Guy Gordon (00:01.205)
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Facts Matter podcast. Courtesy of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, I’m Guy Gordon along with Eric Lufer. By now you have been probably following our series on the constitutional question that’s going to be presented before voters on November 3rd of this year, which is whether or not Michigan should call a constitutional convention, also known, I guess affectionately, as a con con. And we have slowly carved through many of the important articles today.

We review Article 4, which basically sets up the framework for our legislature and the president of the CRC, Eric Gloufer. Here to break it down for us as always. Good day to you, Eric.

Eric Lupher (00:42.05)
good day. about halfway through our series. This is the seventh of our 15 papers, so we keep plotting along.

Guy Gordon (00:49.599)
Yeah, but this is a fascinating one because Article 4 in the legislature seems to be in the crosshairs for amendment more often than any other part of the Constitution.

Eric Lupher (01:00.266)
It does, and I think it speaks to the idea that the people generally want to rein in the purview of the legislature to deal with a lot of things or how the legislature acts. So they have targeted this article more than any other article, as long as we’ve had the ability to amend the Constitution. It also has a pretty poor batting average.

Guy Gordon (01:28.123)
Yeah, yeah. We wouldn’t wish it on the tigers. True.

Eric Lupher (01:30.51)
Well, we’re getting close, unfortunately. Yeah, the people, even though there’s subgroups of the people that say, let’s do something about this and amend the Constitution one way or another, they have a hard time convincing a majority of the voters that this is a good idea.

Guy Gordon (01:50.069)
Well, there seems to be a faction of, I guess not a throw the bums out faction, but certainly a push the bums around faction here, isn’t there? They just can’t seem to get to a majority.

Eric Lupher (02:00.403)
Yeah, it’s maybe a tie their hands behind their back idea, right? Let’s limit what they can do and how much, you know, again, keeping with that bums, limit how much damage they can do.

Guy Gordon (02:04.916)
Okay.

Guy Gordon (02:12.543)
Yeah, which I that seems to be maybe something where there’s a bit of growth in popularity. Let’s line out the basics in terms of Article four for starters. I guess lays out the size and scope of what our legislative body is going to look like.

Eric Lupher (02:30.56)
Right. So this is the very basic. you know, if you start by looking at the U S constitution, article one is the legislature. And we look at the Michigan constitution before we deal with the executive or the judicial branches or local government. we hear you get into the legislative branch and, right away it’s determines the size of the body.

Some state constitutions say we’re going to use sort of a proportion of the people try to keep a number of districts per 90,000, 100,000 people, something like that. Michigan in 1963 locked in that we were going to have 110 state reps and 38 state senators. Our population’s grown since then. Unfortunately, not much, but the ratio of

people to legislator has changed. It’s also apparent when we go back and look at that 1963 constitution that it really meant to create a part-time body. It doesn’t say so, but there are provisions in there that say dealing with immediate effect, with special legislative sessions, with the ability to

Guy Gordon (03:42.015)
Really?

Eric Lupher (03:53.538)
governor to pocket veto, bills that have been enacted, the idea of a referendum. The way all those were written, they presuppose that the body will wrap up around June 30th and go home and there’s time within the balance of the year to call a special session or for the people to circulate petitions and call for a referendum, things like that.

Guy Gordon (04:18.911)
I don’t think most people know that. happened on the way to efficiency and part time?

Eric Lupher (04:25.934)
You know, the legislature was part-time under the 1908 Constitution, and I’d have to go back and look to see if it explicitly says so. So I suppose the Can-Can delegates in the 1961-62 just had it their mind that, of course, it’s a part-time body and we don’t need to say so. On or around 1970 or 71, all of sudden, they said, we got work to do. We’re not going home.

June 30th, then they just kept going and going. So that now Michigan’s considered a full-time legislature in these little provisions about special sessions or referendums just getting in the way and largely are ignored or it creates a lot of complication for how they’re implemented.

Guy Gordon (05:15.839)
And then we’ve got those lovely late night, December lame duck sessions that have become so fraught with nonsense.

Eric Lupher (05:25.344)
Right, and if we had those explicit statements of a part-time legislature, then a lot of that would go away.

Guy Gordon (05:30.773)
Yeah.

