But I paid for parking and stayed. By then a few more had gathered. I counted 40. One speaker said this was double last week's numbers (though it rained last week). This is not to the level of issue inclusiveness of the North Carolina Moral Monday rallies, at least not yet. The Detroit bunch is way too focused on the city's bankruptcy and their own loss of pensions.
I asked one of the organizers two important questions. (1) How goes the case declaring the emergency manager law illegal? It is in the limbo between the hearing and the ruling. (2) Early on the bankruptcy judge said it looked like there is enough evidence to convict several of the banks of fraud. Is anything happening? No. The EM and the city and state gov't haven't pursued prosecution and the judge apparently can't or won't do it on his own.
The Michigan Constitution has a provision for citizen initiatives. If citizens collect enough signatures on an issue and if the legislature doesn't act on that issue it is placed on the next November ballot. With the way the GOP dominated legislature has been refusing to do what the people want done there have been a lot of these petitions lately. The GOP, of course, believes we can't have that so has concocted a couple workarounds.
I haven't been a lawmaker so I don't know what goes into a bill's innards, especially when a bill modifies a previous law. I'm sure there is a standard way of saying this bill modifies that law in these ways. That apparently also applies to citizen petitions.
As I mentioned, if citizens collect enough signatures on an issue the first stop is the legislature. If the legislature acts, all is well. If they don't act, the issue goes on the ballot. However, the GOP leadership had found another way to act and still get their way. When they act they don't amend the previous law, they abolish it and create a new law. That leaves the citizen initiative hanging because the law it is to modify doesn't exist anymore. Then they tend to put some spending into the bill because spending bills can't be overturned by citizen initiative (this was done for the Emergency Manager law).
The legislature has used that tactic already with wolf hunting. The wolves of the Upper Peninsula were recently taken off the Endangered Species List. Residents began to be fearful of encounters of wolves. The legislature approved a wolf hunt law. Citizens collected enough signatures. The legislature abolished that law and passed a new one. There was a wolf hunt last fall. There will be two citizen petitions on the ballot this fall asking for a ban on wolf hunting, one referencing the first law, the other referencing the second. I've heard their might even be a third question -- this one asking for permission to hold a hunt.
The GOP leadership is at it again. There is a petition drive to raise the minimum wage in Michigan. It apparently looks like it will succeed in getting enough signatures. But a business controlled GOP can't have that. So they came up with a bill that abolished the old minimum of $7.40 an hour and wrote a new bill raising it over a few years to $8.15. The petition asks to raise the minimum to $10.10 over a few years and then link it to the Consumer Price Index. A more important part of the petition is to raise the wages of tipped workers (restaurant waiters) from a measly $2.65 (at the mercy of stingy tippers) to the same $10.10 as everyone else. The GOP increase was only to $2.93. Citizen initiative foiled again.
Though the GOP could have pushed that through on its own, they decided it would be better to attract a few Democrats to their cause -- perhaps to spread voter anger to them too? So the bill the state Senate passed yesterday is a bit kinder. It would raise regular wages to $9.20 and tipped wages to $3.50 over three years and it would also then index to the CPI. The indexing is a big gain over the current law. But indexing from $9.20 is not as good as indexing from $10.10. And restaurant workers are left in the cold.
The petition gatherers are furious at the GOP's anti-democracy tactics.
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