Michigan Budget fails again
If it wasn’t over such an important issue, the phrase “I can count!” being uttered on the Michigan Senate floor would be amusing.
But when the issue is the Michigan budget crisis, technical difficulties keeping the Senate from tallying votes last night just added insult to injury.
For the second time in three years, the Michigan government briefly shut down as a result of the yearly budget not being passed by Thursday’s deadline. For most states, passing a budget on time is no problem. Only two other states have had to shut down their government because of a budget crisis.
But how many states have had more than one government shutdown? Just one — Michigan. Why have we had to resort to shutting down part of the state government twice in the past two years?
The answer is that we have had the same failures in leadership for the past three years (and arguably longer than that). We are in the same scenario as we were in for the 2007 shutdown: an economically incompetent Democratic Governor, a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives with a Speaker who waits until it is too late to try to begin work on the budget, and a Republican-controlled Senate who tries to get the budget done, but is unable to overcome the incompetency of the House.
This year, the main problems are basically the same problem that we faced in the 2007 shutdown. Work on the budget started too late, and many state legislators lacked a sense of urgency to get the budget done on time.
While budgets were being passed in the Senate late into the night Tuesday, the House had already gone to recess until Wednesday. On Wednesday night, the Senate stayed in session for hours after the House had already recessed.
Michiganders saw the same thing in 2007: Speaker of the House Andy Dillon,D-Redford, exhibited a pattern of only having the House meet once or twice a week, and he even took a five-day weekend trip to Mackinac Island when he knew the state was facing a budget crisis.
On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, has been getting his budgets passed and sent over to the House faster than the House is getting budgets passed and sent to the Senate.
The second problem is the Democrats in the legislature have refused to accept that spending cuts are an inevitable result of the state’s deficit. Taxes can only be raised so much and, when you cannot raise taxes anymore, you have to cut spending.
Fortunately, a temporary budget extension of 30 days was passed by the state legislature late last night. Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed the bill, ending the shutdown only hours after it started.
But Michigan isn’t out of the woods yet. A full yearly budget still needs to be passed for the 2009-10 fiscal year. Unless the state legislature realizes that spending cuts are going to be necessary and that they have to crack down and get to work, Michigan will see a full-blown government shutdown.