Guy Gordon (05:35.851)
We do see Nebraska has gone to you know a unicameral legislature. Do you think that that there’s any? desire for that

Eric Lupher (05:46.081)
I, you there will be some contingent, probably some delegates that come in and say, well, let’s take a hard look at Nebraska and how things work there. That is a much more agrarian state, much smaller population. Probably you would say much more uniform in political leanings. So I think there’s, it’s worthwhile to look at it in the end, having a bicameral legislature with

Guy Gordon (06:06.933)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (06:14.158)
checks and balances, not necessarily one party, I suspect will probably, you know, hold the day as well as ultimately what the constitutional convention comes up with. They have to sell to the voters in trying to get their vote on what they, the new constitution is better than the 1963 constitution and you should vote yes. And so radical changes such as a uniform.

Guy Gordon (06:16.437)
Right.

Guy Gordon (06:30.343)
Exactly.

Eric Lupher (06:44.174)
unicameral legislature might be a step too far.

Guy Gordon (06:47.947)
could be plus do the do the financial savings ever live up to the hype. Whether it’s unicameral, whether it’s part time.

Eric Lupher (06:59.358)
yeah. In the, in the world of looking at part-time, full-time, there’s a middle ground that’s sort of, Michigan was certainly falling to call it hybrid, right? The number of session days is limited, either by a certain date that they have to wrap up or, they say you have 44 session days to do your work, but that doesn’t mean the legislators are going home from Lansing on

Guy Gordon (07:13.471)
Okay.

Eric Lupher (07:29.356)
July 1st necessarily, but they’re going to stick around and have committee hearings and deal with constituent needs and things like that. So still you’re paying staff, still you’re paying legislators, even though they’re not in session. The work goes on, you’re just not in session and they really, in a part-time legislature, have to condense all of the work of enacting or amending laws into a

Guy Gordon (07:59.189)
Right.

Eric Lupher (07:59.874)
shorter amount of time.

Guy Gordon (08:02.251)
So one of the limits that was placed on the legislature since 1963 were term limits. We revised them again in 2022. Is that the final word on it or do you think that’d be fertile ground to plow in a concon?

Eric Lupher (08:19.566)
I suspect they’ll want to look at it, not necessarily to get rid of it. Again, they have to sell this to the voters that this is going to work. And I think the people have spoken on two different occasions saying that they like term limits, but you can continue to tinker around the edges with it. In 1992, we put in these lifetime limits and the provision at that time was you had certain amount of

Guy Gordon (08:31.051)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (08:49.71)
terms, three terms in the House, which would amount to six years, two terms in the Senate that would amount to eight years. And then when we amended it in 2022, we said, well, you just get to be a legislature, a legislator for 12 years and how you decide to use that is up to you. So they might look at that and say, is 12 years too long or too short?

Guy Gordon (09:16.019)
Yeah, maybe a little too soon to pass judgment on that. It’s been only four years.

Eric Lupher (09:23.052)
Right. But yeah, I think they might tinker around the edges without throwing out the whole system.

Guy Gordon (09:27.935)
Yeah. Okay. We have heard a lot about transparency, but we’ve also come to expect that it ends up being a lot of lip service and not a lot of legislative action. it seems that they seem to go back and forth with the house being aggressive in one session. And then just a year later, the Senate doing something, but neither teaming.

Is that something at a con con where advocates of greater chance, transparency and financial disclosure could really make an impact?

Eric Lupher (10:02.158)
Yeah, you know, this is a tough one. So we say in very early in this series, sort of pointing out what a good constitution looks like. And we say that the provision should be concise enough to give meaning or give direction, but not so much as to be putting legislative language into the constitution. In 2022, when we were amending term limits, we

Guy Gordon (10:10.879)
Right?

Eric Lupher (10:30.968)
told the legislature it’s time to have financial disclosure. And they took a very lackadaisical, unsubstantial way out of it. They did enact some disclosure laws, but they are relatively weak compared to other states.

Guy Gordon (10:48.619)
shocking considering some of the financial scandals that we’ve had on both sides of the aisle over the past decade.

Eric Lupher (10:57.324)
Yeah, you know, again, going back to where we started, a lot of these amendments over the years have been to tie the hands behind the back. In this case, we asked the legislature to tie its own hands behind its back and it said, no, I don’t think we want to. Right. So yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitely going to be an interest, a topic of interest if there is a constitutional convention. How do you strengthen that? How do you give it more teeth?

