I think it’s great that we have a bill now and we see a process developing to add more transparency to that. When I was elected in 2022, before I was sworn in, the first thing I started working on with Senator Runestad who had worked on it for many years was asking that we amend the rules of the Senate to require transparency in the budget process. That request fell on deaf ears. The newly-elected Democratic majority was not interested in changing those rules. Fast forward a few years, I remember being engaged with a lot of people who were interested in serving in the House in the next cycle, there was sort of a groundswell movement around this topic, and sure enough when Republicans won the majority in the House, Speaker Matt Hall, under his leadership, adopted a new rule in the House requiring budget transparency on these legislative spending items. The Senate resisted though. The body that’s putting this bill forward right now, that’s doing this, I believe, there’s a level of performative legislation going on here, resisted for the entirety of this year, coming to a resolution about a set of rules that we could all follow to have transparency in the budget. Now we’re going to vote on this.
What bill do we have in front of us? We’re going to now create a law that creates a framework around budget transparency on legislative-directed spending. Sounds great, until you read it, dig into the details, and consider some of the implications. I’ll just say two broad reasons I’m going to oppose this legislation. One, on a technical level when you go through it, there are just too many gaps, too many problems. We just saw an amendment attempted to make sure there’s a sufficient amount of time to review these and that was rejected. We just saw a largely party-line vote rejecting the idea that we have enough opportunity for people to review these items and actually see what they are before voting on it. There are also carveouts in there. There are spaces where people can still take advantage of the process.
The bigger problem I have with this is that I don’t think we should be doing this by amending a law in the first place. This body—the Senate of Michigan—and the House, we are governed by our own rules. The Senate is governed by a set of rules, the House is governed by a set of rules, and jointly we’re governed by a set of joint rules. Those rules are powerful, especially the joint rules. If we were to use the joint rules to create a process for budget transparency, that would be a very effective tool. It would be difficult to suspend those rules because it would take both chambers, and importantly, when we’re actually doing budget negotiations and passing those bills, it would provide an actual mechanism of recourse where we can object to the process. We could highlight if the rules are not being followed. If we do this legislatively instead, we’re going to end up with a law that tells the Legislature how we have to do budget transparency and I predict that if we pass this law this way, the Legislatures of the future will promptly ignore it, find ways around it, or simply challenge it by saying, We’re going to spend money the way we want to. It may be cloak-and-dagger, it may involve legislative-directed spending that doesn’t comply with this process, and if somebody doesn’t like it, they can take us to court. The history of litigation around this tells us that the courts are very cautious in getting involved in telling another branch of government—the Legislature—how they operate.
Just to summarize, I don’t believe this law is actually tight enough to accomplish what it says it’s going to but more importantly, on a structural level, I think it’s going to fail down the road. We need more transparency but this isn’t the way to do it. Let’s give the people what they actually want. Let’s go back to the drawing board and work on a real measure, ideally a set of joint rules.
Senator Theis’ statement is as follows:
I would like to reiterate some of the cautions I described in committee when this was being presented there. I have major concerns with prohibiting for-profit organizations. I’d like to see not-for-profit and for-profit be held to the same high standards for both. Historically the state has partnered with for-profit to much more success in certain areas than they have not-for-profit. This bill exempts the for-profit and I have major concerns with that. Another concern is the timeframe. It seems to me that there is a definitive desire not to be fully transparent if 60 days are not allowed. I don’t understand why we’re going to limit it to a timeframe when the public would then be unable to understand fully where the government money is going in advance of it being ordered.
I would like to ask we put this back to the drawing board. I reiterate my colleague’s comments. This is a fantastic idea. We absolutely should have more transparency, but to the extent that we’re limiting it in such a way, I have major concerns, and that would be the reason I’m going to be voting “no.”
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 330, entitled
A bill to amend 1961 PA 236, entitled “Revised judicature act of 1961,” by amending section 1307a (MCL 600.1307a), as amended by 2023 PA 308.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: