Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: The Cost of the Governor's Spouse - 12.13.10

On New Year's Day, Michigan will no longer have a First Gentleman, but a First Lady. Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry wants to know if it makes sense to have gubernatorial spouses cost the state money.

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I don’t know very much about Governor-elect Rick Snyder’s wife, other than that her name is Sue. And that’s just fine with me.

That’s not because I have anything against Mrs. Snyder.

From what I’ve read, she is a pleasant woman who has had three children with Michigan’s soon-to-be chief executive, and who was the first to suggest that her husband ought to run for governor.

I wish her the best. But her husband is the politician, not her. She didn’t run for office. The voters did not elect Sue Snyder to anything. She has a right to privacy.

But by the same token, I don‘t think the deficit-ridden citizens of Michigan ought to pay for her to have a staff of assistants. Now, I can see having someone to help Sue Snyder answer her mail. And I can see her having an assistant, maybe a driver, if she represents her husband at some state function.

However, our governors aren’t royalty.

We treat the spouse of the President of the United States as something more than a normal civilian, because in our system the President is both head of government, like the prime minister in Great Britain, and head of state, like a Queen or King.

But our nation has no hereditary aristocracy, and the wife or husband of a state governor isn’t nobility.

This was brought to my attention, by the way, three years ago by Leon Drolet. He‘s the man who drives around pulling a pink fiberglass pig, to symbolize the high cost of government. Three years ago, he reported on his blog that the governor’s spouse, who we call the First Gentleman, had a state-paid staff of three assistants, one of whom he said got a six-figure salary.

However, Drolet was unable to find out exactly what the total cost to the taxpayers was. That’s because, he was told, the Governor’s office is exempt from having to tell us.

Under our Freedom of Information Act, citizens have the right to request any government documents and report on them, and on what any level of government is doing, which only a few small exceptions. But in Michigan, the governor’s office, the legislature and the Supreme Court are exempt from FOIA.

Mr. Drolet wrote to the governor, asking that she disclose the cost of the First Gentleman’s staff. He seems never to have gotten an answer. Now, Drolet is a Republican. I am sure he didn‘t mind trying to embarrass a governor who is a Democrat. But that doesn’t mean his broader point is wrong. Two or three years ago, the First Gentleman came to have lunch with me in Ann Arbor.

Dan Mulhern had a driver who was being paid by the state. Now -- isn’t this a bit silly? The governor perhaps needs a driver, so she can transact state business while she drives.

But the governor’s husband? There’s an absurdity factor here. Frankly, I hope Sue Snyder forgoes the trappings of mock nobility, and does not keep a taxpayer-funded office in the capital.

If she does that, we might not think of her as Michigan’s designated “first lady.“ But she will have set an example as a classy grownup with a sense of proportion. Which we may need, even more.

Essay: When the Law is an Ass - 12.8.10

A Wayne County circuit judge this week ruled that the Detroit Schools’ Emergency Financial Manager had no authority to set academic standards. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about that decision.

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This is the season when Charles Dickens is again in style, or at least his Christmas Carol. We’ve all been grappling with our own versions of Mr. Scrooge all year, and we all need a happy ending.

But I’ve been thinking of a different Dickens character this week: Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, who said in response to some idiotic legal ruling: “If the law supposes that, then the law is an ass.”

What made me think of that was the Wayne County Circuit Court ruling Monday. Judge Wendy Baxter ruled that Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Schools, had no right or power to make academic decisions.

She ruled that those decisions can only be made by the elected school board, and that Bobb had no business creating an academic plan and putting it into place. Legally, there may be a basis for her decision, but she also seemed to personally attack Bobb. She virtually sneered that his vision comes “from a person chosen solely based on his finance credentials and who has no … education or counseling background,” except from “unvetted sources.”

That seems to ignore the fact that Bobb was the elected president of the board of education in Washington, D.C schools, and that many of the Detroit school board members aren’t former teachers either, including current board president Anthony Adams.

More importantly, under them, the district compiled a stunning record of both financial mismanagement and academic failure. Students were fleeing in droves, test scores and graduation rates were abysmal, and the system was running huge deficits.

Robert Bobb, a nationally respected turnaround expert, was then brought in by the governor as the schools’ emergency financial manager. He maintains that you can’t separate financial from academic decisions in a context like Detroit’s, and he’s clearly right.

More than ten years ago, Detroit’s schools were in a similar state and former Wayne State University President David Adamany was put in charge of them, in a similar role to that Bobb has today.

