Question 1): A couple of week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped back from the brink of totally gutting the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).
By a 5-to-4 vote, in the case of Allen v. Milligan, a coalition of conservative and liberal justices reaffirmed the court’s 1986 precedent interpreting how legislative districts must be drawn under the landmark VRA, as amended in 1982. The court said that in Alabama, a state where there are seven Congressional seats and more than one in four voters is Black, the Republican-dominated state legislature had created only one majority Black district, thus denying African American voters a reasonable chance to elect a second representative of their choice.
Throughout the country, liberals, progressive interest groups and Democrats hailed the unexpected court decision as renewed hope that it will reverberate across other states, with reconsideration of how Congressional and state legislative district lines are drawn in areas with significant Black populations. If that happens, the conventional wisdom is that it will surely help elect more Democrats.
How about in Michigan? What might be the ramifications here? Will it play out the way Democrats hope?
Answer 1): Maybe the opposite. Michigan is not Alabama. Not even close. The Michigan maps in effect for the past two decades — widely reviled by Democrats and the news media as partisan gerrymanders — adhered closely to all past interpretations of the VRA. But then, two years ago, the new Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) came up with new maps based on the 2020 census that reduced the number of majority-minority districts that had existed in Michigan for nearly half a century from two to ZERO. The MICRC also reduced the number of state Senate districts with a Black majority from five to ZERO, and in the state House, from 12 to six. In fact, the Commission argued that NO districts needed to be majority-minority; a plurality was good enough, it claimed. As a result, there is only one African-American in Michigan’s Congressional delegation (Republican John James), and he is from the majority white 10th District in parts of Oakland and Macomb Co. There is none from Wayne County, which has by far the heaviest African-American population in the state. This map is ripe for litigation, yet, amazingly, no such lawsuit has yet been filed against it. One soon may be. Suits HAVE been filed against the two state legislative maps for violating the VRA, and they’re awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision would plainly seem to buttress the argument of the plaintiffs; if they prevail in federal court, and if that court should rule that at least part of the maps must be redrawn (probably by the MICRC) it would seem to give an advantage to the Republican Party, not the Democrats, because it could well lead to CDs and state legislative districts like the ones created by the GOP between 2003 and 2022 that had two majority-minority districts but also gave an advantage to Republican candidates in adjacent districts.
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Question 2): Last week, the Democrat-dominated Michigan House of Representatives Elections Committee reported out HB 4156, a bill that would ratify Michigan’s participation in what is called the National Popular Vote (NPV) compact. Sixteen states + the District of Columbia have now ratified the NPV, which would mandate that the electors of any state that is part of the compact must allot its votes in the Electoral College to the presidential candidate who has won the popular vote NATIONALLY, even if that candidate did not win a majority in that state (meaning Michigan). 270 votes are the required minimum number for a majority of the Electoral College to elect a president, and with Minnesota recently ratifying the NPV, the total of states (+D.C.) in compliance has reached the 205 mark. Michigan would bring the total to 220. Republicans in the state Legislature appear almost unanimously opposed to the NPV, while a big slice of majority Democrats appear to support it.
What is likely to happen? Will the Legislature vote to join the NPV? Even if we do, how likely is it that enough other states will join in coming months or years to reach the magic 270 mark? Is it even constitutional? Can a state (that has already joined) at some point in the future RESCIND its participation, thus rolling back the total number of electoral votes needed?
Answer 2): Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Paraphrasing King, proponents of the NPV are convinced “justice” is on their side in Americans’ preference for first-past-the-post winners of a direct popular vote, unfettered by artificial constructs like the Electoral College. There is some evidence to support what NPV acolytes say.
Consider: Before World War I, U.S. Senators were not elected by direct popular vote; they were appointed by state legislatures. Republican Abraham Lincoln actually won the popular vote in Illinois in 1858 when he challenged the incumbent Democrat, U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, but the Illinois Legislature was controlled by Democrats and appointed Douglas to another term, anyway (Lincoln, of course, got his revenge two years later when he beat Douglas for the presidency). Because of what happened in 1858 and other reasons, pressure rose across the nation to take away state legislators’ power to appoint senators and give it to “the people” — the rank-and-file electorate who could decide whom to elect by direct popular vote. In 1913, that led to the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, mandating the direct election of U.S. senators.
