FMP-Constitution1.txt

Page
1
/
1
100%
Guy Gordon (00:01.219)
Hello and welcome to the Facts Matter podcast. I’m Guy Gordon, a presentation of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, where we believe that facts should drive policy, not politics. In this midterm election, November 3rd, you, with proposal one, are going to be asked whether or not Michigan should have a constitutional convention, also known as a CONCON. Exactly what is it? Well, we’re going to be breaking that down over multiple papers and multiple podcasts, which you can find at crcmich.org.

I’m joined by Eric Lufer, president of the CRC, and I guess this is going to be con con 101 for people. The nuts, the bolts, the 411, whatever you want to call it.

Eric Lupher (00:39.672)
That’s right.

Eric Lupher (00:44.462)
Let’s break it down.

Guy Gordon (00:45.739)
all right so first off what is the purpose of a constitutional convention why do we ask this question every sixteen years

Eric Lupher (00:55.406)
So, I mean, even more basic, why do we have a state constitution? We’re using that document to develop the fundamental laws of the state that we should have a governor and a legislature and a judicial branch and those powers of those branches should be equally distributed, that we should have a school system and a system of local government with cities and counties and however you wanted to find that, the university system.

This creates the fundamental structure of our government and we have afforded ourselves in a way that’s not unique among the 50 states, but a fairly aggressive approach to it to say, let’s not just take for granted that what they did 55, 65 years ago is still applicable to today.

today, right? Technology changes, our state grows, not as much as we want, but our state grows. There are societal shifts and to the credit of our founding fathers more than a century ago, they put in a provision, say, let’s do a check-in. Let’s see what the people think if they understand that this document is working, is not working, that there’s a reason to come back and change things.

Guy Gordon (01:59.233)
major societal shifts.

Eric Lupher (02:22.217)
And in the interim, we have the amendment process. So it’s not static, but some things can be dealt with an amendment and other things such as they decided 65 years ago, other things need the Wiley Coyotes TNT and just blow it up and let’s start over.

Guy Gordon (02:43.865)
Okay, so there’s this giant box marked ACME. We’ll stay in the Looney Tunes metaphor. why, you said there are some things that are better done through amendment than through a constitutional review. Define those forms.

Eric Lupher (02:47.383)
Right.

Eric Lupher (03:00.749)
Yeah, I mean, what we see with the amendment process, which has been vigorously used, we’ll discuss this later in the series, that we really nibble at the edges. We’ve added rights to our Declaration of Rights, we’ve added limitations in our tax section, we’ve put term limits in, things like that. So we’re nibbling at the edges.

Guy Gordon (03:25.133)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (03:27.179)
But if we were to decide that the balance of powers between the executive and legislative and judicial branch is tilted in one way that the execution of those powers has been interpreted in such a way that it’s not equal, you couldn’t change that through amendment. You would have to call a constitutional convention. If we were to decide that our higher education system is suffering because of the

autonomy granted to our public universities just isn’t serving us anymore. You couldn’t do that really through a memo. You would have to open up at least that section of that article, the document, and think about that. you know, it’s really a matter of scope and whether

Guy Gordon (04:19.138)
Right.

Eric Lupher (04:21.454)
Use another metaphor, the Rube Goldberg, if you flip this switch, does it have consequences all the way down the line or it’s really more narrowly focused through an amendment?

Guy Gordon (04:35.001)
Okay, so we’re going to be asked this question on November 3rd. Should we approve it? Let’s assume that voters for the first time since 1963 say yes, we should have a constitutional convention. What happens then?

Eric Lupher (04:49.622)
Right. mean, the simple thing is to say what doesn’t happen. And what doesn’t happen is if we vote no, then we go on doing what we’re doing and there’s still the chance to amend the constitution. There’s still the opportunity for judicial interpretation of our current document. And it’ll be a living document that we continue to work with. What does have, if we do vote yes on that, then that triggers a process. The first thing we have to do is

decide who the delegates to that constitutional convention would be. So we hold the vote in November of 2026. By February of 2027, we have to have a primary to narrow the number of delegate candidates for the convention. And then a couple months later in June of 2027,

we would actually have a general election to choose those delegates. So in February, narrow the field. In June, choose the delegates. And we would, in choosing the delegates, the constitution stipulates that we would choose one delegate from every state house district. There’s 110 of them. And we would choose one delegate from each Senate district. There’s 38 Senate districts. So each

