Democrat Congressman Gary Peters of Bloomfield had a big
target on his back last year. Tea party groups in Oakland County and across the
nation wanted him out of Congress due to his votes to grow the federal
government. But his spending ways didn’t start in Washington. As a member of
the Michigan Senate in 1999, Peters voted for two budget bills so decorated
with extravagant spending that one Lansing political newsletter compared them
to a Christmas tree. Among the goodies was $10 million to buy office furniture
for politicians. Future Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, called
one bill a “laundry list of unnecessary pork.”
The next year, yet another budget Christmas tree would be
decorated, and Peters would again vote ‘yes’ on all of the ornaments.
But Peters’ critics might be surprised to learn the name of
a state representative from that era who matched him vote for vote: Rocky
Raczkowski, the candidate Republicans promoted unsuccessfully to dislodge
Peters from Congress last year. And
Rocky wasn’t alone: Most Republicans in the state capitol voted exactly the
same way.
Much like the situation taking place today, this was a period
when Republicans controlled the entire state Legislature and the governor’s
office. The decision to spend and how much
was almost entirely theirs. If today’s tea party groups are looking to hold
Republicans accountable for their deeds as well as their words, then they should
take note and remember that Republicans running Lansing does not
necessarily equal frugal spending.
Because he was in the minority in the Michigan Senate,
Peters had little power to control the bills being submitted to him by the
majority Republicans. He had only the choice to support or reject the spending
bills being proposed. Raczkowski, on the other hand, was the majority floor
leader in the Michigan House – literally the second-most powerful person in the
chamber and one of those primarily responsible for the Legislation that came up
for a vote and got sent along to the governor.
State government was then running huge surpluses, giving the
politicians in charge – such as Raczkowski – the idea that they had boundless
opportunities to spend it. Even though Republicans held a majority of the seats
in the Legislature, just two of them voted against all of these Christmas tree
bills. Few of them suspected the economic collapse that would swiftly take hold
in Michigan as they were spending this surplus tax revenue.
Consider the 1999 spending bills: Senate
Bill 68 and House
Bill 4075. When it was all over and
these were enacted into law, Republican lawmakers in the House convened a task
force on “government waste” and criticized themselves for at least $131 million
in nonessential spending. The Gongwer capitol newsletter quoted the task force as
follows: “Before members of this task force consider recommendations on how to
reduce government waste, it is important to examine our own contributions to the
problem.”
A few of their “contributions”:
- $4 million for the Windmill Island Village project in Holland
- $5 million for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn
- $10 million for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
- $5 million for the Detroit Science Center
- $35 million for the Detroit Institute of Arts
- $2 million to restore a wall at Fort Mackinac
- $1 million for the Museum of African American History
- $10 million for new furniture to go in a new House of
Representatives office building
- $500,000 to demolish the old House of Representatives office
building
When these bills passed, Gongwer said they were part of an
agreement between “Republican leaders” and Gov. Engler to boost spending of
taxpayer dollars by more than $500 million over a two year period, due to the
“strong economy” that “bore its fruits.”
Most Republicans had their names all over the 1999
supplemental spending. Senate Bill 68 passed
on a vote of 37-1 in the Senate and 101-1 in the House. House Bill 4075 passed
91-16 in the House and 31-7 in the Senate.
The only
lawmakers to vote against both bills in 1999 were state Rep. Bob Gosselin,
R-Troy; and state Sen. Dave Jaye, R-Washington Twp. Both lawmakers issued
public calls for a halt to the spending spree before it continued into the
following year.
“There’s so much taxpayer money in Lansing that we’re
tripping over it in the hallways,” said Jaye in a news release picked up by the
MIRS capitol newsletter on Jan. 1, 2000. “The $355.5 million state budget
surplus is a direct result of excessive taxation, and I am formally requesting
Governor Engler to return this surplus money to the taxpayers.”
But much of that advice went unheeded by June of 2000 when Senate
Bill 968 was passed. What Gongwer again called “the brightest Christmas
tree in many legislative sessions” and a “massive” spending bill was loaded
“full of goodies” directly costing Michigan taxpayers an extra $460 million. With
another $140 million kicked in from federal taxpayers, the full total topped
out at over $600 million. In March, Engler
called a press conference to attack the Republican-led Legislature for porking an
earlier version of SB 628 up to $435 million. He was annoyed because this total
was already $117 million above his original request.
But then, by the summer, the bill grew another $170 million heavier still! At that point state budget
estimators were projecting even higher surpluses, and this seems to have muted
Engler’s criticisms. He signed SB 968 with a note thanking the Legislature for
their work.
Once again, it had the support of both Peters and
Raczkowski; and also massive support from Republicans. The bill passed
102-4 in the House and 29-9 in the Senate.
Yet again, Gosselin and Jaye were in opposition. Gosselin
even offered up an amendment before the bill passed, asking the House to cut
$220 million in spending from the bill and return it instead to the taxpayers
as a refund. His amendment was defeated.
Some examples of the ornaments s on the “brightest Christmas
tree in many legislative sessions” were as follows:
- $10 million for the Detroit Zoo
- $3 million for an aviation history museum in Kalamazoo
- $11 million for arts and culture grants
- $5 million for the Dept. of Management and Budget to demolish
buildings
- $500,000 for an iron museum in Negaunee
- $15 million to assist public TV stations in their conversion to
digital broadcasts
After he had specifically threatened beforehand to line-item
veto the money for public television stations, lawmakers sent SB 968 to Engler
with the $15 million appropriation still in it. He made good on his threat and
zeroed out the digital conversion spending, but signed the rest of SB 968’s
spending into law on Sept. 20, 2000.
Ten weeks later, on Dec. 1, 2000, Gongwer published a story
alluding to the “slowing economy” and “tumbling stock market.” Not even a year
after Jaye’s statements about “tripping over” the extra money in the capitol
hallways, this was the first rumblings of what would swiftly become the decade
of economic hardship that Michigan is still enduring.
The following September, one year after SB 968 was signed,
Michigan had lost more than 100,000 jobs and its unemployment rate had grown from 3.9 percent to 5.5 percent, topping 5 percent for the first time since 1995. From
that point on, it kept going up. Michigan hasn’t seen unemployment as low as
5.5 percent since 2001.
Nothing has changed in the incentive structure inside
Lansing that caused lawmakers of both parties to approve this spending.
However, outside Lansing something has potentially changed. Today there
is a social movement called the tea party that's capable of making politicians
re-think their priorities. Whether it does so or not remains to be seen.
Because runaway government spending is the primary
motivating concern of the tea parties, it seems likely that they would have
balked mightily had they been around in 1999 and witnessed the decorating of
these Christmas trees. It is entirely possible that their objections would have
been enough to chop them down.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. The lesson of the
Christmas tree bills is that tea parties need to watch and reprimand
Republicans just as much as they do Democrats - perhaps more so when the GOP is
in charge of the whole state government.