Republicans Vs. Democracy: Michigan Edition

How do we not have a thread on this? C'mon now.

So basically, MI Republicans are ramming through a boilerplate Koch-written Right to Work bill* through the state legislature with the full faith and confidence of a governor who had previously been a relatively sane moderate Republican who may have actually done some useful things for the state**.

Because the all-knowing framers of the Michigan constitution foresaw just this occasion, they kindly left in a loophole for the Republicans to include a minor appropriation (spending) clause in the same bill so that it could not be brought to the voters as a referendum. So, in honor of the state's founding fathers, they did just that.

The Democrats and their organized labor pals (gosh, there are one or two of those in Michigan, who knew) are not amused. They're basically going nuclear, and may have some capability in that regard that their opponents hadn't counted on.

Good times, good times.

* aka there is now by legislative fiat no such thing as a closed shop, aka unions are completely fucked in the medium and long terms as labor collectively bargaining only works when you, y'know, actually have the power to bargain for the collective

* this is all second-hand; I'll let RyanMM and others actually speak to Gov Snyder

Snyder is a dickweed of the highest order.

Ive never understood the forced union laws, all states should be right to work, if one wants to join a union they can, but they should also have that same choice to not join one.

When you get hired into a union shop, the pay that you are getting was fought for by that union. If you want to opt out of the political contributions, you have a right to do that under federal law. However, you can't accept the gains that the union has achieved at that workplace without being a member. That would be absurd.

If you don't want to be in a union, work somewhere where there aren't unions. That's the vast majority of employers.

Well, thanks Adam. We were going to let this whole fiasco pass quietly without drawing any more negative attention than we already get for eating muskrat and fighting off radscorpions, but you had to go out us right in front of everyone. :(

It's basically "roll back the clock 50+ years" here in the GOP-controlled state government. The Republicans see their opportunity to dismantle Democratic power in the state and they're making the most of it. A package of abortion bills is being rushed through the lame duck session as well, and I'm guessing there's no chance in hell that Snyder won't approve those as well, all the while protesting in his obnoxiously nasal nerd-voice that he just doesn't really want to have to sign all these laws but you see, the time has come when we have to deal with these issues and blah blah blah. Just shoot me.

What's amusing about right-to-work laws is that they're fundamentally anti-libertarian. Closed union shops are a matter of freedom of association; nobody forces a firm to close the shop.

Let's not forget the other shit the lame duck GOP has been doing:

Let's set reproductive health back a few decades!
Let's let hospitals discriminate based on completely arbitrary and bullshit criteria!

There is some EPIC bullshittery going down in MI right now.

Anyone have the total popular vote from the 2010 state election? All I could find was raw per-district totals, and I'm curious to know whether the overall vote coincided pretty well with the seat counts or not.

Which'd seem paranoid, but, given the crazy ass congressional redistricting going around this stuff's not really a given.

How's this Jason T? http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/michigan

This is worth repeating (so I will). Right to work is presented as a limit on the union's ability to force people to join them, but the key distinction the popular narrative usually lacks is that right to work is actually a limit on the company forbidding them from making a closed shop concession to a union even if they want to or decide it's fine with their business model. Yglesias had a nice post on it.

I hope you'll all join me in hoping that the GOP gets off the backs of these job creators.

I guess it's a huge coincidence that right-to-work states tend to have worse wages than union states.

The only positive news about this is that maybe it will drill home to people what happens when you vote for even "nice problem-solver" Republicans in the new partisan parties era.

Actually as far as I know, no one is forced to join a union in the United States. The Taft-Hartley act outlawed "closed shops" in the late 1940s. You can be forced to pay dues, but you can't be forced to join the union.

As a corollary to this, all that "right to work" does is reduce the ability of the union to collect dues. It does not directly reduce the employer's labour cost, but it does reduce the union's relative power.

One thing also about the title of this thread, people voted to put republicans in office, and they are now passing things. That sounds like democracy in the US in action to me.

That's because you're a goddamned idiot who wouldn't be able to reason his way through a vegetable's understanding of context. That's why it sounds like democracy to you.

I'm waiting for you to rebut the point that I answered directly and respectfully.

An idea I've been toying with lately - triggered by the obsession with anarchist types in Victoria 2 of all things - is that I think we're experiencing a real surge in across-the-board distrust of institutions and governments unseen since the 19th century. Even after you adjust for "white people mad at the collapse of the supremacist system" there's a really high residual of anarchist types and general attitudes.

