Organized labor was outraged on Friday (July 10) when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer killed nine bills that had been stuck in legal limbo for more than a year and a half.

A couple of hours after the Michigan Supreme Court OK’d a lower court ruling that House Speaker Matt Hall must cough up this legislation he’s been sitting on since Jan. 8, 2025, Whitmer sent her veto letter.

Her point: It’s been too long since they’ve passed. The state doesn’t need more years of legal wrangling to work all of this out.

Among other things, the bills would have given teacher unions more flexibility to collectively bargain their members’ health insurance and allowed corrections officers (among others) to join the State Police’s pension system.

A Michigan Education Association official expressed “shock and betrayal” in an email Friday night to members given the governor’s “longstanding relationship between her administration and organized labor.”

Likewise, Democratic lawmakers were ticked off. They felt Whitmer’s reasoning was an excuse.

“Congrats to the Governor and Speaker Hall,” said Rep. Kelly Breen (D-Livonia). “Together, they’ve accomplished a rarely achieved feat: Uniting all legislative democrats.”

The rub stems from the lame-duck session in 2024 when legislative Democrats – knowing that Republicans and Matt Hall would take charge on Jan. 8, 2025 – hurriedly passed 118 bills, right up until Dec. 19.

At this point, the story becomes strange.

The Secretary of the Senate and House Clerk must run the final edits and checks on every passed bill. Then they’re sent to the governor’s office.

Historically, this isn’t a problem. In 2018, for example, the legislative staff churned through nearly 300 bills through the Christmas holiday so Gov. Rick Snyder could address them before he left office Jan. 1, 2019.

For reasons never properly explained, then-House Clerk Rich Brown said his staff couldn’t properly prepare all the bills by the time Hall was to be elected speaker on Jan. 8, 2025.

At 11 a.m. Jan. 8, an hour before Hall was to be elected speaker, Brown sent all but the nine bills in question to the governor. He told me at the time that it was the best his staff could do given the tight time frame.

When Hall took office later that day, his new clerk, Scott Starr, told him about these nine bills. Hall told Starr to hold them until he could run the legal review.

How is it that (with one exception) since the 1963 constitution, the Clerk’s office couldn’t churn through all of the bills passed by one Legislature before the next one took over?

And why was it that THESE nine bills didn’t make it?

The bill numbers — 4665, 4901, 6055, 4117, etc. — don’t fall in any numerical order. They weren’t the final bills passed by the House or Senate back in December 2025. There’s no chronological reason for them, in particular, to be the ones left behind.

It’s one of the greater Capitol mysteries that may only be answered in someone’s memoir at some point.

The only breadcrumbs we have at this point are the fact that Whitmer never publicly advocated for any of them. They were all driven by labor or other influences.

Whitmer never criticized Hall for sitting on the bills for the last 18 months. She never intervened in the lawsuit. The Democratic Senate sued the House. Whitmer never got involved.

The public policy behind the bills could be viewed as problematic.

Opening up teacher employee health care to collective bargaining likely would strain school district budgets. Expanding a pension system arguably creates long-term costs. Other bills would have forced a vote on a property tax increase to benefit a pair of local museums. Is that something state government should order?

Two final nuggets. After the House adjourned sine die on Dec. 31, 2024, Democratic House Speaker Joe Tate, under law, was no longer the speaker. House Clerk Rich Brown was without a boss for eight days until Hall took over on Jan. 8.

Who is one of Brown’s best friends when they served in the House together (2001-2006)? Who presided over Brown’s 2023 wedding?

Yup. The person who never said she wanted the bills to begin with.

The current resident of the Governor’s Residence.

Editor’s note, from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office: “The Governor’s office disputes any assertion that she never wanted the bills, noting that at the Detroit Regional Chamber event on Mackinac Whitmer said specifically that she expected to get the bills sent to her.”

