Attorneys for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and the Republican-controlled legislature will (virtually) meet in court Friday morning for oral arguments on the legislature’s lawsuit over Whitmer’s COVID-related executive orders.
If we became embroiled in another World War the goddamn MAGA crowd would be suing to prevent being forced to manufacture armaments and ammunition. Because freedom.
And they would not be lining up to enlist because of bone spurs, or gout.
Gotta disagree with you here.
There is nothing the MAGAts would enjoy more than making guns, explosives and tanks. Except maybe shooting brown people. So, nothing but winning for them!
(I’m from Michigan and am thrilled that we have another fine Dem governor in place to be proud of. Hope it’s a cold day in hell before we are dumb enough to elect another Engler or Snyder. Keep up the good work, Ms Whitmer!)
The wingnuts (a designation that now includes virtually the entire GOP, and definitely includes President Trump) have managed to politicize the basic question of whether we even ought to have a governmental response to the most dangerous pandemic of the past 100 years.
You’d think there’d be more discussion of how totally insane that is.
Making guns and explosives, yes. But MAGA(t)s would never fight. They are too coward to volunteer. All they want to do is try to bully people due to their cowardice and insecurity. They only care for themselves.
The MAGAts want guns and explosives to intimidate those who don’t carry them, and to rule in a post-apocalyptic world.
They’d have no interest in fighting against a trained army that had plenty of weaponry of its own.
Most of the journalism on this mess labels it a separation of powers flap. I don’t think that’s entirely it. In states that recently elected Democratic Gov’s but kept GOP control of their legislatures the lawmakers have tried to heist the powers granted to the executive. That’s what’s going on here. Hopefully a Judge will limit what executive power the legislature can grab with its law making prerogatives. Same crap going on in NC and WI.
We are in ‘be careful what you wish for’ territory. It is a classic liberal position to be highly suspicious of emergency assertions of executive power. Countless dictatorships have started that way. The problem, as ever, is that that the Republican Party has wrecked our democracy. In a healthy politics, the opposition consents to strong executive action in an emergency and preserves its right to act as a good-faith check on the executive. The Republican oppositional posture is currently so insane that Democrats have no option but to take unilateral action and risk laying the judicial foundations for future Republican excesses. Not that Republicans won’t, and don’t, in any case do as they please.
Living here in Michistan, I will add some local flavor.
The senate majority, while spending all of 2019 obstructing the governor’s attempts to work out a plan to adequately fund roads, suggested the some roads be allowed to go back to being unpaved.
The speaker of the house, who is 31 and has five children, attempted in 2018 to carry a loaded handgun onto a commercial flight. He had bought the gun three years earlier, but had never registered it as required by law. His father is a pastor, and is one of a group of pastors suing the governor in a separate lawsuit.
Another member of the legislature open carried his gun to the governor’s state of the state address this year. A few days later the gun was stolen from his apartment in the capital.
My own state legislator was opposed to the stay at home orders on the day they were issued.
I think it’s going to take more than a Democrat in the governor’s mansion to fix the destruction of what was once Michigan. If you go into my workshop you’ll many older American made tools. They last forever unlike the China made shit. If you look at the ID plates on those tools you’ll see names like Detroit, Saginaw and Kalamazoo on may of them. People made those tools as well as all kinds of shit in Michigan. They got paid well, had strong unions and although only high school educated lived a lower echelon middle class life.
Then they bought the bullshit. Freedom Of Religion, Second Amendment and who can take a piss in a woman’s room. NONE of those issues will make a blue collar family better off. But while they absorbed themselves in that bullshit their bosses and the pols they voted for destroyed those unions, shipped their jobs over seas and put lead in their drinking water. But Obama was going to take their guns away so they voted for a bigger stick up their asses. Meanwhile Michigan’s 1% was having a fied day. They kept the rubes riled up on issues the !% don’t give a shit about like abortion or guns and behind the smoke stuck it to the working class of Michigan with a vengeance and blamed it on “the left”, “libruls” or “socialism”. Most Michiganders still don’t get it and will probably put a GOP’er in the Gov spot soon enough.
Michigan like many states is done.
Broken beyond repair.
Some people yearn for war because they make a killing in war-time but, for others, war is what we do when we, collectively, have failed to or refused to do anything else. Even during the WWI and WWII eras, there were dissidents. Some of them conscientiously objected to war itself. Others, especially in the period 1938-1941, latched on to “America First” sloganeering for several reasons, including: (1) anything was good if it stymied FDR; and (2) “Mr. Hitler is not perfect but he has some good ideas.”
The “MAGA crowd” (as you put it) has been with us since cave days. Easily manipulated, they are – literally – a force to be reckoned with.
For example, they …
Oh, I understand more than you think. I was a high level administrator at a large community college in the Metro Detroit area and lived in Sterling Heights (Macomb County), within spitting distance of much of the auto industry, so right in the heart of things. We had training programs and lots of cooperation with the auto companies and suppliers. Still have friends and contacts there and so am fully aware of the mentality that has swept through there. My folks are up in the northern part of the lower peninsula (Michigan Militia country) and close family in the UP. I was born about a mile down the road from the State Capitol in Lansing, actually in the hospital that was shown blocked by the first bout of protests. All points covered.
However, I do see that there are some interesting signs of life: the biomedical corridor between Ann Arbor and Troy, the growth of the electric battery industry (many still start-ups there), also, interesting grassroots level stuff in the city of Detroit (regularly visit friends in the Pointes)… The German research institute that I work for has its US headquarters in the corridor between Detroit and Ann Arbor for a reason.
I’m not ready to give up yet.
OT a bit: I watched the press conference about the Daimler-Chrysler merger while getting dressed for work that morning. Went to a meeting of colleagues who worked extensively with the “Big Three” and watched the astonishment grow in their faces when I explained that the “AG” in Daimler-Chrysler AG meant the company was registered on the German stock exchange (DAX) and was therefore no longer a US company – none of them had picked up on that. Talk about shock waves when the realization hit!
Far too many lazy media foofs are picking up the “Michigan is a state bitterly divided” theme for stories.
Polling shows we clearly aren’t that divided over Gov. Whitmer’s safer-at-home orders; a strong majority of Michiganders strongly supports them and has yet to reach a comfort level sufficient to go full Wisconsin.
Yet, a handful of armed, beer-breath morons dragging their knuckles across the statehouse lawn in Lansing have somehow become a 50-percent bloc in the merde the media continues to peddle.
Just no.
On the other hand:
Thank you. Much appreciated.
Since it’s so safe, why aren’t all the legislators and judges meeting in person?
Three things to watch? Only one thing matters, what does the court say. I have long given up the idea that my opinion matters, even if that opinion is in a majority. Democratic government my rear end.
Emergency Powers of the Governor Act of 1945
Sadly a little known fact about this law is that it only applies to GOP governors