*sigh*
Shithead Libertarian today: "It's all about giving people choice! Ooooooh isn't that a weird concept: choice. People can choose to not have their money taken for no reason!"
Me: "Unions are a necessary evil-"
SL: "NO! No! They WERE back then, but now we have all these laws and they aren't needed!"
Me: "And where did those laws come from?"
SL: "It doesn't matter, they're there now. Unions are no longer needed."
Me: "And what happens when someone tries to repeal those laws or does?"
SL: *pause* "Then the unions will come back because they'll be needed."
Me: "What? The-"
SL: "And no one is attacking those laws! They aren't being attacked! No one wants to repeal those laws!"
*sigh*

Fox News...uh..."contributor" pisses people off until he gets the reaction he wanted.

Guy shouldn't have lead with his left, it was clearly weaker.

The correct response is "No, it's all about denying people choice. Oooh, isn't that a weird concept, if a business wants to be a closed shop, what right does the government have to say no? It's a freely negotiated contract."

But, what if a shitheel wants to work in that shop but doesn't want to join a union? HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY HIS CHOICE to work anywhere else

Sucks to be him. It's flagrantly unethical, in a libertarian moral framework, for the government to require a business to hire non-union workers if the business doesn't want to.

Make sweet love to me with that logic, will you.

It's like this guy is a perfect weathervane for being incorrect. Absolutely everything that he says, tweets, or thinks is wrong. He deserved everything he got, and then some.

Well nice to know you all think that it is ok for someone to be assaulted because they disagree with you politically.

Depends on what the disagreement is about, and how you go about disagreeing. If you disagree about basic fucking human rights (yes, union organization falls into that category) AND you disagree in the most disingenuous, dishonest way possible, welcome to the town of Approval of Assault, population: me.

The free hand of the market has a strong right hook, brett.

I can't speak for exactly what Mark M meant, but I'm guessing it's more that he thought it was OK for the guy to be assaulted because he's a gigantic douchnozzle. Regardless of his politics.

1. The guy edited out part of the video and it starts with the guy who punched him getting up off the ground.

2. As someone who runs his mouth like a track meet on a daily basis, you have to understand you are dealing with people, and people can lose their tempers. If you set out purposefully to get people to lose their tempers, you can complain about what happens to you, but don't expect anyone else to give a shit, because that whole getting punched in the face thing is one of the reasons why everyone else doesn't say those types of things to those types of people. It's not that you're brave, it's that they ain't stupid. Everyone saw that punch coming from the way that guy was acting. Under the law, people who just run their mouths are protected. However, under the Western world's standards for proper behavior, there are occasions, from culture to culture, where violence for certain affronts to decency is viewed as understandable. You want to push people's buttons, it's up to you to make sure that you're not pushing buttons on a rock-em sock-em robot.

Anger hath a privilege!

Hey Brett, you're doing that thing where you don't respond to people who've been kind enough to rebut your points. That's how discussion works, is there's a back and forth! Here, I know it's just a bit further up this page, but let me save you the effort of scrolling, I know that's tough sometimes:

Thinking about it more, the libertarian position on this truly is incoherent. I've seen libertarians sincerely argue that we should eliminate laws the punish workplace discrimination. Hell, I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one libertarian argue against sexual harassment laws. Because like you can always just quit if you don't like it. But when it comes time for unionization? Whoa stop the presses we need ourselves some government to stop that from happening. It's almost like libertarians aren't all about individual rights, and are rather just dupes used to protect the interests of the wealthy.

What you're forgetting is that this is good for minorities, because according to libertarians libertarianism is best for all concerned. The thinking goes like this: if an employer is racist, let's say, but they have to pay and treat people the same, they'll just hire white people because that's their preference. But if we didn't have any of those laws, minorities would gain an important bargaining chip: the ability to offer to work for lower pay and in worse conditions to make up for their being black. This is a real thing that I have seriously read and heard from multiple people.

The true lolbertarian line on unions is that anything goes as long as there's no government involvement whatsoever, so unions are ok and striking is ok and strikebreaking is ok and just firing everyone who goes on strike is also ok.

I meant the most recent elections for the state legislature (which I believe were in 2010); the link is for the state's delegation in Congress I believe. I found raw results on ballotpedia broken up by the state legislature's districts but not raw vote totals. Couldn't really get a sense that way.

Derp! I didn't read my own link closely enough.

State legislature results - unless it's just MI - seem to be a bit too small time to access easily. I should get off my lazy ass and just find some archived day-after-the-election news stories or something.