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Question 1): Could it be that Whitmer, despite her insistence at Mackinac that she “expected to get the bills sent to her,” in fact worked behind the scenes, or had her staff do so, with then-House Clerk Rich Brown (at one time D-Bessemer) or, later, with new Republican House Speaker Matt Hall to facilitate the eventual result? Did she actually not want the bills in the first place? Or did it become more apparent over time that, if it took a year and a half to resolve the legal questions in the courts, it would be impractical or impossible to sign the bills in July of 2026 and make them work as intended without creating budgetary chaos?

Answer 1): Keep in mind that Whitmer’s Mackinac comment doesn’t answer any of the above questions. It means nothing, except that she was ‘expecting’ that she would get eventually get the bills — and this was at a time when she knew everyone expected her to sign them.

Question 2) When Hall commented in the “Overtime” portion of his “Off the Record” appearance on Michigan Public Television a week ago that he never discussed any of this with the Governor, was he being truthful? There’s no reason to doubt it, but it means nothing. His key aides were undoubtedly in touch with Whitmer or her staff, and he would know exactly how things stood with the Governor at the time the state Supreme Court non-decision effectively ordered Hall to forward the nine bills to the governor. Of course, Hall also said he never received any court order but decided to send the bills to the governor, anyway. Why?

Answer 2): The House Republicans’ legal argument in the courts all along has been that this was a legislative matter and the judiciary had no right to order the House to do anything. Hall might have taken a defiant position like Josef Stalin vis a vis the Pope, or President Andrew Jackson vs. the U.S. Supreme Court on Native American rights back in the 1830s: “The Pope (Court) has made his (its) ruling. Now let him (them) enforce it.” Actually, Hall addressed that question on OTR, saying he didn’t want to provoke a “constitutional crisis.” But he didn’t need to, if he knew he’d get what he wanted if he simply sent the bills to Whitmer — vetoes. That would be a lot better than provoking a constitutional crisis in the middle of a general election campaign in which his party is struggling to hold onto its House majority and perhaps win back control of the state Senate. After all, Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) during the past 18 months has been all too happy to make Hall the “fall guy” in this escapade. Democrats everywhere believe they have been winning the public relations battle, with help from a doofus news media that doesn’t understand that powerful interest groups through their capitol lobbyists were working ever since late 2024 to ensure that these bills would never become law. Any pressure these interest groups put on Whitmer was reinforced by her own realization that the bills were indeed, in Melinn’s words, “problematic” as public policy.

Question 3): Hall also hinted on OTR that he almost welcomed Whitmer signing the bills, because the fiscal implications would have been so great that it would have opened the door for him to “negotiate” with the Whitmer administration and legislative Democrats, a process he was confident he could “win,” as he claimed he has in all negotiations with his Democratic adversaries so far. So was Hall a true “fall guy?”

Answer 3): Only in the news media, which has missed the real story all along. In fact, Hall regards himself as a big winner, and so does his GOP caucus, which he kept fully briefed on developments during the past year and a half.

Question 4): Last Tuesday, Whitmer told news media in Grand Rapids that, because House Republicans “played games” with the nine bills from the 2023-24 term, she thinks they “owe it to the people of Michigan to come back and try to get something done on these … I also believe that there is a will in both chambers on some of the bills to get them done. I’m eager to work with anyone and everyone who wants to get something done between now and the end of the year.” So, how likely is this to happen?

Answer 4): Highly unlikely. After the outrage over her vetoes expressed by her fellow Democrats and organized labor, this sort of standard empty CYA rhetoric from Whitmer should be expected. Whitmer surely knows little or nothing is going to pass muster in the Republican-controlled House this year unless it’s on one of the relatively innocuous “cat and dog” measures with few fiscal implications.

Bottom line: This gallimaufry wasn’t created by sheer incompetence. These nine bills were signed by Clerk Brown before the end of 2024 and ready to be presented to the governor, except they never were, while the other 109 lame duck pieces of legislation found their way to Whitmer. Despite all the plausible deniability from Whitmer, the answer appears obvious — the fix was in.

However, should Democrats sweep the board in the Nov. 3 general election and get another “trifecta,” we can expect that the nine bills will be their first order of business in the 104th Legislature.