Guy Gordon (05:53.763)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (06:14.774)
resident will be voting to choose two delegates to represent them in a constitutional convention. And then on October 5th of 2027, the convention would convene in Lansing. And from that point on, that body is free to do their business. They’re going to choose their officers. They’ll choose a president of the convention and

divide into committees and choose committee chair people. They will determine the rules of proceedings and judge the qualifications. If somebody’s not showing up, if somebody has misbehavior, it would be up to that body to decide whether they should go on being a delegate. And, you know, they get down to business, they would

Guy Gordon (07:01.091)
Okay.

Eric Lupher (07:13.23)
sort of not stipulated in the constitution, but inferred is that somewhere along the line, the legislature would have to provide an appropriation because this is gonna cost a little bit of money. We went back and yeah, go ahead.

Guy Gordon (07:23.201)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Gordon (07:27.797)
I think the estimate from your first paper was somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million.

Eric Lupher (07:33.647)
Yeah, we went back and looked at what it cost in the 1960s for the convention to come together and we adjusted for inflation. So we didn’t try to guesstimate because we have computers now or, or zoom or inner, you know, teams or things like that, what could be done more efficiently? We just said, if we did the same thing today that they did then what would it cost? We didn’t account for AI. Um, so, you know, when the Paul Parker 50 to $60 million.

Guy Gordon (07:53.625)
You didn’t account for AI?

Eric Lupher (08:03.34)
So that’s pretty significant.

Guy Gordon (08:05.485)
So how partisan is this process? mean, when we look at the board of canvassers, it’s a portion based on party so that it is a balanced board, a delegation that is going to do or undo our constitution and a lot of things that we have come to be familiar with. How partisan will that process be? Who will determine what party controls it? Or will a party control it?

Eric Lupher (08:29.166)
You know, we can go through the series, we’ll cover it in the podcast and we’ll break down the different issues that we think are ripe for convention to look at. But what your question there is sort of the fundamental thing that I think a lot of people will think about. We live in a purple state that’s pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. There’s no guarantees that the

delegates that we choose will be evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats. It’s a political process just like choosing the governor, just like choosing your representatives to the state house and Senate. And they’re being asked to undertake a pretty political process going forward to think about our declaration of rights and whether same-sex marriage and abortion will

Guy Gordon (09:11.801)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (09:27.886)
be issues covered in the convention and if so in what way? They’ll be asked to think about the tax limitations that are placed upon us and should those be strengthened or weakened?

Guy Gordon (09:31.949)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Gordon (09:40.185)
term limits, control, whether or not state policy can bigfoot a zoning board in a township.

Eric Lupher (09:47.151)
Right, just sort of everything that we’re fighting about for the last 50 years will come into a, you know, a condensed in terms of timeframe, number of weeks and months, and they’ll be fighting out everything out. And we could guess that they’re going to be heavily lobbied by every special interest that wants to make sure that their special, you know,

topic is handled to their preference and whatever the document looks like in the end.

Guy Gordon (10:20.535)
well and that becomes i think the issue for every special interest they can view it as an opportunity or a potential peril

Eric Lupher (10:28.844)
Yes. Yeah, there’s, you know, depending on where you stand on many of these issues, there’s the opportunity for improvement or the threat of losing your issue, having it weakened in some way. I should mention, you know, in the end, whatever this body comes up with, there’s no limit of time for what they do. But at some point,

they’re going to want to get back to their day jobs and spend more time with their family, not up in Lansing talking amongst themselves. At some point they have to come up with a document and ultimately that comes off back to we the people for a vote. So we just talked about how political it could be. Ultimately they have to sell it to the voters that this is an improvement over the 1963 constitution and get a majority of the votes so that

Guy Gordon (10:56.963)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (11:24.268)
they can be adopted. Otherwise they’re just spinning their wheels for a couple months and making an extra buck.