Still, it should be noted that the composition of the Senate and the Electoral College has given Republicans a significant advantage over Democrats for a long time. The reason for that is that there are more small states that are Republican-leaning than there are Democrat-leaning small states, allowing the GOP to claim Senators and presidential electors way out of proportion to their population. Just do the math.
Take Wyoming and New York, for example — the former is Republican, the latter Democratic. New York has more than 30 times the population of Wyoming, yet Wyoming has an equal number of senators (2) as New York. And Wyoming gets those same two extra electoral votes in the Electoral College as New York. That’s one of the reasons why Democrats have lost every single one of the five presidential elections where the loser of the Electoral College vote has gotten a majority or plurality of the popular vote. Those years were 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. In the last four, the Republican nominee was elected president even though he lost the popular vote. Therefore, it’s long been a goal of the national Democratic Party to abolish or end-run the Electoral College, and NPV is the way it has settled on to do it. NPV is a non-profit bankrolled primarily by a Democratic funder, John Koza of California, and other bi-coastal Democratic millionaires and PACs.
In Michigan, Koza & Co. have signed up Ann Arbor Democratic state Rep. Carrie Rheingans as the prime sponsor of the NPV bill (HB 4156), which appears to have some traction. Orchestrating things behind the scenes is former state legislator Rebekah Warren (also D-Ann Arbor), whom National Popular Vote hired when she was still a Michigan lawmaker, to promote the issue in Lansing and a couple of other states.
NPV has also been smart enough to entice a number of prominent Republican names such as former Lt. Gov. Dick Posthumus, ex-Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, ex-state House Speaker Chuck Perricone, and former state GOP chairman Sal Anuzis to go around the country convincing states to throw their Electoral College votes behind the candidate who receives the highest national vote total. For these Republicans to support NPV is counter-intuitive; history plainly indicates that maintaining the Electoral College gives the GOP a significant advantage in a close race for the presidency. Counter-intuitive? Some cynics suspect money must be involved in getting these men to say the things they’re saying. These token Republicans (none of them now in elected office) claim NPV’s formula would enhance voter turnout (a noble sentiment, right?), and that the only reason that Republicans are being drubbed today in, say, California and New York and other bi-coastal blue states is that the GOP nominee doesn’t bother campaigning there because he knows he can’t win. If we had a national popular vote, say the GOP front men, the Republican presidential nominee would campaign in these large blue states and win the popular vote there.
Such an argument doesn’t make sense. The goal of a political party is not to drive up overall turnout; it’s to get a majority of the voters who DO turn out, whether it’s large or skimpy, and most of the evidence over time is that lower overall turnout, not higher, helps the GOP. Besides, does anybody believe that the modern Republican Party could conceivably win California or New York or Oregon or Washington State, or Massachusetts or Maryland anytime soon, if ever? For that matter, for a Republican presidential nominee to campaign in those states would dry up resources and time that could be used in “battleground” states that the GOP would actually have a chance to win.
Current Republican officeholders “get” that, in Michigan and elsewhere, and that’s why they oppose NPV. Again, note that the Potemkin Village Republicans who have endorsed NPV are not currently in elected office, if they ever were. So the best argument legislative Republicans have against HB 4156 is that it would eviscerate Michigan’s “battleground” status and take away Michigan voters’ rights to determine what impact the state has in a presidential election. NPV would be tantamount to saying, “We don’t even need to vote in Michigan; we should just let the other 49 states decide who wins the popular vote, and we’ll send our electors to vote the same way.” That will be difficult for any Democratic candidate for any office to rebut, in 2024 or 2028 or whenever it might become an issue.
In the meantime, if the Michigan Legislature does in fact vote to join the NPV compact, how might Republicans fight back? Well, they could recapture control of the Legislature and vote to RESCIND or reverse such approval. And what about litigation? Lawsuits would surely be filed against the constitutionality of what Koza, Warren, Rheingans and Anuzis are trying to do with NPV. Remember, term limits in Michigan was aimed at Congress as much as anything else when it was on the statewide ballot (and approved by voters) back in 1992, but a federal judge ruled that term limits could not apply to Congress, which has the sole power to determine the qualifications of its members. Anything can happen in court.
Stay tuned. This could come to a head before the Michigan Legislature breaks for the summer.
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The GOP in Michigan actually during some of their meetings hawked campaign lapel buttons that read “Support the Electoral College”.
