Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Buying Congress - 12.6.10

The campaigns are now over, and official reports indicate that our races for Congress were the most expensive in state history. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about this.

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Tim Walberg, who lost his seat in Congress two years ago, is going back to Washington next month. Once he gets there, he will be paid an annual salary of $174,000 dollars a year.

That sounds pretty good, though it is a little less sweet once you realize that he has to live in two places, including one of the highest-priced real estate markets in the country.

That’s probably not a big problem for some of his fellow congressmen like Dave Camp of Midland, a multi-millionaire.

But it hasn’t been easy for some others. Bart Stupak, who is voluntarily retiring from Congress, lived for awhile in a boarding house. A few members have tried living in their congressional offices, but that hasn’t usually worked out very well.

What will boggle your mind, however, is how much it costs these days to actually win a seat in Congress. The official numbers are now in, and it cost six point three million dollars to put Walberg back in Congress. Six point three million.

Now he didn’t spend that out of his own pocket. That would be illegal even if he had the dough. His campaign apparatus raised and spent a lot of it. But outside special interests spent even more.

The Walberg campaign raised and spent one point six million. But groups from outside the district, like the Manhattan-based Club for Growth, spent four point seven million dollars.

By the way, don’t think I am implying that the incumbent who lost was overwhelmed by a GOP spending blitz. In fact, the loser in this case, a liberal Democrat, spent more than the Republican.

Eight point eight million dollars were spent in a futile effort to return Mark Schauer to office. That would be enough to pay his congressional salary for fifty years. There was one difference: Far more of Schauer’s money was actually raised by his campaign. Far less came from outside groups.

But it is very clear that campaign spending has gotten to out-of-control levels. This is a fairly recent development.

David Bonior told me he was embarrassed by how much his campaign spent when he first won a hotly contested Michigan congressional seat in 1976. It was a lot more than he planned on spending -- thirty-six thousand dollars.

Today, congressmen have to spend vast amounts of time begging people for money. Usually, they want something for it, which is an open invitation to corruption.

Something needs to be done. Most people think that’s impossible, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in January that corporations can spend as much as they want on campaigns. But there is a way, other than a constitutional amendment.

The vast majority of all this spending is for broadcast commercials. Congress, or even, the Federal Communications Commission, could require stations to supply all candidates with the same amount of time, as a public service.

Even before that, Michigan could require campaigns to provide full disclosure about who is giving what to whom, something the Supreme Court says is fully legal, but our state doesn’t require.

There may be other solutions, but we need to find one. The only alternative is to be content forever with the most expensive Congress that special interest money can buy.

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.

Essay: Women and Justice - 11.22.10

There’s a lot of focus on what Governor-elect Snyder will do in January, but Michigan Radio’s Jack Political Analyst Lessenberry says a former governor is still trying to get Governor Jennifer Granholm to do the right thing before she leaves.

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Over the weekend I went to see former Governor William Milliken, to ask him what he thinks about our state’s future, and the incoming Snyder administration. To my surprise, something else was on his mind, namely, an injustice that could be fixed right now.

It’s something he hopes Governor Jennifer Granholm will do something about before she leaves office on New Year‘s Day. There are dozens of women in Michigan prisons Milliken is convinced are unjustly there, and who should be released. The governor has the power to pardon them, or have their sentences commuted.

“These are some very sad situations,“ he told me. He has looked at dozens of files. In almost every case, these are women who were either wrongly convicted, the victims of bad lawyers and/or callous judges, or battered women who attacked their tormentors. In a few cases, they may have deserved to serve some time, but received punishment out of all proportion to their crimes, and are now no danger to anyone.

Milliken then referred me to the real expert in this area -- Carol Jacobsen. She is a professor of art at the University of Michigan, but is also director of the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project. And she is on a mission to get the governor to do the right thing, and release dozens of women whose cases her team have thoroughly investigated. Jacobsen doesn’t see herself as a bleeding heart liberal. She is aware that there are women in Michigan prisons who are a threat to society and deserve to be there.

