Lawmakers like to brag that the vast majority of bills that they pass are on bi-partisan votes. The statement, of course, is true, but at the very least it is misleading, but they don’t tell you that. The bulk of those bills are not controversial but run of the mill cats and dogs issues that get bi-partisan support because there is no reason not to vote for them. That politically creates the illusion that both political parties are listening to you and working together for the good of the state. Bully for them.
However in recent days there was an honest to goodness difference of opinion on a series of bills over what the minimum wage was going to be in our state and how much sick time should employers be forced to provide to their workers. And don’t forget the flap over tip wages with thousands of servers from Monroe to Marquette telling lawmakers to leave their mud-hooks off the current system that they argue is working just fine. They also told lawmakers they would lose money if they did anything different.
Adding more intrigue to the cantankerous debate was the pressure segments of organized labor was putting on Democrats to vote to boost the minimum wage for everyone thus ignoring what many tip workers were saying.
All the lobby groups were engaged with lawmakers caught in the cross-fire.
But when they counted the votes, oh my, labor took a hit as a handful of Democrats bolted and voted with enough Republicans to pass, on a bipartisan basis, the very plans labor did not want.
House GOP Speaker Matt Hall helped to engineer all this along with Democratic Sen. Sam Singh of East Lansing. The two actually did a give-and-take that resulted in not everyone getting what they wanted, which is what a compromise is, but there was enough in there for both parties to say, “let’s do this.”
Prior to this vote the speaker reflects there was not a lot of this going around in this town.
“We haven’t worked together very much, me and the senate Democrats and the governor so we have to determine if we trust each other, are we serious, are people playing games, can they deliver votes?”
And on these questions the answer was yes, yes, no, and yes.
“I think everyone showed that we can put the politics aside, we can honor our word and we can deliver our caucuses,” he reflects after the dust had settled. Bully for you the citizens.
Now make no mistake, labor will try to get even with those D’s who jumped ship but those D’s will tell the voters back home that “we did the right thing for workers and in this case we are sorry labor was not pleased.” And then the voters will decide whether to reward or punish this historic bi-partisan vote.
With that one in the books, the next question is, is this a one-off or the “start of something big” as the comedian Steve Allen once composed into a hit song.
Speaker Hall and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer both profess to be true-believers when it comes to working together and the next chance they have to prove it is with the so-far elusive permanent fix to fix the roads.
“She has started to move my way,” the speaker tells reporters.
But when reminded that compromise is a two-way street, he refused to move her way on raising new revenue for the roads. She says she’ll do some budget cuts and starts the bidding at $500 million to appease him but “you can’t fix the roads with cuts alone,” she is fond of saying into his so-far deaf ears.
He’s not there on anything that even smells like a tax hike, but in a look toward building on what just happen with this wage bi-partisan vote he suggests, “the way I viewed it if this thing fell apart and blew up, it would not be a productive two years. If we get it done it would lay the foundation for maybe having a productive two years” on roads and other issues.
Let’s see if the “foundation” is on solid rock or quick sand.