The Rust Belt gained renewed political power in recent presidential elections as a way to defeat Democrats nationally. The Electoral College made this possible.
It is hard to believe any sane GOP leader could support NPV.
i do not believe increasing voter turnout is a necessarily laudable goal – as when Dems in Florida attempted to register convicted felons via a civil rights restoration process.
In Washtenaw County recently, the Dem-controlled Board of Commissioners recently voted to allocate $1.2 million in revenue sharing in ARPA funds to “Supreme Felons” a non-profit group organized by ex-convicts to – amongst other things – encourage voter registration. This was met with citizen outrage.
There are elements in our society who should be discouraged from voting – felons, non-citizens, and mentally incompetent – to name a few. These are some of the segments of our society that Democrats have encouraged to vote. Remember the “Election Ambassadors” of a former Detroit City Clerk who mass-mailed absentee ballots to juvenile correctional facilities and visited nursing homes to “help” insane patients vote. Ex-Clerk Jackie Currie’s absentee voting program was placed under court receivership for abuses.
Ronald Reagan called the VRA “a bad piece of legislation. He was right. John James and Michael Duggan illustrated that “race loyalty” is dying out in the Michigan electoral process.
(1) The US Constitution’s provisions about election of the president and vice-president (even after being hastily repaired by the 12th Amendment) are not well-thought-out, but at least there is a defined process for what happens if no candidate gets an Electoral College majority.
Proponents of National Popular Vote don’t have much to say about what happens when the most popular ticket gets much less than a majorty of the votes.
Presidential elections have been won by candidates who got pluralities of 46% or 47% or 48% of the popular vote, and few complained about that, so presumably that’s okay. But what if the top votegetter has 35% of the vote? Or 25%? Or 15% There is no bright line below 50%.
(2) States have wildly inconsistent voting policies, practices, security, and voter eligibility. A national popular vote system would create incentives for partisan states to do weird things to inflate their vote totals, like lowering the voting age to 13. So, very likely, elections would have to be extensively federalized to guarantee uniformity.
(3) If a national popular vote election were ultra-close, would it be necessary to have a NATIONAL recount to determine the winner? That would be a time-consuming and colossally expensive nightmare.
(4) And finally, I’m skeptical that the National Popular Vote Compact is enforceable. What’s to stop a state from allocating its electors to the ticket that won the state?
ON THE OTHER HAND….
There is a better solution which would not require the abolition of the Electoral College or risk a national recount, while dramatically reducing the possibility of a popular vote winner losing the election:
Here’s how it would work: all states and DC would allocate their electors proportionally to the top two finishers in that state’s popular vote.
(NOT by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska currently do, because congressional districts can be gerrymandered.)
For example, in 2020, Biden/Harris got 64.9% of the two-party vote in California, and would get 36 of the state’s electoral votes. Trump/Pence got the other 35.1%, and would get 19 electoral votes from California.
Similarly, in Texas in 2020, the Republican ticket got 52.8% of the two-party vote, and would get 20 electoral votes. The Democratic ticket, with 47.2%, would get 18 electoral votes from Texas.
Adding up the electoral votes this way would make it exceedingly unlikely that the Electoral College would choose a different winner than the national popular vote winner.
No one’s vote would be meaningless, since both major candidates would win electoral votes in every state.
Any recounts in close elections would be within a state, not nationwide.
That said, it would require every state to allocate presidential electors the same way. I’m not sure how that could be done, short of amending the Constitution.
Your scenario of electoral vote allocation sounds much like the party convention delegate process. That process has been much-maligned as well.
The winner-take-all system per state of the Electoral College votes seems unfair and it would seem that allocating the candidate losing with 48% of the states popular vote with some equitable electoral vote award total would ameliorate the process.
The Electoral College system is broken in other ways – District of Columbia is not a state but receives Electoral College votes – yet other parts of the U.S. that are not states but have U.S. citizens such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa receive no electoral votes.
I have taken part in the Electoral College system at the grassroots level where we pick our Electoral College member at the state party convention and send him or her to vote in the Michigan Legislature. it is an arcane and complex system that is subject to intense levels of criticism, yet has become a part of our nation’s tradition and history.
I cannot believe that ANY political leader in Michgian can justify giving up our electoral votes to California and New York or Florida and Texas for that matter. Make those candidates come and earn them.