What had happened then, Adamany told me, was that the schools had been largely ruined by an elected board which picked superintendents for political reasons and demanded that the schools appoint cronies to jobs for which many were unqualified.

Much the same thing happened under the current board.

Robert Bobb, whose term expires this year, has stabilized the schools’ finances, won approval of a half-billion dollar bond issue, and has put some sound academic reforms in place.

Democracy is a wonderful thing. But we the people don’t attempt to elect the board that certifies brain surgeons.

Making sure children get the education they so desperately need is as important as brain surgery. Detroit Public School kids have been the victim of political football for far too long. This decision should be speedily reversed, and Bobb’s academic reforms need to be given a chance to work. For if we don’t restore public schools that parents can have confidence in, Detroit hasn’t got a chance.

Essay: Helen Thomas, Again - 12.7.10

Wayne State University has ended a historic award named for famous alumna Helen Thomas, after she made what the school called anti-Semitic remarks. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks there are no winners here.

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George Seldes, the great journalist who lived to be almost a hundred and five, said that if you live to be 90, the public forgives all your sins. In some cases, that certainly has been true.

Ronald Reagan’s policies fiercely divided Americans while he was in office, but by the time he died six years ago, he had become a national icon. But that certainly isn’t always the case.

And sometimes, people’s legacies might have been better if they had lived shorter lives. Take Jack Kevorkian, the apostle of assisted suicide. Had he died fourteen years ago, history would see him differently. He was regarded as a hero by many people in 1996. Juries had refused to convict him in five separate trials in which there was no doubt whatsoever that he had helped suffering patients commit suicide. Prosecutors in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties said they would no longer press charges against him, making what he did de facto legal.

But Kevorkian then destroyed himself and his cause. He performed euthanasia, videotaped it, sent the tape to 60 Minutes, and forced a prosecutor to charge and convict him.

Now, helping someone die is illegal again, and after spending eight years in jail, Kevorkian is a mostly forgotten nobody.

Helen Thomas is in some ways a similar case. Her epitaph might someday read, “Yes, there is life after 90, but it isn‘t necessarily a good one.” Thomas, who grew up in Detroit, was a journalistic icon for decades. She was the first woman to be White House bureau chief of a major news service, a job she held forty years.

She got women into institutions like the National Press Club and was a helpful and generous colleague.

Years ago, soon after she went to work as a columnist for Hearst, I had dinner with her in Washington. Ironically, she told me that she was having a hard time getting used to expressing her own opinions, after decades of writing strictly balanced straight news.

Tragically, she learned how to do so all too well. Last May, she told a blogger with a video camera that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland. She lost her job over that. What wasn’t then clear was whether that was an out-of-character moment, whether she was challenging Israel’s right to exist, or merely saying it should leave the occupied territories.

Well, now there’s essentially no doubt. Last week in Dearborn, she delivered a clearly anti-Semitic rant, charging that “the Zionists” owned American institutions from the White House to Hollywood.

Wayne State had no choice then but to cut its ties with its famous alumna. Now, I fear she will be exploited now by various groups, who will use the off-the-wall comments of a ninety-year-old to further their own agendas. This is all very sad.

For there was once a woman from Detroit who was fearless, who worked hard, endured ridicule, questioned Presidents, blazed trails and explained to millions what was happening at the White House. That person may be forgotten now, because of what an older version of herself did in the twilight of her life. And there isn’t very much more that anyone can say.

Essay: Culture of Debt - 12.3.10

These days, we’re accustomed to a world of deficit spending. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talked to a business expert whose new book suggests we’re headed over a cliff.

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Jim McTevia never had a credit card growing up. That’s largely because there weren’t any in the small town of Marine City, Michigan where he was born. Today, he thinks that just might have saved him. He‘s done all right for himself; he became a well-regarded business turnaround expert without a college education.

Today, he has homes and businesses in the Detroit area, Harbor Springs, and West Palm Beach. McTevia, who turns a healthy seventy-four this weekend, isn‘t worried about his future.

But he‘s desperately worried about his country‘s and that of the state of Michigan. He thinks we’ve become addicted to spending money we don’t have, stealing from our kids’ future.

And he worries that if we don’t do something soon, our country will be destroyed. Now, conservatives have been saying things like this since the New Deal began.

They were predicting the speedy collapse of America back when Franklin D. Roosevelt began deficit spending, and after awhile, people regarded them as the little boy who cried wolf.