But there are dozens of women who she has interviewed and investigated, and who she believes deserve freedom.

There‘s a vast degree of injustice in our prison system, she told me. Jacobsen said she had attended more than a dozen parole hearing in recent years, and found them, “racist, sexist exercises in public flogging.” She said she found “the parole boards‘ ignorance about domestic violence, incest, and the relationship of abuse to women‘s lawbreaking astonishing.”

So, she and former Governor Milliken keep lobbying the current governor to act. They‘ve been doing this for years, and have had a tiny bit of success. Clemency for four women sentenced to life; paroles for a dozen or so more.

“But these are a drop in the ocean,” she told me. And as she sees it, the problem seems to be getting, if anything, worse.

Jacobsen has complained to the governor and the corrections department that there is a “culture of cruelty” and a rash of suicide attempts in Huron Valley Women’s Prison. She is begging Patricia Caruso, who heads Michigan’s Department of Corrections, to investigate this and stop it.

But right now, the governor has a golden opportunity to painlessly do the right thing. “Jennifer Granholm can leave a powerful legacy of human rights when she leaves office if she has the courage to commute the sentences of battered women prisoners,“ she says.

Jacobsen notes that Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher commuted the sentences of twenty-one battered women when he left office three years ago. She thinks that if a Southern Republican can do the right thing, a Michigan Democrat should be able to as well.

Essay: Sex and Justice - 11.16.2010

A recent horrifying case involving teen suicide has gotten wide attention. The case got Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinking about the state’s sex offender registry.

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If news is what people are talking about, then the big story in Michigan last week wasn’t the budget deficit, or Governor-elect Rick Snyder’s efforts to put together an administration.

No, the big story was a horrifying case where a fourteen-year-old girl killed herself after having sex with an eighteen-year-old boy.

And it ought to make us all think about a lot of things, including whether the Michigan Sex Offender registry makes any sense.

In this tragic case, both teens at first told police the act was consensual, but later the girl appeared on local TV news, and said she had been raped. Following that, the kids in her high school evidently turned on her. Eventually, the child went home and hung herself. This story is distressing on too many levels to count.

Whatever actually happened between the teens is hard to determine, though police say the girl said she told the boy she was eager to lose her virginity. If so, she later had second thoughts. As a journalist, I am appalled that a local so-called news station put this child on TV, identifying her by name, as she talked about her sex life.

Grownups ought to know how cruel the world can be.

But this whole episode really ought to draw attention to an appalling institution called the Michigan Sex Offender Registry.

Since the 1990s, the registry has listed anyone convicted of a so-called sex crime and indicates where they live. The idea was to protect children by allowing families to discover if a convicted sex offender lives in the neighborhood.

That may make some sense in the case of serious pedophiles, though it also could be seen as a dangerous invitation to vigilante action. But the registry also includes those convicted of a wide variety of far lesser offenses, including drunk frat boys who relieved themselves in public. They are on there with the serial rapists.

The main problem is in cases like this one. In Michigan sixteen is the legal age of consent. But in our highly sexualized society, there are many sixteen year old boys who are active with their almost sixteen year old girlfriends. Legally, they are committing a felony.

If they are caught, they will end up on the registry, and you can imagine what that will do to their futures.

A few years ago, I knew of a seventeen-year-old honor student who was taken to court for having relations with his underage girlfriend. Upon finding out he’d be on the registry, he killed himself by driving into the path of a huge truck.

In the case now making headlines, the student who was the dead girl’s sex partner wasn’t old enough to legally drink, but he was headed to hard time in prison, even if she had admitted that she solicited him. Our law has no tolerance for sex with underage minors, no matter the circumstances. The young man would also have been on the sex offender list for at least twenty-five years.

But ironically, he won’t be on that list now, since the only witness is dead. I’m not saying he should be, nor am I condoning whatever his behavior was. I am saying there is something terribly wrong with this system.