Nice article, Bill. Always fun to read about the MICRC, though if the lawsuits – actual or future – succeed, they’ll be back on payroll. Think the MICRC, if called back to duty, can stretch this out another year or two? Will they give themselves another pay hike? Not that I am cynical, mind you.
QUESTION 1: I, too, cannot fathom why the congressional seats have not been subject to a lawsuit – unless those who would file suit fear the same outcome that happened in Illinois when MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, I believe) sued and got clobbered in the 7th Circuit that held that partisan gerrymandering, the rather explicit objective of the Illinois Democrats, is okay. If they do sue, it will be fun to see who their election attorneys will be.
Spot on about the effects of their redistricting. It must be truly embarrassing for the Democrats that the only African-American member of Congress from Michigan is a Republican from Macomb County, and the only other African-American candidate from a major party in the last election was Republican John Gibbs from the 3rd District. Warren Evans must be beside himself, though he has given up trying to take out Representative Tlaib.
To fix the congressional districts should the districts be shot down, they may want to consider is creating a district using all the 482 ZIPs in Wayne County (Oak Park and Ferndale’s ZIPs start with 482, but they are in Oakland County) to create at least one majority African-American district (and this idea is free to the MICRC to use, attribution not needed). A district with Detroit, Highland Park, Redford Township, Hamtramck, Harper Woods, the Grosse Pointes, River Rouge and Ecorse should have the requisite number of people for a district. If not, there is Melvindale they can add. That would leave the rest of the County for a second district (Wayne County has a shade under 1.8 million people) with some slivers going to another district. But to fix that, Ann Arbor would most like wind up in Representative Walberg’s district again, not to mention making several districts more competitive. Film at 11?
Zero majority African-American state senate districts is a serious problem. Zero. It took some doing to come up with that. Senator Bayer’s district cut out part of Oakland County to give her some of northwest Wayne County while Senator Polehanki, who gave up that part of Wayne County got the part of Oakland County that Bayer used to represent. And it goes on. The districts in and around Detroit are not in any way, shape or form “square”. And this lack of squareness apparently led to significant reductions in African-American districts. Macomb and Oakland County are much in the same boat.
Same for the state house seats as well. Placing Menominee and Delta County in the UP in the same district with Leelenau across Lake Michigan? Huh? Looking at these districts, the old way of redistricting, though hyper-partisan, yielded results more compatible with the recent SCOTUS decision.
QUESTION 2: Nice comments on the NPV. It’s a bad idea and I think you are spot on concerning the folks endorsing it and their reasons, or lack thereof. They are selling our votes to California. Or Texas. The foundational idea behind is explicitly anti-Constitutional. NPV is designed to change America from a constitutional republic that uses democratic practices, to a form of democracy that kills off the republic by rendering the needs of the smaller states nothing more than a moot point, treating them as colonies to bled dry to feed other states. The backers – for the most part – must loathe the structure of the US Senate and the Constitution itself. They forget history, or more accurately, they reject both the Senate and Constitution.
After winning the Revolution, we drafted the Articles of Confederation to set up the structure for the now 13 states to function as a country. As a form of government, the Articles of Confederation was an abject failure. And I am being kind. Each state really had little, if any, useful interaction with the other 12 former colonies. So to fix it, we had a Constitutional convention that redid the way we interacted with one another as states in a unified nation.
The Senate was set up so that the small states could deal vis-à-vis the big states as EQUALS. When the Constitution was drawn up, the smaller states feared being overwhelmed by the “big” states of Virginia (I believe 25% of US population at the time) and Massachusetts, with New York closing in. That would be a bad deal for the other 10 colonies, now states, as prior to the American Revolution each colonial governor reported directly to the king. The governor of Rhode Island was not beholden to any other colony, large or small. Only the king. They liked that. To get all 13 states on board, we drafted the Constitution and created the Senate and Electoral College to fix that. It got them to ratify the constitution. This is the foundation behind the restrictions on states effectively levying tariffs on the products of another state as well as the concept of “sovereign states”. Put into today’s time, California is not supposed to bully Utah.