Guy Gordon (11:31.715)
So beyond the issues and some of the thorns that are going to be on this rose, what are the virtues that we should be using as goals or objectives when we redo a constitution? Should we choose to do that? How important is brevity, clarity, and maybe specificity in detail? Or is it?

that not what a constitution should be about that’s what statute should be for

Eric Lupher (12:03.532)
Yeah, this is where theory collides head on with reality. An ideal constitution is brief to say that the governor should be our executive in charge, but not so detailed as to become burdensome in sort of interpreting what that means. But what we’ve seen in the amendment process over the last several

several decades, I guess, really, is that every time we’re amending the Constitution now, we’re putting in great detail. We can think about the Citizens Redistricting Commission that the Voters Not Politicians introduced a few years ago. They didn’t just say that we should have a process that involves the Citizen Budget Commission and the legislature should figure out what that means.

They put in every detail about how we should check that, select that, the members to that commission and how the voting process would work and all the detail. And we see in other provisions where the legislature has taken statute and lifted it out of statute and put it in the constitution and find detail in what we’ve done over the last 65 years.

is basically double the size of our constitution by adding all of this detail.

Guy Gordon (13:34.307)
Yeah. 19,000 words, there’s something like 37,000 words, correct? And clarity, I mean, we want this document to be accessible to the average person, right? And that’s why both brevity and clarity are so important.

Eric Lupher (13:40.098)
That’s right. Right. So.

Eric Lupher (13:51.151)
And we, we started off talking about the times are changing. They’ve changed in the 65 years since we did this and they’re going to continue to change. And if you put in docu and provisions that are so defining that don’t change with the times, then that leads to inefficiency and it leads to a document that’s not really reflective of what’s going on.

good example of that is something we’re going to cover in Article 2. Our current document says you have to be 21 to vote. Well, the US Constitution says we have to be 18 to vote. So we want a document that’s reflective of reality and you shouldn’t need to need read the footnotes to understand what’s going on.

Guy Gordon (14:43.939)
So is that one of the compelling questions too? How much of this is about cleaning things up where maybe our federal and state constitutions don’t agree or things are left unsaid or things are just no longer, they’re obsolete.

Eric Lupher (15:00.056)
I, know, as a good government organization, we think that’s important. But again, the reality theory clashes with reality. The reality is we’ve been working with a document that’s been ineffective or not reflecting reality for years and dealing with it through statute. So yes, we think it would be important to do. It’s something that we could fix.

many of the provisions by amendment today, if they had a champion to say, let’s do something simple by amending our constitution to say anyone 18 years or older has the right to vote, who would vote against that, right? It’s a very simple question to put on the ballot and fix something like that. But it just continues to float under the surface, not getting the attention either of legislators or citizens themselves.

Guy Gordon (15:53.981)
And we’re going to dive into some of the amendments and the history of them in part two of this discussion. But I do want to touch on the fact that we’ve had, I think, more than 80 attempts to amend our constitution. I think 39 have been successful. But I think you would agree that many of our amendments are things that could have been done in statute, but for either the legislature did not have the political will or maybe voters didn’t trust them to do it.

How much has our amendment process, I wouldn’t say corrupted, but changed our constitution, not just for the sake of change, but because how many amendments are in there that should actually be in statute, I guess would be the simple way to ask that question.

Eric Lupher (16:36.066)
Yeah, I don’t have a number to assign that, but your point is very good that what we’ve seen through the amendment process is a weakening of the powers of the legislature. Term limits are one example, tax limitations. So, you know, part of it is distrust of our current body, that are they making decisions that reflect our needs, but also a distrust of the future.

Guy Gordon (16:49.795)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (17:06.294)
that we want money set aside for schools. We don’t trust that the legislature is going to do that on their own. So let’s put provisions in the constitution, setting a bottom, setting a minimum of how much of the resources should go to schools.

Guy Gordon (17:22.507)
Yeah. Or my poster child for this would be the lottery. People said, you know, we don’t trust that the money is actually going to education. So by golly, we’ve we’ve got to put it into the Constitution so people can trust the process.

Eric Lupher (17:39.105)
It’s trust is a big part of it and we don’t trust. mean, ultimately the legislature is a reflection of ourselves, right? We’re choosing people to represent us. So we don’t trust our future selves are going to make the decisions that are important to us today. So we’re going to limit their authority to change a lot of things.

Guy Gordon (17:48.931)
right.

Eric Lupher (18:04.91)
It’s sort of a sad state of affairs, but it also is very reflective of where we are today as a society.

Guy Gordon (18:11.797)
Well, in the same lack of trust or lack of will that’s driving that may also complicate the con con if we have one.

