By Zachary Gorchow
President of Michigan Operations
Posted: May 31, 2017 10:08 AM

MACKINAC ISLAND – If the part-time Legislature proposal Lt. Governor Brian Calley is spearheading qualifies for the ballot in 2018 and passes, it, combined with Michigan’s strictest in the nation term limits, would restrict the legislative branch like no other state in the Union.

Some of this depends on what type of part-time Legislature Michigan would have, and more on that later, but according to tracking from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the only states that have comparable term limits to Michigan and run bona fide part-time legislatures are Maine, South Dakota and Montana.

There are a couple of other states – Colorado and Arizona – that have similar term limits but have what the NCSL terms “hybrid” legislatures where legislators say they typically spend two-thirds of a full-time job on their legislative work. But that’s not what Mr. Calley is suggesting his proposal would mean. He’s saying legislators would only take three months out of the year for legislative work.

No other state limits their House members to six years (though several limit them to eight and many, like Michigan, limit their senators to eight as well).

But no state in the Union currently has a part-time legislature, a six/eight year limit on representatives/senators AND a lifetime limit on the number of terms served like Michigan. Other states say legislators cannot serve more than a number of consecutive terms, so a legislator would take a term or two off and then could return.

Mr. Calley’s proposal has touched off some real anger in the Capitol community, among those already fuming that term limits has left the Legislature bereft of expertise (except for a handful of senators) and especially considering that Mr. Calley made a tidy $79,000-plus annually during his four years in the House and is now running a de facto campaign for governor. Mr. Calley’s part-time legislature proposal -- conveniently several insiders are saying privately and publicly -- would substantially weaken the legislative branch at a time when Mr. Calley wants to head the executive branch.

The expertise in the Legislature currently comes from the staff, and if Mr. Calley really wants to save “tens of millions” as he said Tuesday from moving to a part-time Legislature, the only way to do so would be to slash the staff. Cutting legislative pay in half as his proposal would achieve would save only $4.6 million.

So would a part-time Legislature mean the end of the House and Senate Fiscal agencies, whose staff is instrumental in putting legislators’ ideas into actual budget language and walking legislators – and the public – through the complexities of the budget? Rep. Edward Canfield (R-Sebewaing), who is chair of the House Appropriations Health and Human Services Subcommittee, said, candidly, recently that the Health and Human Services budget is so big and complex (and it is) that a legislator with only two or four years of experience is ill-suited to managing it.

That’s where the rub of this unique combination of a strict part-time legislature and term limits law exists. Legislators heavily rely on staff expertise to perform their work. What happens when that staff gets obliterated?

And while the main public focus on the Legislature is its votes on the budget and policy, much of the actual legislative work surrounds constituent services. Michigan is a higher service state, and when residents run into a problem with state government – Medicaid, human services, state roads, state parks, environmental concerns, unemployment benefits and more – often their first call is to their representative or senator. That legislator’s staff then contacts the relevant department and tries to get answers.

In fact, it was calls to legislators from constituents seeking help that played a major role in bringing to light the scandal in the Unemployment Insurance Agency where a computer system falsely determined more than 22,000 had committed fraud.

House members already have just one or two staffers, tops. Senators have more, anywhere from three to five. Do legislative offices even carry staff when the newly part-time Legislature is not in session? Who will take those calls? And who does the staff call when the legislator personally needs to get involved during non-session times, because Mr. Calley says they will only be working three months of the year?

What Mr. Calley has proposed, when combined with the state’s term limits law, would leave Michigan with the weakest legislative branch among the 50 states. He is betting, and virtually everyone agrees, that Michigan voters will take the same approach as they did in 1992 with term limits, and stick it to those dastardly politicians.