Essay: Sometimes On Sunday - 11.12.10

The legislature has approved a bill allowing the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sunday mornings. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about its effects on society.

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Well, the outgoing state legislature never did fix the recurring budget problem. They never found a way to save the Michigan Promise Scholarship. They did try to save the state fair.

But the governor killed it anyway. However, as the last days of most of their term-limited careers are trickling away, our lawmakers finally accomplished something. They made it possible to buy liquor on Sunday morning and in the afternoon on Christmas Day.

And you’d have to be Ebenezer Scrooge to say Bah, Humbug to that. Actually, I wasn’t sure at first that this was a good idea.

That’s not because I think I have any right to decree when any grownup should drink. However, I like to think of myself as having a healthy spirit of self-preservation, both of my own dear carcass and that of society as a whole.

And I had this dreadful image of some poor loser whose sweetheart left him just before the holidays. So, on Christmas afternoon, he goes into a bar, drinks himself blind, leaves, and runs over little Susie walking to grandma’s house. Or, to make it personal, smashes into little old me, sent out to buy another pint of egg nog.

Something like that really happened to an editor I knew, who was killed by a drunk in broad daylight on New Year’s Eve.

However, upon mature reflection, I think that the bill is essentially a good idea. Serious alcohol abusers are generally going to find a way to get alcohol, whether or not the bars are open.

Naturally, it would be nice if we could find a way to make sure that bartenders are extra vigilant for problem drinkers, especially on holidays and Sunday mornings. But I suspect this law’s main beneficiary will be grocery stores, and occasional shoppers like me.

My alcohol consumption is limited to wine, and not very much of that. But once or twice I’ve needed to pick up some beer for the relatives, and forgot and put it in my grocery store shopping cart on a Sunday morning. The result was that the cashier triumphantly announced that this was against the law, signaling to everyone in line that I was clearly just a few days away from some alley on Skid Row.

My guess is that I am not the only person this has happened to. The idea that it is immoral to buy liquor at 11:59 a.m. and just fine to buy it a minute later is sort of nuts, and I’m glad that’s ending.

This will also help state revenues, at least a little bit. Establishments will have to pay the state a hundred and sixty dollars a year to sell alcohol on Sunday mornings, and thousands surely will.

However, having passed this bill, it would be nice if our lame duck lawmakers next adopted a sane policy for taxing alcohol. For example, the beer tax has been the same since 1966.

A rational modest increase on each bottle could do wonders to help fund education. Powerful lobbyists won‘t like that idea, of course. But if our lawmakers ever find the necessary courage, I happily drink to that. Maybe even on Sunday morning.

Essay: Bipartisan Success - 11.10.10

The new governor doesn’t take office until January, but Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says there are already signs that he wants to move past the bitter partisan divisions that have paralyzed Lansing.

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Nobody knows what’s actually going to happen when Michigan’s newly elected officials take office in January.

But so far, there have been some hopeful signs, especially from Governor-elect Rick Snyder and his team. Yesterday, he went to Lansing and met with not only the majority Republican caucuses in both the House and Senate, but with the Democrats as well.

That’s something the last governor-elect did not do, though in fairness to her she probably wouldn’t have been welcome in the Republican caucuses. He also met with the bi-partisan freshman caucus, which will now account for more than half the legislature.

The governor-elect made the usual sort of remarks about having an open-door policy, and even reportedly told the freshmen they might all go bowling sometime. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath waiting for that one. But he did some other things that impressed me more. Even though he won by almost six hundred thousand votes, the governor-elect did not claim to have a “mandate” for anything.

Instead, he said he and the other folks elected had “simply earned the right to participate,“ saying “We’re going to be on the field playing; let’s show some results.“

What the governor-elect knows is that he and the legislature don’t have any choice about that; they have an enormous task to do, and not much time to get it done. The state’s facing a $1.6 billion budget deficit for the next fiscal year, and that’s more than twenty percent of the entire general fund. Hard decisions have to be made.