Eric Lupher (18:21.29)
very much so, Ultimately, sort of a best case scenario is that we would look at a lot of that verbiage that is very statutory in nature and ask, can that be pulled out and simplify the constitution to make it a more livable document into the future? But in doing so, now you have to go to the voters and say, we just took away something that

you put in because you didn’t trust our future selves and we’re telling you trust us and that’s a hard sell I think in the end.

Guy Gordon (18:53.528)
Right.

Guy Gordon (19:00.525)
well it should there there’s certainly a shift of burden if you’ve got if you’re going to clean up those amendments they still have to be addressed in statute somehow and there was a reason that they weren’t

Eric Lupher (19:12.088)
Well, yeah, mean, some of them were. We have in our finance section set asides for our natural resources, trust fund and things like that. And they were in statute and we picked them up and put them into the constitution. So it’s just a trust. Anything that can be done statutorily can be undone statutorily. We don’t want them to undo it statutorily. So let’s put it in the constitution and lock it under right.

Guy Gordon (19:38.689)
Raise the bar.

Eric Lupher (19:42.126)
throw away the key.

Guy Gordon (19:43.523)
So it’s time that we close this up and we want to remind people that this will be a multi-part and very comprehensive 360 look at the issues involved here in our next episode. We’re going to be looking at when we have changed the constitution because it is through that past prologue that we can define what may be the hot button or radioactive issues going forward should we choose to do a concom. But Eric, I want to ask you before we leave.

as voters, when we look at this ballot question, let’s break down two questions. What are the most compelling reasons to vote? Yes.

Eric Lupher (20:27.214)
The most compelling reasons to vote, yes. We need a document that reflects our needs of today and into the future. One that’s not restrictive to allow us to adapt our state and local governments to those changing needs. And one that serves us into the future. So it’s

I guess I would also say, depending on where you stand, some people would choose to vote yes to protections that have been placed there, whether that’s the abortion rights or other things.

that might play a role in how you choose to vote.

Guy Gordon (21:22.827)
And the flip side of that could be, we said, a compelling reason to vote no is because you fear what could be done if you reopen this, the kind of the Pandora’s box reason. And I think we will be, and we’ve already seen many special interest groups already campaigning hard against this.

Eric Lupher (21:41.155)
Yeah, the organizations are coming together to protect what they have. there’s now organizations lobbying or advertising vote no on the constitutional convention question. The people, you know, everybody has their own political philosophy, political priorities. And

With our efforts, we’re just trying to get the information out so people understand what these issues are. We’re not at all advocating for a yes vote or a no vote. We’re just trying to do the education so that come September when the absentee ballot starts circulating or come November when you show up at your polling place, you’re a more informed voter able to know what this question is about and think about the issues that are important to

Guy Gordon (22:39.425)
And I guess that leads me to the final, final little element here. You spoke perfectly there to the mission of the citizens research council, which is to better inform voters, better informed citizens in an unbiased and objective way about the issues facing government and the good government. You’ve got a birthday coming up, not you specifically, but the, the, the council itself, 110 years.

Eric Lupher (23:06.222)
110 years. It was on April 13th of 1916 that they turned on the lights and got down to business. So here we are. We’re recording this on March 23rd and we’re just a few weeks away from that monumental 110th anniversary.

Guy Gordon (23:23.115)
And so we ask those, if you appreciate the work of the Citizens Research Council, and I would argue that there has never been a greater need for objectivity and nonpartisan analysis of issues than right now. And if you cherish that as much as we do, we invite you to go to crcmich.org and give a donation. Tell the CRC happy birthday by supporting the mission here. Eric, you and I have taken the first bite of the elephant here.

It’s a big one. We’ve looked at the nuts and bolts. Coming up in part two of this, we’re going to look at the amendments and try to divine some of the trends that may be coming out. We briefly touched on some, but also past is prologue and we’ll take a look at what a con con might look like come 2027. We’ll see you then, Eric.

Eric Lupher (24:12.994)
All right, thanks.

Guy Gordon (24:14.221)
And thank you for being with us. Again, you can tell your friends, you can find us on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, any of the platforms. Look for hashtag facts matter. That hashtag is important in your search to get to what you’re looking for. Until next time, I’m Guy Gordon. Take care.

Displaying FMP-Constitution1.txt.