Guy Gordon (11:09.567)
Right.

clean out your own barn.

Eric Lupher (11:26.386)
And I just wonder, can they do that without being so verbose in that sort of provision as to violate the guideposts that we would put on drafting this type of stuff?

Guy Gordon (11:42.559)
Well, and to your point, does it even belong in the Constitution? Shouldn’t they do this statutorily instead?

Eric Lupher (11:49.63)
Yeah, right. They definitely, that’s a short answer. Yes.

Guy Gordon (11:52.947)
Yeah, yeah, you are unfailingly consistent on that. We are currently also witnessing countrywide these pitched battles over redistricting. And that could be an electric issue if we were to approve this constitutional convention.

Eric Lupher (11:57.261)
Yes.

Eric Lupher (12:15.232)
It is certainly first and foremost an issue of the day, I think. So Michigan, when we adopted the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2018, we’re following the pattern of California and Arizona before us and saying, let’s take the legislature out of the process and give it back to the people and limit the amount of gerrymandering that can go on.

And in doing so, we said, you know, whatever the federal voting rights act says, we have to do that as part of our process. But now we see that the voting rights act has been blown up and states are given free reign to gerrymander as much as they want. And Michigan under this provision is sitting on the sidelines saying this constitution says only the independent citizens redistricting commission can do that. So.

it will be a topic of conversation if there’s a con con at the same time, we are pretty purple state and is either party should they control constitutional convention, willing to throw this out, knowing that the winds of control change between the political parties and the legislature moves from Republican to Democrat. And although they might not like what they end up.

within one cycle in two years, it might change and now we’re redistricting all over again. The idea have to do this after every census seems to be long gone in many of these states.

Guy Gordon (13:53.045)
Well…

Guy Gordon (13:56.917)
They could redline that in a con con. could say no mid decade nonsense. Couldn’t they?

Eric Lupher (14:01.484)
They could, yeah. But again, they have to sell it to the people and are the people interested in being gerrymandered? We don’t know. You know, Indiana’s a lot more Republican state. Tennessee and Alabama, they’re pretty uniform. What are the states that look pretty purple like Michigan and what sort of gerrymandering is going on there to the extent that there’s any independence away from the

Guy Gordon (14:09.301)
Well, Indiana was.

Guy Gordon (14:22.826)
Yeah.

Eric Lupher (14:30.114)
who controls the legislature at the time.

Guy Gordon (14:32.701)
A real sore point among those that get sore or the legislature is elected officials compensation. And there is a healthy section about that in, in article four.

Eric Lupher (14:47.086)
Right. The 1963 constitution was silent on this subject, but 1968 group of interested citizens said, well, that’s a failing of the constitution. We need to put in a provision. And they wrote it. They created what’s called the state officer’s compensation commission. And they said that whatever that commission recommends will go into effect unless the legislature votes to reject it.

So that gave the legislature a pretty easy way out. Let’s just not act on it. And all of a sudden we get a pay raise and, um, able to buy bigger gifts for our kids and holiday season and so on. In 2002, the people said enough of that. need to rein in the salary increases of the legislature and they changed it so that whatever the commission recommends now has to be approved.

Guy Gordon (15:27.403)
Yeah.

Eric Lupher (15:44.543)
by an affirmative vote. You can’t just stand by on the sidelines anymore. And what we’ve seen since then is the legislature is pretty gun shy about doing anything that seems self aggrandizing, self self-serving. And there has not been, except for minor bumps in the salaries of judges, Supreme court justices, there hasn’t been pay raises. So.

Some among us might say, that’s great. You should be doing your civic duty when serving in the legislature. It’s not about pay. But at the same time, we’re asking citizens to take time out of their lives to leave their day jobs and go serve for some time in the legislature. And if that means a pay cut and it means a salary, not necessarily befitting a full-time legislature.

Guy Gordon (16:25.94)
Right.

Eric Lupher (16:41.674)
if we stick with that full-time legislature, then maybe that’s a detriment. So there’s no easy answer to this, but we definitely need to look at the process that’s in place and see if there’s a happy ground between standing by and doing nothing or having to take that affirmative vote. It’ll certainly be an item of discussion.

Guy Gordon (17:01.419)
Okay.

