Hall: Earmark Transparency Shutdown Government; Anthony: GOP Inserted Chaos Into Process

Article courtesy MIRS News for SBAM’s Lansing Watchdog newsletter

So, why exactly did the state government operate for four hours Wednesday morning without a budget? Not surprisingly, it depends on who you ask.

House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) told reporters that it boiled down to getting the Senate to agree to transparency and disclosure for legislative earmarks.

“The reason the government shut down is because the Democrats didn’t want to do this, and we took it all the way up to the brink, and then they did it, and we’re going to make it a permanent law change, and it’s going to be a good change, and we significantly cut the pork,” Hall said.

But according to Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing), it was the House’s manufactured crisis that stretched things out until September. The chamber didn’t pass a budget until August, and then needlessly prolonged negotiations through their unorthodox budget process.

She noted that when the Democrats had the trifecta, budgets were done in the early weeks of summer. Now . . .

“That’s the common denominator. Whether it’s from the federal level or the state level, Republicans now have a seat at the table, and when they do, you see chaos. We’re sitting here on Oct. 2, and we’re finally getting serious about making sure people have predictable funding,” Anthony said.

The Republican House Speaker pushed transparency in the legislative earmark process from the beginning of the term. With negative headlines about how a secretive earmark process has spawned criminal charges, Hall was bound and determined to rip the cover off what has historically been a closed-door process.

Since 2023, Senate Democrats have wanted to release a list of who wanted which earmark months after the budget was signed, which didn’t work for Hall when he took the speakership this year.

To avoid this timeline next year, Hall said passing the Hall Ethics, Accountability and Transparency (HEAT) package will prevent the problem. He said Democrats didn’t want to disclose earmarks in the Senate, which got the budget delayed as far as it did, and with one or two days left, they decided to implement the practice.

“I’ve never seen anything like the Democrats’ addiction to pork spending and how, even after we settled that, how they kept trying to shove it in. I mean, every day, finally I had to tell them, ‘Look, I’m not moving the government shutdown prevention plan until we end this discussion,’ and then we ended it. We put it up for a vote. This stuff’s out of control,” Hall said.

Anthony laughed at the assertion, noting that with the loss of federal funding this year and a fresh push for more road funding, there was always going to be less money for earmarks.

The Senate adopted a resolution on Monday requiring legislators to disclose their earmark requests before a budget bill that contained them could be passed in the chamber. The next day, a “Legislative Directed Spending Items” list became accessible on the Michigan Senate website.

Anthony’s Senate Appropriations Committee listed out all the requests in their system a few hours before the omnibus budget bill showed up in conference committee.

Meanwhile, she noted that the House passed a “shutdown prevention” bill back in March as if it were a self-fulfilling prophecy. House Republicans were signaling a desire to use the clock as leverage and push the negotiations into shutdown territory.

“This has been a very long and non-traditional process,” Anthony said. “I think that there were a lot of missed opportunities to compromise in a civil way, but we did get there . . . Under my leadership, I’ve shown that you can get a budget done by July 1, so hopefully we can get it right next year and cooler heads and more civil conversations can happen earlier.”

Rep. Alabas Farhat (D-Dearborn), the lead House Democrat in the appropriations process, conceded that he thought the process was “ugly.” However, even when a budget that made sense was once out of reach, they were able to put aside partisan differences and get it done.

When asked if Michigan residents would more appreciate a late budget with over 100 yea votes or an on-time budget on a party line vote, Hall said if he had allowed the undisclosed earmarks in the budget, voters would not have preferred that budget.

“You would have had all kinds of scandalous spending . . . at least we bended the Senate and Lansing to the House Republicans’ will on this, and we forced them to have a hearing telling us what all that stuff was before it went in,” Hall said.

Farhat said he’s proud of the transparency in this budget process.

“I’d love to see more transparency, like FOIA and even budget requirement timelines for a budget to be presented,” Farhat said. He added that a big holdup in this budget was that there was no House budget until a month ago, and conversations ignited right away once the House-proposed budget passed.

To actually meet the statutory July 1 deadline, Farhat said the partisanship needs to be taken out of government.

“We need to focus more on the issues that the working families and residents are asking us to focus on and less on political gamesmanship,” Farhat said.

Farhat said it shows which side takes governance more seriously, since House Democrats could have “easily not given the votes” and instead chosen to be partisan. He said he hopes the lessons learned can be incorporated next year to get a budget done on time.

Minority Leader Ranjeev Puri (D-Canton) said it was a political choice by one man to drive the Legislature into passing a budget after the Constitutional deadline.

“We did it on time the last couple years in the trifecta, the governor’s team followed suit by putting their recommendation out on time, and the Senate did the same,” Puri said. “The Democrats knew that this was going to come if you didn’t meet those statutory requirements.”

Farhat said one lesson to be learned from this year is that uncertainty isn’t good for Michigan.

Hall said a lesson for Senate Democrats is to “move the bills,” and a lesson for the media is that he was right about the ghost jobs. Later, he added that budget conversations need to be more about what is money getting spent on, rather than what is cut compared to what was budgeted last year.

Puri said House Democrats wanted to “Trump-proof” the state, and this budget limits damage to Medicaid or SNAP, funds schools, paves roads and keeps state troopers employed.

“No budget is perfect, but that’s why we’re going to be fighting for a Democratic trifecta to make sure that we can build on that work,” Puri said. “But all in all, you can see from the board itself that Democrats were excited to take this vote because this budget did align with the value of the things that we were fighting for.”

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