(Source: MIRS.news, Published 10/05/2022) Michigan has three constitutional amendments going before voters Nov. 8, and the head of the Citizens Research Council (CRC) said Wednesday that altering the state's guiding document to enact policy change is, in general, "bad practice."
Putting aside the merits or lack of merits behind Proposal's 1-3, CRC President Eric Lupher said that Michigan writing specific policies into the constitution, along with the finer details on how everything should work, "just begs for future problems."
"Maybe it's worthy of being in the Constitution that we need voting rights, but really it is the job of the Legislature to finetune it and what it means to have early access," he said.
Speaking during an informational webinar breaking down all three proposals, Lupher noted that Michigan is one of only a few states -- California, Oregon, Louisiana -- that has relatively easy access to the state's founding document.
Writing detailed policy directly into the constitution comes with pitfalls such as what happened with the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC) when the U.S. Census data came in late. The Commission was mandated by the constitution to follow a strict time schedule that they couldn't meet because the pandemic slowed everything down.
"If it were a statutory implementation, it would have been a much easier problem to fix and to work with," Lupher said.
Generally, constitutional language should be brief in general, but detailed enough to give the Legislature direction for the implementation.
"We don't need every fine detail on how every fine point should work," he said. "We start defining a postmark in the Constitution or the rules of procedure of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, we've gone into such fine detail that we're hurting ourselves in the long run."
Lupher applauded the drafters of Proposal 1 for not getting into the weeds with the details on how the new financial disclosure requirements would work. The wording is general enough to leave the Legislature some latitude on how it will work.
Other highlights from today's CRC briefing on the ballot proposals include:
- If Proposal 3 were adopted, laws governing abortions, such as mandatory parental consent for minors or mandatory waiting periods would not go away immediately, said CRC research associate Karley Abramson.
It would take a court ruling to invalidate a law, which would take time.
For example, the Constitutional amendment makes the right to an abortion available to all people, not just adult women. So, until an underage pregnant teen who can't get a parent to sign off on her abortion successfully sues to overturn the law, it's still on the books.
- If Proposal 2 were adopted, the state would pick up the costs of pre-postage for absentee ballots, but local governments would be responsible for any additional staff costs for early voting, said CRC Research Director Craig Thiel.
"There's no provision for state reimbursement, no new taxing authority for local governments to tap into," Thiel said. "The proposal does put the onus on the state to reimburse locals for the postage associated with sending out applications, returned applications and ballots."
Thiel said the cost of pre-postage, based on the amount of absentee ballots mailed out in the August primary election, would have been $1.7 million.
The state is also picking up the tab for the drop boxes mandated in the proposal, which is one per community with multiple drop boxes available for communities with more than 15,000 people.
