Michigan Republicans have ILLEGALLY passed over 96% (546) of their bills under “immediate effect”

http://eclectablog.com/2012/04/michigan-republicans-have-illegally-passed-over-96-of-their-bills-under-immediate-effect.html

April 6, 2012

Last night, Rachel Maddow broke a huge story that has been happening since Republicans took over in Michigan in 2011 and has gone completely under the radar. Since January 2011, 566 bills have been signed into law. Of those, 546 of them, 96.5% were passed under “immediate effect”. Here’s the video from last night’s show that will blow your mind. Pay particular attention to around 12:30 where they show it in action. It’s astonishing.

[...] [see original article for video]

This is new in Michigan governance. This is not the way that Michigan was set up. This is not the way it was supposed to be…Michigan Republicans are using what is supposed to be an emergency provision for everything, even for the most contentious and partisan and divisive things that they want to do.

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Maddow then went on to show just how illegal this is. It’s something that I pointed out in my piece yesterday titled “Michigan GOP appeals ruling preventing them from violating the state constitution”. It’s the fact that immediate effect can only happen if 2/3 of the members of the House vote for it. But Republicans do not HAVE 2/3 of the House. The entire reason that they have been avoiding using roll call votes is because they did not have the votes to make the laws immediate effect. In other words, over 96% of the laws passed by the Republicans since January 2011 have been illegal in their implementation.

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