We’ve been facing deficits of this size year after year, but they’ve been kicked down the road, papered over with accounting tricks, and more recently covered by the President’s stimulus money.

There’s not going to be any ability to do that next year. Our lawmakers are going to have to choose huge spending cuts, tax increases, or most likely, a combination of both.

Rick Snyder made two other moves this week that struck me as eminently sensible. He said outgoing House Speaker Andy Dillon would be his state treasurer, the job Bob Emerson now has in the Granholm administration. This got a lot of attention because Dillon is a Democrat, something that gave some members of both parties fits.

Worrying about that, however, struck me as silly. The state treasurer’s main role is to explain state finances to the governor. Dillon is eminently qualified to do that. He’s been the top House leader for four years, and has both a financial and legal background.

His position is a policy-making one only to the extent that he and the governor trust each other. The governor-elect also named former lieutenant governor Dick Posthumus as an advisor who will clearly be sort of a legislative liaison. Posthumus is also a former senate majority leader who has a deep understanding of how things work and knew how to get it done.

He was as deeply conservative as former Governor Engler, but unlike his old boss, didn’t inspire the same degree of animosity; even his opponents tended to liked him.

You can expect some of this bi-partisan honeymoon stuff to fade once the real work gets underway.

But for now, the new broom seems off to a good start.

Essay: They Don’t Trust The People - 10.25.10

Michigan voters are going to decide next week whether to have a new constitutional convention. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says it’s a matter of whether you trust the people.

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Yesterday I moderated a discussion about what’s wrong with state government. The panel included two current state legislators -- Senator Gilda Jacobs and Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton, and one former state rep, David Gubow. He served for fourteen years before being forced out by term limits, and is now a district judge.

The three of them have a lot in common. All three are fairly liberal Democrats who live in an older Detroit suburb. Regardless of what you think of their politics, all are responsible and conscientious servants of the people, who have never been touched by scandal.

They also all agreed that our system of state government is broken, and headed for a day of reckoning, with all the stimulus money gone and next year’s huge state budget deficit looming ahead. Term limits have been a big part of this problem. Gubow, in fact, once said that term limits mean that in Michigan, the only people barred from serving in the legislature are convicted felons currently in prison -- and those who have earned the support of the voters.

They agreed on a number of other problems; our constitution is too easy to amend, and so questions that should be decided merely by passing a law are instead resolved by voters passing a constitutional amendment. Our constitution also forbids a graduated income tax, which means rich and poor pay the same tax rate.

Representative Lipton spoke of efforts to address the resulting unfairness with a complex system of tax credits. So complex, in fact, that when she explained this, I couldn’t understand it.

Eventually, one member of the audience asked a logical question. Eight days from now, the voters are going to be asked if they want to call a convention to fix the state constitution.

Since government is broken, were the panelists in favor of having a constitutional convention? Every one of them said no.

No, for one simple reason. They don’t trust the people. They didn’t use exactly those words, but that’s precisely what they meant. “Not in the present political climate,” Judge Gubow said. He feared that Tea Partiers might win a majority of the delegates and trample all over various rights and freedoms.

Representative Lipton said she had worked long and hard to make embryonic stem cell research possible, and feared that religious opponents might get elected delegates and write a new constitution that outlawed such scientific work.

Well, there is a safeguard, it was pointed out. No new constitution could take effect unless the voters ratified it.

If they wrote a turkey, we can vote it down. But it turns out none of the panelists trusted the people to do the right thing there, either.

Liberals are not, however, alone in this. Conservatives don’t trust the people either. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce and other groups are spending heavily to try to get them to vote no.

Their fears could have some merit. But I can’t help but think, what kind of democracy can you have if, at the end of the day, you fundamentally don’t trust the people?

Because if that’s the case, well, maybe we should have just stayed colonies of Great Britain after all.

