Article courtesy of MIRS for SBAM’s Lansing Watchdog newsletter
House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) followed through on his promise to file a lawsuit seeking to override the Attorney General’s Wednesday opinion related to the spending of $645 million in work projects.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the Court of Claims, seeks an injunction and a temporary restraining order to halt what the lawsuit described as Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel’s “authorization of the Executive Branch to seize the legislative power of the purse.”
In a press release, Hall said: “Dana Nessel’s recent opinion to allow government slush funds to keep spending these hundreds of millions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse on things like illegal-alien welfare, diversity festivals, and the Biden-era green energy scheme was purely political and extremely flawed.
“Our lawsuit will stop this Nessel power trip and uphold the law that allows the Legislature to put an end to this nonsense,” he added.
Nessel, whose formal opinion is binding on state agencies unless the courts overturn it, held that the law the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee used to deny $645 million in carryover funding from the prior fiscal year through the “work project” process is unconstitutional.
The committee invoked a rarely-used section of Michigan’s Management and Budget Act to reject the work projects request in November.
Hall wants this carryover spending to go through his new budget earmark transparency process that’s part of his Hall Ethics Accountability and Transparency (HEAT) initiative. If Nessel’s opinion stands, they will not.
Hall called Nessel’s opinion a “flawed interpretation of Michigan law, and as a result, the House GOP filed suit against 31 departments and department heads to prevent them from using the slush funds.
The lawsuit seeks quick court action, noting that the State Budget Office “activated” the spending by authorizing departments to begin spending immediately after Nessel’s opinion.
“It is clear Democrats rigged this whole process to stop House Republicans’ fight to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in our budgets and go around the thing they hate the most – the Hall Ethics, Accountability, and Transparency plan,” Hall said. “While the Democrat politicians and Lansing insiders fight for more wasteful spending, we’re suing to fight to protect the hard-earned dollars of Michigan families and taxpayers.”
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