Michigan may show the way to destroy the cancer of conservatism Comparing miseries is tacky. And both the Michigan GOP and the Wisconsin GOP are miseries. Indubitably. From a distance, Republicans on both sides Lake Michigan may seem boring and technocratic. These are the states where the GOP was born to resist the expansion of slavery, after all. But this […]

Michigan, where our GOP is almost as bad as Wisconsin’s It’s not just Wisconsin. After Michigan Republicans had their worst statewide wipe-out since 1938, the profoundly (and illegally) gerrymandered GOP State House and Senate have launched a smash-and-grab attack on our democracy, our workers, our wetlands and — even! — our puppies. “It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said Mark Brewer, […]

This week marks the painful beginning of the lame duck (or, as I call it, “enflamed duck”) session in the Michigan State legislature. With a Democratic governor about to take the reins, Republicans are hell-bent to pass as much regressive legislation into law as they can before Gov. Gretchen Whitmer moves into her new office. One of the worst is […]

When the GOP loses their bets, they use their gerrymandered majorities to make workers to pay UPDATE, 12/4/18: Michigan’s GOP-controlled House has voted to gut both the One Fair Wage minimum wage increase and earned sick leave. The bills now go to the desk of the governor. If you wonder how that’s going to go, the Detroit Free Press reports, […]

Perusing the Facebook pages of some of the Democrats who won their elections last week, I came across a post by Jeff Irwin, the newly-minted Democratic Senator in Michigan’s 18th state Senate district. In it, he reveals that Democratic members of the state Senate are given $129,700 plus two staff benefit packages (for two staff members.) Republican senators, in sharp […]

After receiving the good news last month that a federal judge had commanded the Michigan Secretary of State to allow for straight-ticket voting, yesterday we got bad news: A three-judge panel of the 6th District Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the ban on straight ticket voting could remain in place for the November election. The result, of course, is […]

Let the state know you oppose needless burdens on older Michiganders, people with disabilities and seasonal workers You know that Rick Snyder has signed into a law a bill that raises the costs of administering our state’s Medicaid program by adding unnecessary new burdens on the 675,000 Michiganders on our Healthy Michigan Plan that will uninsure tens of thousands and […]

It’s no secret that Michigan is one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the entire country. Here’s the 11th Congressional District, for example: The 9th District is almost as bad: Note that they are both adjacent and interlocking. The 11th District is highly Republican and 9th District is reliably Democratic. For good measure, here’s the 14th which is another […]

The following essay was written by my good friend Eli Savit. Eli is an attorney and an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan Law School. His areas of expertise include appellate and Supreme Court litigation; civil rights, education law, environmental law, and public-interest litigation. He writes regularly about legal issues on the Take Care Blog and elsewhere. Follow him […]

We need to learn from the right in order to defeat it Democrats must strive to take Republican talking points as Republicans do, which is not seriously at all. The White House released predictions this week that the budget deficit will burst over $1 trillion by 2019, nearly matching the deficits hit during the worst of the Great Recession as […]

The minimum wage hasn’t risen in a decade and the right is determined to make the poor suffer for it In 1933, at what may have been the peak of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt said: In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be […]