Essay: Dying on The Trail - 10.19.10

State Representative Robert Jones of Kalamazoo died in his home Sunday morning. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry wonders why he was running for office this year.

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State Representative Robert Jones was an enormously popular former mayor of Kalamazoo who was in an intense battle to win a seat in the state senate. Intense, but not nasty.

Even in the present, bitter partisan atmosphere, people appeared to genuinely like Mr. Jones, who one friend described as the “guy with the curly little mustache and the huge smile.” Those people included his opponent, Republican Tonya Schuitmaker, who had a hard time saying anything bad about him.

But two days ago, Robert Jones suddenly died in his home, throwing the race into chaos and elections officials into a tizzy.

Legally, dead people’s names aren’t supposed to appear on the ballot. The ones that will be used two weeks from today can perhaps be reprinted, at what I imagine will be considerable expense.

But absentee ballots have gone out and, in some cases, already have been returned. What’s to be done about those?

The Democratic party has to scramble to name a new candidate, who then has to try to make her or his case to the voters in less than two weeks’ time.

Journalism is sometimes about telling unpleasant truths that nobody wants to hear, and here’s one of those. Tributes have been flooding in, praising Robert Jones as a lawmaker, friend and leader.

But the truth, as I see it, is that he had no business running for office this year. Jones had esophageal cancer; he had been fighting it for more than a year. I do not know for certain that this is what killed him, though two days before he died a friend said he appeared to be in pain, and that it was difficult for him to speak.

But he knew he was gravely ill. Being a state senator is a full-time job, and he had to have known that even in the best case scenario, fighting cancer would take up time and energy. Sadly, Robert Jones is far from alone.

Throughout history, candidates have campaigned, sometimes even when they were dying, sometimes going to great lengths to conceal their true condition from the voters.

When the late Paul Tsongas ran for president in 1992, he and his doctors repeatedly said he was cancer-free when it fact he was not. He did not win the Democratic nomination that year, but if he had been elected, he would have died in office during his first term.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a dying man when he was last elected president during World War II. Within three months, the leadership of the nation fell to a vice-president who had no preparation whatsoever for the enormous responsibilities of the job.

Fortunately, that turned out all right. But it wasn’t fair to the voters. In recent years, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of a senile Strom Thurmond and a dying Robert Byrd holding down seats in the U.S. senate. Public office requires responsibility to the public.

Robert Jones was a fine mayor, state representative, and man. But he did his district and his party a disservice by running for office when he was gravely ill. It’s not to much to ask that our elected leaders be honest with us, and be physically up to the job.

Essay: Shrinking Government - 10/14/2010

The city of Pontiac plans to disband its police force… and turn to the county for protection. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks this is the beginning of a healthy trend.

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Everybody hates the government, or at least it’s fashionable these days to say so.

That seems to be one of the main reasons behind the rise of the Tea Party Movement.

Tea partiers cheer people like national anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, who likes to say he wants to shrink the government till it’s small enough he can drag it into the bathroom, beat it to death and drown it in the bathtub, whatever that means.

Indeed, the bigger the government is, the more the anti-government crowd hate it.

They hate the federal government most of all, and anything that they think might expand any of its powers.

That’s one reason President Obama’s health care plan is so unpopular with them. The anti-government crowd also think state government is too big, and want to shrink the powers of the legislature and maybe make it a part-time, or unicameral body.

However, they tend to like local government, the more local the better, and to have affection for their village mayor, local police chiefs, county commissioners and local school boards.

Well, there is a lot of evidence indicating that in a way, the Tea Party is right. We do have more government and more layers of government than we can really afford. But there’s also evidence that their approach is entirely wrong, that their solution is backwards.

We need a vibrant and powerful state government, to protect us, lock criminals away, educate our kids, rebuild our roads and bridges, and make sure we have a functioning infrastructure.

But in many places, we just can no longer afford as much local government as we now have. Several Michigan cities, including Highland Park, Benton Harbor and Pontiac are now being run by state-appointed emergency financial managers.