But eventually there was a wolf, and there are increasingly troubling signs that we are drowning in debt.

McTevia thinks the main problem is that we have become accustomed to the idea that we should get whatever we want, right now, and that there is nothing wrong with borrowing to get it --

Regardless of whether we have a reasonable expectation of ever being able to pay the money back. So he has written a small, very readable book about this: The Culture of Debt: How a Once-Proud Society Mortgaged Its Future.

Bill Haney, the founder of the specialty publishing house Momentum Books, brought it to my attention. Haney tends to be a supporter of pump-priming Keynesian economics. But he told me he thought this book had an important message.

And after talking to the author, I have to agree. McTevia has spent his career rescuing or, these days, mainly liquidating businesses drowning in debt. He wants to save our e nation from the same fate. “I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that we are truly a sick society, and just don’t realize it yet,“ he told me.

This isn’t his first effort; seventeen years ago, he wrote a similar book called Bankrupt. He drove to Washington and gave one to every member of Congress. “I only heard from two of them. Some congressman in Florida and Vice-President Al Gore, who thanked me for caring about my country,” he said yesterday.

This time, he hopes to bypass the politicians and try to convince young people to have the courage to just say no.

McTevia isn’t a single-issue crank. “Some debt is good. Few people can buy a house or car for cash.” Nor does he think all taxes are bad. In fact, he thinks our state needs to increase taxes until we get out of the current mess we are in.

His bottom line is that we have to realize there is no free lunch. His book may attract little notice. But I can’t help thinking of how General Motors used to go on losing billions every year, until one day it was bankrupt. If that happens to our nation, there won’t be anywhere to go for a bailout. Which is why McTevia wrote this book.

Essay: Fighting the Good Fight - 12.1.10

Most experts think there’s no chance of getting Senate approval of a new Detroit River bridge project his year. But Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says one state senator isn’t giving up.

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Ray Basham’s term as state senator runs out a month from today, and unless we change Michigan’s constitution, he can never come back to the legislature, thanks to term limits.

That doesn’t mean he’s done with public service, or that he has anything left to prove. He‘s sixty-five now, and spent four years in the Air Force and thirty on the line at Ford.

And though his voice still has a touch of his native Virginia, he has lived most of his life in the blue-collar downriver suburb of Taylor. In fact, so many of its citizens are fellow southern transplants that the town is sometimes referred to as “Taylortucky.”

Even while he was working and helping his wife Iva raise two kids, Basham always found time to serve his communities.

He was active in the United Auto Workers union at work, serving on the local’s bargaining committee, and did what he could for Taylor, serving on the water commission, planning commission, and as constable before finally getting elected to the city council.

From there, it was on to the House and Senate. Throughout his career, he seems to have been driven by a desire to make life better for his fellow citizens. For years, he fought for a smoking ban in bars and restaurants, something finally achieved this year.

That wasn’t universally popular with his mostly blue-collar, working-class constituents. But Basham felt it was the right thing to do.

Now, in the waning days of his career he is still fighting, in a cause most see as hopeless, at least this year. He’s fighting to get the state senate to vote on whether to build the new Detroit River International Crossing Bridge.

Last May, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop promised an up-or-down vote on the bridge before the session was over. Then, last month, he changed his mind. Bishop’s office says flatly that the issue is dead. Republicans are in firmer control of the state senate than ever, since one Democrat recently quit.

But Basham is not giving up attempting to use procedural maneuvers to force the bill out of committee and onto the senate floor. He knows it’s a long shot, what he calls a “Hail Mary pass into the end zone.“ But he says he won’t give up trying.

Why? Well, Basham believes the new bridge is the right thing to do, and is convinced that it eventually will be built, despite the fierce opposition and deep pockets of Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun. And Basham thinks it is vital for Michigan that it get started now. “People’s long-term unemployment is running out,” he told me.

“This is the biggest job driver, biggest job-creating project anywhere out there. It’ll mean more than ten thousand jobs. It’s a two billion dollar project for the State of Michigan,” he said.

Having to start over next year puts off putting people back to work. Ray Basham himself won’t be out of work. Since the voters couldn’t re-elect him to the Senate last month, they made him a Wayne County Commissioner instead. But he says he intends to keep fighting for the bridge as long as he is in Lansing, because the times are too tough and this opportunity too big to let it get away.