The bicameral structure of Congress assures that. The interests of the people are represented in the House, the interests of the states by the Senate. At the end of the 18th century, the Senate made sure that Rhode Island was equal to Virginia. Now, Wyoming is equal to California. That’s why, prior to the 17th Amendment, senators were elected by their state legislatures, not the people. That’s why the Senate confirms judges, approves treaties, and is the jury in impeachment trials. These activities represented the interests of the states and their interaction with the other states.
The electoral college is designed to FORCE our political parties to try to be NATIONAL in nature, NOT to have big states try to crush smaller states. It makes us campaign there; makes sure that your platform addresses their particular and specific concerns; makes you, while campaigning, bring their needs to others; makes you recognize to only do they exist, but they are worth your time and effort. NPV throws these ideas into the trash.
NPV not only makes a mockery of that, but you’re right, it simply means there are no more battleground states. No campaign like we’ve known them. And no real reason to visit small or dying states.
The real problem with NPV, as I stated, is that it is anti-constitutional. Its supporters must know that. When the courts, or SCOTUS, strike it down, it will yield cries about the “legitimacy of the court” from the usual suspects who define judicial legitimacy as doing what they want because in the game of politics, they play to win, not to get along. I wonder if Mssrs. Anuzis, Richardville, Posthumus or Perricone know that or care.
I will agree with you that there is a serious question of constitutionality of a proposed NPV statute.
It was the Great Compromise that made states themselves equal amongst themselves in the U.S. Senate. North and South Dakota are allocated a total of four seats with their comparatively tiny populations and California is allocated two seats in the Senate despite having many times more citizens.
Michiganders outstate believe in “God, guns and Trump” and urban dwellers in poverty, recent immigrants, and minorities support Democrats. It remains a “winner-take-all” gambit to seize those electoral votes.
In 1972, Nixon and the GOP depicted Democrats as the party of “amnesty, acid and abortion”, but it was the conservative Warren Burger-led Supreme Court that enshrined first-term abortion as a constitutional right and President Ford who granted amnesty to draft evaders several years later. Acid remains illicit much to the dismay and chagrin of its users.
Right now, the State of Texas is the major battleground where the Texas Democratic Party is trying to cobble together voter registration activists into a cohesive organized effort to attain enough new Democratic voters on clerk rolls to become the majority party in the Lone Star State. Once Dems accomplish this lofty goal – as they have in California and now Arizona – the NPV initiative shall be superfluous as they will have achieved hegemony via the Electoral College route. Hispanic voters in Texas, however, have thankfully for the GOP been almost evenly split between Republican and Democratic affiliation.
The RNC is keeping a VERY close eye on Texas and allocating resources to ensure that Hispanic citizens maintain their interest toward conservative GOP ideals.The Mayra Flores episode in south Texas was a manifestation of national GOP efforts at Mexican-American political recruitment.
NPV in a nutshell is likely unconstitutional but represents a Democratic Party strategy to attain political hegemony in the U.S.
The Hispanic vote has been recognized as the key to the future of political control of the U.S. government for the past 40 years. The best thing that has happened is that this demographic group has not been beholden to a single political party – although certain ethnic segments – such as Cuban-Americans and the GOP and Puerto Ricans and the Democratic Party – have had their predilections obviously.
The California Republican Party dominated the political scene in California for many decades that brought several right-wing politicians such as Sam Yorty and Ronald Reagan to prominence – but those days are long gone and it was the Hispanic vote that turned the tide with the flood of immigration from Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Today, a tenuous coalitions of blacks, liberal Hispanics, and progressive activists dominate the California state government and the large metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland.
White supremacy is collapsing nationwide and Donald Trump is the best thing that could have happened to the Democratic Party as he has alienated moderate voters away from the GOP fold. Incumbent presidents generally get re-elected absent some crisis – as the Great Depression or Vietnam – that can be attributed to the incumbent chief executive. Trump managed to lose his seat to an obviously uninspiring Democrat nominee due to his gaffes and perceived bad policies – such as his promoting harsh immigration policies resulting in numerous immigrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexican border. Trump managed to alienate Latin communities across the board among the U.S. electorate.
The Democratic Party hopes that Trump shall receive the nomination for president in 2024 – he is one of the few prospective GOP nominees who could possibly lose to Joe Biden.
There are forty states with fewer people than Los Angeles County (My former home of forty-nine years ago!) so, you want the coasts of the country to determine the president? How is that a good idea again?