I’m going to hit you with a 60 second challenge here and we’re going to put a yellow flag caution flag out and say, okay, we’re going a little bit into the weeds, but indulge us for a moment because we’re going to be brief. What is the presentment clause and why would we need to change it? Tick, tick, tick.

Eric Lupher (17:22.028)
So at the end of a term, well, during the term, it’s the job of the legislature to present the bills enacted to the governor for a signature or a veto. It has become an issue only recently. For the longest time, this was just of course, of course, of course. The last turnover in legislative control, the Republicans

took control of the House and bills that were enacted in the last session, but not finalized. didn’t do all the legislation, legal niceties in time for the past legislature to give them to the governor, fell to the new one and they said, well, we don’t want to. And so there’s a question now the state Supreme court is trying to decide, are they compelled to? It’s not a yes or no. It’s of course you have to.

whose responsibility is that. It is really in the weeds and but for this, you know, more recent controversy, yeah, but for this recent controversy, nobody would ever pay attention to this.

Guy Gordon (18:24.267)
But it’s good that we learn a little something here.

Guy Gordon (18:31.573)
Yeah. All right. And finally, this notion that most actions in the part of the legislature, if not tied to an appropriation, can be subject to a citizen referendum or a of the people. And since its creation, we have seen some pretty significant pretzeling and gymnastics done to try to bring appropriations into the question so that

They can avoid a referendum and to some extent avoid accountability.

Eric Lupher (19:02.348)
Right. So the idea, the referendum, the idea that people can say, I don’t like what the legislature did. Let’s circulate petitions calling for a vote and let the people decide if that’s a good idea or not. And they said, well, we can’t do that for an appropriation. Right. The idea is the state appropriates money to run the departments and fund universities and fund schools, everything else. If we subject to that, to a referendum.

The whole system would break down and we couldn’t function as a state government. And then what happens is that some creative legislator said, well, okay, I have this controversial act that I build that I want to push through that probably somebody is going to get upset about and might want a referendum. What if I took a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or something and call it for implementation or for.

some other part of it, and now all of a sudden it’s not subject to referendum. Really contrary to the intent of that provision, but the courts have winked and nodded and let that go along. If we were to have a con con and they did one thing and address that, it would be a successful con con. They need to clean that up and return it to its intent.

Guy Gordon (20:01.609)
fences.

Guy Gordon (20:09.682)
Absolutely.

Guy Gordon (20:27.293)
Yeah, that that is one of those where it’s it’s so ripe for for reform And sad that it has to be done and is distorted. So so much

Eric Lupher (20:39.052)
Yeah, it could be done by amendment, who’s going to champion it? Who’s really going to take that up? It’s not in the legislature’s interest to put that out there and get that fixed. So the people would need to do it, but who’s going to do it?

Guy Gordon (20:52.317)
Yeah. All right. Any final thoughts? That’s that’s well covered.

Eric Lupher (20:56.854)
No, yeah, I mean, the legislative branch, there’s a lot of what you would expect and just this is the job of the legislature and how they should go about their business. But clearly there’s some controversy, well, maybe not controversial. There’s some issues that the people might want to really pay attention to and think about how they could change the structuring, the functioning of our state government and the policymaking.

Guy Gordon (21:17.205)
compelling.

Guy Gordon (21:25.545)
And maybe a con con is the way you get that batting average up.

Eric Lupher (21:30.254)
It’s all or nothing. Yes.

Guy Gordon (21:33.171)
Yeah, yeah. All right, Eric, thanks very much. And we might want to remind people that we just celebrated a very significant anniversary at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. we are certainly not putting our hand out, but we’re smiling and asking if people would like to support.

Eric Lupher (21:53.132)
Yes, we’re getting a lot of positive feedback for this ConCon series that it’s very helpful for people to think about this vote, but also better understand how their state government works. And if they can support us in our work to do this type of stuff and other projects that we’re undertaking during the year, it’d be very helpful keeping the research council sustainable and going for the next 110 years.

Guy Gordon (22:20.969)
All right, we’ll be there for you. right, Eric Looper, thanks so much. That’s it for our Article IV review, and we will be back with more on the Facts Matter podcast to wrap up our CONCON review in future weeks. Take care.

Eric Lupher (22:23.403)
Alright.