Essay: Rebuilding Education - 11.29.10

There’s going to be a debate in the legislature next year over the cost and future of education. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry wonders if we’ve been asking the wrong questions.

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We’re going to see a huge and overdue debate next year about the future of public education in Michigan. We’ve already seen battles over teacher pensions and health care.

This year, this discussion is bound to get louder, with a state budget deficit approaching two billion dollars and no federal stimulus money anywhere in sight. Traditionally, so-called conservatives want to start by going after teacher pensions and benefits.

So-called liberals, led by the teachers’ unions, rally to protect these bennies, and say we need to raise taxes and spend more on education instead. However, there’s a compelling new argument.

It says that we’ve have been asking the wrong questions and fighting over the wrong issues. Its major proponent is former state superintendent of schools Tom Watkins, now a business and education consultant both here and in China.

Watkins says public education is collapsing in this state, that the current model is failing students academically and is unsustainable financially. He’d spend more on education if it made sense to do so. But right now, he says that would be crazy. “We need to promote the three R‘s of education,“ he said in a recent newspaper column:

“Restructure, reform, and reinvent.”

Otherwise, he says investing new money in the schools “would be the equivalent of pouring water into a glass with a hole in the bottom and wondering why the glass never fills.”

Fixing the schools may be the single most important long-term challenge Michigan faces. Nobody disputes that the state is going to have to do more with less. But it is also true that unless we have a better educated workforce, and public schools that get the job done, the high-tech, good-paying jobs of the future aren’t coming to Michigan, even if our tax rate were to drop to zero.

Nearly everyone in the state is aware of the wretchedly dysfunctional condition of Detroit’s schools. But Watkins thinks that Detroit is just the canary in the coal mine warning what’s to come.

His argument is that it is time to stop tinkering with our current 19th century model for education, and “do a tear-down and start over.“

So where do we start? Watkins doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Nobody does. But he knows we need to start by building an education system designed around the students.

Sadly, that’s too often not the case now. That doesn’t mean there aren’t islands of excellence out there. There are.

But study after study has indicated we need to totally reinvent the wheel. While we worry about the smart kids fleeing the state, we ought to be equally worried about the undereducated ones who stay behind, people for whom there are no longer any good jobs.

“We can either get smarter and wealthier or we can became dumber and poorer,” Watkins says; it’s up to us, and our leaders.

He’s hoping Governor-elect Rick Snyder is willing to think outside the box and take on the entrenched education establishment. Watkins wrote “Our world is changing in dramatic ways, and our system of education must embrace these changes or be engulfed by them.” Those words ring true. But what’s telling, significant and sad is that he wrote them nine years ago.

Now, there’s no more time left to waste.

Essay: Back to Our Farms - 11.26.10

For the first time in more than a century, someone from Michigan will chair the Senate Agriculture Committee. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about that.

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The men who founded Michigan State University in 1855 would, no doubt, be pleased that one of their graduates is becoming chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2011.

What became Michigan State was originally known as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, back when farming was not only our main business, it was just about our only business.

Of course, the founders would be shocked to learn that the new committee chairman will be a woman, and that she had earned two degrees in social work, not farming, at MSU.

Nor did she even grow up on a farm. Debbie Stabenow’s father was a small-town Oldsmobile dealer. But while Oldsmobile has gone extinct in the course of our lifetime, farming hasn’t.

And Senator Stabenow will now be in a position to have a significant impact on the second biggest sector of Michigan’s economy. Farming is receiving renewed attention these days.

For a century, many of us city dwellers took farming for granted. Yes, there was corn, and those cows out there making milk someplace between Lansing and Grand Rapids. They grew cherries up in Traverse City, and grandpa had chickens.

But manufacturing was where it was at. These days, however, manufacturing isn’t what it used to be. Neither are oil prices, and interest in ethanol has caused the growth of even more corn. Plus, there is huge new interest in urban farming. Detroit has lost well over half its peak population; there’s a lot of vacant land, and the people remaining need more fruits and vegetables.

The Senate Agriculture Committee also is responsible for forestry and nutrition issues. Both are vitally important to Michigan. Some crops are more important to us than others; besides cherries, we are big in blueberries, cranberries cucumbers, and flowers.

Dairy products are our biggest agricultural commodity of all.

We once had what amounted to a laissez-faire policy for agricultural products, back when those first students were chopping down trees to built their own dorms in East Lansing before the Civil War.

But that ended long ago. Today, like it or not, the name of the game in agriculture is subsidies. Senator Stabenow will be in a key position to influence who gets what when she shepherds a new farm bill through her committee next year.