Is it a good idea for the 600,000 people in Wyoming get as much representation in the senate as the 40,000,000 people in California, and an outsized share in determining who is elected president and who is on the US Supreme Court? When the electoral college was established, all states were more agrarian than industrial, and the discrepancy in population was something like 7 to one maximum. Today, industrial states are dominated by rural states, and the maximum population discrepancy is more like 66 to one. The result is that a minority of the US population is making decisions for the majority. Maybe we are not looking at the current system or the NPV concept as good ideas, we are looking for the least worst.
I too don’t like the idea of a National Popular Vote (NPV) compact since it would appear a person’s vote for president wouldn’t amount to much in a state, because it’s the overall national vote which would count. But, if our fascist majority Supreme Court sides with the “independent state legislature theory,” where electoral votes can be determined by a state’s legislature, overriding a state’s popular vote, where are citizens to turn?
Let me comment on the possible implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alabama redistricting decision on congressional and state legislative districts in Michigan. If any of the 2021maps are found to be inadequate under Sec. 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC), would under provisions in the 2018 amendment (Proposal 2), be the entity to redraw districts to bring them to compliance with any court decision.
For the past 18 months since the maps were adopted each of the 13 MICRC Commissioners continue to be paid at an annual salary rate of approximately $55,700 that equates to about 35% of the salary of the Governor, waiting for some court ruling that would spring them back into action.
The latest outrage from the MICRC is that one of its members, Anthony Eid, who was chosen by random draw to be one of five members without partisan affiliation on the Commission was hired last week to be the Deputy Executive Director of the progressive advocacy group Michigan Voices. The salary was posted to be between $95,000 and $110,000. Michigan Voices is not registered under the Michigan Lobby Law even though on their website they say they were engaged with the Commission “right up until they approved the final maps.”
With his new gig, Anthony Eid can now double dip with his $55,700 redistricting commissioner salary, for currently doing nothing, along with his minimum $95,000 salary to be Deputy Executive Director of Michigan Voices, an unregistered lobbying group. One of his fellow commissioners, Rebecca Szetela, wants the MICRC at their next meeting to discuss the appropriateness of Anthony Eid continuing on the Commission. If Michigan Voices had been registered under the Lobby Law and he had been an employee of Michigan Voices back in 2020, he would have been ineligible even to apply to be a redistricting commissioner. If Eid remains on the Commission every interest group who has an interest in redistricting would be free to hire a commissioner.
Anthony Eid should resign as Commissioner, and Secretary of State Joselyn Benson, under the provisions of Article IV, Section 6, select from the original applicant pool by random draw a new person with no political party affiliation to serve on the Commission.
Bob, Would Article V, section 10 work as well? Not that the Governor would use it, but….
§ 10 Removal or suspension of officers; grounds, report.
Sec. 10.
The governor shall have power and it shall be his duty to inquire into the condition and administration of any public office and the acts of any public officer, elective or appointive. He may remove or suspend from office for gross neglect of duty or for corrupt conduct in office, or for any other misfeasance or malfeasance therein, any elective or appointive state officer, except legislative or judicial, and shall report the reasons for such removal or suspension to the legislature.
Governor’s have used that power in 1894 and 1926. Both Governor Engler and Governor Granholm held hearings on possible removal removal of John Kelly and Kwame Kilpatrick. Both public officials quickly resigned.
The threat might just be enough to convince Mr. Eid that he needs to do the same and resign. Who knows, maybe the threat will get some TV coverage on the issue. As for Article V, section 10, I just think it would work faster on him than waiting for Secretary of State Benson to act.
And for the MICRC, as a retired state employee, I found it truly remarkable that their first significant act was to vote themselves a considerable pay hike. Not bad for a bunch of limited term employees.
I agree the threat of a removal hearing might work. Unfortunately, for the Commission itself to remove a Commissioner under Article IV, Section 6 (3) requires 10 votes to remove a Commissioner out of the 13 Commissioners serving on the MICRC.
Anthony Eid’s link to the Bernie Sanders progressive wing was reported in Free Beacon in 2021 – so its not news.
Everyone knew that left-wingers were on that Commission – and nothing was done to stop it.
Decent people need to believe that arbitrary power in Redistricting Commission operations will be constrained by the law – or else “manufactured consensus” will not be enough to upset the current order. PR/propagandists have kept that touching belief on the barest of life support.