That’s because those cities have fallen in to the equivalent of receivership. More cities are almost certain to follow.

And in another sign of things to come, Pontiac is about to shut down its police department and turn protective duties over to the Oakland County sheriff’s office. The reason is simple; they can’t afford the vanity of having a separate police force anymore.

The city’s emergency financial manager signed an agreement yesterday under which Pontiac would disband its police department, and pay the county $10.2 million dollars a year. In return, seventy-four deputy sheriffs would protect the citizens of Pontiac.

That number, in fact, is slightly higher than the number of police Pontiac now has, and the deal would save the city about two million dollars a year. They’ll get more protection for less money.

I haven‘t studied the numbers in detail, but it seems clear at least some of the savings will come because they will be able to eliminate bureaucracy and administrative expenses. Pontiac won‘t be the first Michigan city to do this; Mount Clemens in neighboring Macomb County did it five years ago, and saved millions.

This isn‘t a principle limited to police operations. Throughout Michigan, we have school districts, townships, and local one-horse firefighting operations that could be combined to give people better service for less money. Yes, there may be a bit of sadness when you say goodbye for the last time to the Flyspeck Fire Hall.

But when you get your lower property tax bill next year, the figures may make it just that much easier to cope.

Essay: Proposal 2 - 10.8.10

Michigan voters will see a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November. It would ban convicted felons from holding office. Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks this might not be as good an idea as it seems...

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Michigan voters have it relatively easy in one sense this election year. In some years, they’ve had as many as half a dozen complex proposals and amendments on the ballot.

This year, there are only two. The first one, which has received some attention recently, asks us if we would like to call a constitutional convention. But the second has gotten little attention.

Proposal Two was placed on the ballot by the legislature, would amend the state constitution to, “prohibit certain felons from holding public office, or from being appointed to any government job that is policy-making or has discretionary control over public assets.”

They would be barred from service for twenty years after they committed their crime. Now at first blush, that sounds like a sensible idea, and a lot of people are very likely to vote for this.

After all, nobody wants Sticky Fingers Monaghan to be released from prison and be appointed state treasurer or elected county auditor, right? Actually, whether its sponsors admit it or not, this amendment was inspired by an actual person:

Kwame Kilpatrick, the felonious and now-jailed former mayor of Detroit. When he resigned to go off to jail two years ago, he appeared on TV and mumbled something about a comeback.

That was the last thing anybody who cared about Detroit wanted to think about, and helped spark this amendment.

However, there are a number of reasons even the most rabidly anti-Kilpatrick voter might want to think twice before endorsing this amendment. Kilpatrick isn’t making any comeback, not in the foreseeable future. He’s back in prison now on a probation violation, and is facing a host of federal corruption charges.

But wouldn’t this amendment help protect the public from other bad guys? Well, probably not, according to an analysis by the respected, non-partisan Citizens’ Research Council of Michigan.

What it would do is take power and decision-making authority away from local governments and school boards and the voters themselves, and give more power to state government.

Worse, this amendment is vague. It would require more laws to be passed, commissions to be set up, and lead to a lot of haggling in the courts over which felonies are a breach of the public trust.

Nobody thinks convicted embezzlers ought to be put in charge of public funds. But there is little chance of that. By the way, our state’s constitution already bars anyone convicted of such a felony for serving in the legislature for twenty years after the crime.

What this proposal would do is take power out of our hands. Let’s say somebody made a mistake a long time ago, paid the price, and today has something to contribute. Your local school superintendent wants to appoint him to a needed vacancy.

This amendment would prevent that from happening. Let’s say the voters were convinced someone was wrongly convicted of some offense and want to elect them to city council. If this passes, they won’t be allowed to; we’ll have given a little more of our power away.

Democracy, as I understand it, means letting the people decide who they want to do the people’s business, even if they sometimes choose unwisely. True freedom means freedom to make mistakes.

Perhaps we should think twice before giving more of our freedom away.