The Ballenger Report

DEVOS SCIONS IGNORE EXISTING LAW, VOTE FOR NAME CHANGE TO KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS Last February, just weeks after Donald J. Trump began his second administration, he fired several members of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Trump then named new members, […]

Who is Bill Whitbeck, anyway? He’s sui generis — he began working in Michigan government at age 25 in the spring of 1966, and he’s still working in state government until later this week at age 85. Nobody else, anywhere, can make such a claim. William C. Whitbeck has worked four different stints for three […]

What’s The Fallout from the Michigan House’s ‘Work Project’ Denials? Question 1): It’s always been routine. It should be easy. As required by statute, the budget office of Gov. Gretchen WHITMER recently sent the Senate and House appropriations committee chairs a list of $2.7 billion in continued spending that had been left over from the […]

Question 1): Amazingly, no Michigan pollster has yet asked a question measuring the popularity among the state’s voters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Can that be determined? Answer 1): In Michigan, no, but it’s certain that any such a survey would find that views of ICE are deeply polarized along partisan lines. […]

“Now the days dwindle down to a precious few …” Cue Frank Sinatra singing the mournful ‘September Song.’ Time to talk about sadness and mortality. And Charlie’s Angels. Not the 1970s TV show, but the famous portrait of Michigan’s Big Three: Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Attorney General Dana Nessel, posing […]

Michigan’s recently-elected  U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin has already gotten more than her share of attention as a freshman solon, and now she’s getting even more. But is what happened this past week a good thing for her image and career? Sedition, hanging, and mutiny? Slotkin, fellow Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and four Democratic U.S. Representatives […]

Retired attorney Lynn Liberato is the author of the recently published (and acclaimed) “Michigan’s Con-Con 11: Women and State Constitution-making in 1961” (Michigan State University Press, 159 pp., $32.95 but 20% off if promo code MSUP25 is used — see below). Liberato addressed the Michigan Political History Society on Nov. 5 in the State Library […]

Question 1): Could this past week’s vote by a bitterly-divided U.S. Congress to end the 43-day federal government shutdown be a wedge that separates progressives from moderate Democrats?  Answer 1): Before the crucial vote in the U.S. Senate, things were headed that way already, but now the wedge has gotten  wider. There is palpable anger […]

Donald Trump and his reshaped Republican Party got whacked by Democrats all across the country last Tuesday. Voters everywhere didn’t like what they were seeing. Does that mean the President might change his tune about whether there is a way for him to serve a third term in office? Not likely, and his sometime guru […]