effect, then making a motion for reconsideration that effectively froze them again and kept them from being enacted. That included a continuing resolution that would keep the government open for 30 more days as negotiations continue on a permanent budget.