She intends to be an activist chair. Her aides say she wants this bill crafted to protect our established farm sectors while developing innovative ways to help new concepts like urban farming in Detroit, and farming with the aid of wind power.

In a way, it is surprising that Stabenow will chair a major Senate committee while still only in her second term. But there’s been a lot of turnover in recent years. The senator isn’t going to have a lot of time to learn on the job, either: She needs to make a splash.

Two years from now, she’ll face what everyone expects will be a tough re-election battle. Even if she wins, she is likely to be wielding the gavel for only a couple years.

The Republicans are thought likely to recapture the senate in two years, even if President Obama wins re-election.

The new senate agriculture chairman has a vested interest in bringing us home the bacon -- and in doing it soon.

Essay: Thanksgiving Day - 11.25.10

It may be Thanksgiving Day, but there’s one place in our state where the turkeys are eating, not being eaten. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry explains.

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Several years ago, a big red steer escaped from a slaughterhouse and went running down Jefferson Avenue in Detroit.

He led police on a chase O.J. Simpson could only envy.

In the end, they knocked him out with a tranquilizer dart. I remembered vaguely that there had been protests from people who thought he deserved to live. One day I asked a friend who was passionate about animal rights if she knew what happened to him.

Yes, she said. We took him out to Sasha Farm. That was the first I ever heard of the place. It was, she told me, the Midwest‘s largest farm sanctuary, in the country near Manchester, west of Ann Arbor. So I went out there. It looked like a well-managed Garden of Eden. Jefferson -- well, what else were they going to name him -- was there, uninterested in the media, or at least, me. There were other cattle, and hogs and chickens and a whole host of dogs that had been saved from Hurricane Katrina. There was Boris, a wild boar who had been found newborn by a hunter, as well as a legion of potbellied pigs bought as cute “fad“ pets and later discarded.

There was a magnificent racehorse who barely escaped becoming dog food. And there were a few animals who still showed signs of a life of torture. Chickens without beaks, for example.

They cut them off in factory farms so they won‘t peck each other. They do it without anesthesia. Then there was Samson, a magnificent red chow. Officially Dorothy Davies and her husband, Monte Jackson, run Sasha Farm, but it was clear that Samson really watched over the whole place. That’s when they told me that he had been rescued from what they called a vivisection lab.

Dorothy and Monte are vegans now. Not everyone who supports Sasha is a vegan or even a vegetarian. But spending time there gives you a different perspective. Whatever else you say about primitive man, they had to meet the meat they ate.

We mostly never do. You may still want to eat turkey, but after you meet the birds at Sasha Farm, you are unlikely to think of them in quite the same way. The turkeys looked happy when I went back to see them this summer. Happy, healthy, and well-adjusted.

Dorothy and Monte have been saving animals since soon after they moved here thirty years ago. Samson died in his sleep a few years back, and they buried him on a hillside.

Today, a couple Katrina dogs who stand guard over the place. The rescued turkeys at Sasha Farm today will be celebrating Thanksgiving by eating instead of being eaten.

In fact, Dorothy and Monte intend for all their creatures to have a nice day today, no matter now many legs they have.

Regardless of what‘s on your plate, here‘s hoping you do too. By the way, if you have any desire to see what Sasha Farm is all about, they are offering a guided tour at two p.m. Saturday.

That just might be a whole lot better for the kids than another couple hours at the mall. For details, go to www.sashafarm.org.

And tell them Jack at Michigan Radio sent you.

Essay: In This Together - 11.24.10

The election is over and the holidays and a new administration are approaching. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks this might be a good time to leave partisanship behind.

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A couple of weeks ago, a business reporter for the Detroit News called and asked what I thought of Governor-elect Rick Snyder’s transition team. I told him I had gotten to know two of its members, Doug Rothwell and Mark Murray.

That’s because all three of us serve on the non-profit, non-partisan, and unpaid steering committee of the Center for Michigan.

I told the reporter that both men seemed intelligent and open-minded, and that while I didn’t always agree with them, I respected their integrity, and thought they were excellent choices.

Rothwell, by the way, is CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan. Murray, a former president of Grand Valley State University, now is president of the Meijer chain of stores.

My comments appeared in the newspaper the next day, and I was immediately attacked by an angry left-wing psychiatrist. “Why are you sucking up to the right wing?” he demanded. I could tell he was angry, because his e-mail was mostly in CAPITAL LETTERS.

I told him that I didn’t think that I was sucking up to anyone, but that if he had noticed the election returns, the Republicans had overwhelmingly won just about everything.

They are going to govern for the next few years, state government faces a huge budget crisis, and everyone of good will needs to hope Governor-elect Rick Snyder does well.

But that merely seemed to make my critic angrier. The men I praised had worked in the Engler Administration, had supported tax cuts for the rich, he said. How dare I praise them.

Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion. But that kind of attitude is ruining our state and our democracy. And there is a lot of that out there, on the right even more than on the left. Last weekend I saw former Governor William Milliken, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Rick Snyder, his fellow Republican.

Milliken was happy Snyder won, but was appalled by something else. He had seen Attorney-General-elect Bill Schuette say that his first priority was defeating Barack Obama in 2012.

Milliken felt that was highly inappropriate, that his priority should be his job. Michigan had, he reminded me, a Democratic attorney general for the entire fourteen years he was governor.

“Milliken said "Frank Kelley told me that I should see him as the governor‘s lawyer, and I could depend on him for advice, regardless of politics,” “And that’s how he was.“ The next morning I talked to Kelley and told him what the governor had said.

“That was exactly right,” Kelley told me in his gravelly voice. “We always got along. I may not have voted for him. But it was my job to get along with the governor, whoever he or now she was.“

In other words, both men saw themselves as responsible, first and foremost to the state and citizens of Michigan.

That’s exactly the attitude we need today, with double-digit unemployment and budget deficits out of control.

We need bipartisan and non-partisan cooperation to fix state government and reinvent our economy. As we get ready for Thanksgiving, I suggest everyone agree to get that done, and at least for the duration, temporarily suspend their little partisan games.

Essay: Squalor in the Court - 11.23.10

Five of Michigan’s Supreme Court justices took the unusual step last week of censuring one of their colleagues. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks there are no winners here.

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To me, there was something terribly sad about the formal letter of censure five of Michigan’s Supreme Court justices sent to one of their former colleagues last week, blasting her for unethical conduct.

There’s little you can say to defend what she did. Last month, Former Justice Elizabeth Weaver revealed that she had secretly taped some of the court’s private deliberations about cases.

She then released selected portions of what she said were the discussions. Weaver said she was doing this as part of a crusade to let the public know more about how the court makes its decisions.

But to secretly record closed judicial proceedings without her colleagues’ knowledge or consent is ethically indefensible. There might have been some mitigating factor if she made the secret recordings in order to reveal some corruption.

However, there is no sign of that. Rather, the material she made public seemed designed only to embarrass one justice for whom she had a particular personal dislike.

Her conduct was wrong, and there’s no way it could be condoned by her former colleagues. But the letter they sent blasting Weaver also left a funny taste in my mouth. It doesn‘t mean much legally, since she‘ll never again be on the court.

But it calls attention once again to the fact that for years, Michigan’s Supreme Court has been somewhat of a national embarrassment, because of its severe partisan divisions and its tendency to deliver what seemed to be highly politicized rulings.

Two years ago, a University of Chicago study rated it the worst state supreme court in the nation for just these reasons.

What was even worse was that in recent years, the justices have too often behaved towards each other like a kindergarten class whose teacher has left the room -- and Weaver was, most of the time, in the thick of it, either attacking or being attacked.

This started ten years ago, when Weaver, who was then serving as chief justice, was ousted from the job by her colleagues after only serving half the normal two year term.

Privately, justices of both parties said she was disorganized. But Weaver saw it as a move by the Engler appointees on the court to humiliate her, and she never forgave them.

Increasingly, she began siding with the Democrats. Two years ago, she voted with them to elect Marilyn Kelly chief justice.

Her Democratic colleagues said nothing about her erratic behavior then. Then, this summer, Weaver made a surprise deal with Governor Granholm.

She would resign if the governor would appoint a judge she respected, Alton Davis, in her place. The governor agreed, Weaver went away, and that was that. Until the secret recordings emerged.

What’s sad is that there really was no good outcome here. Weaver has been making some compelling arguments about the dangerous influence of political contributions on the court’s independence. That’s likely to be forgotten now.

And once again, our bizarrely dysfunctional judiciary has put itself on display. Six weeks from now, we’ll be hearing from the high court again, when Republicans regain a majority, oust Chief Justice Kelly, and replace her with one of their own. And the beat goes on.