[ bleep ] [ bleep ]. you almost could not hear the girls voices as they chanted over the police sirens as they were being handcuffed and arrest ford refusing to leave their school. but you could see what had happened to them. you could see what the school mint to them. and katherine ferguson ascad ca was spared, in 2011. kept it open. the system of by passing elect owed officials and installing emergency managers and giving them unilateral power. that business rolled on. voters repealed existing emergency manager law in 2012. michigan republicans in the legislature put in a new one that voters couldn t as easily repeal. though it is really not at all clear whether this sort of thing works. or helps these towns. when you bypass democracy and instead install a little dictator to act alone without oversight. in muskeegon heights.
excess of 20,000 votes because of irregularities. we have to find out if those irregularities were due to incompetence or part of the criminal activity. that s a tremendous amount of votes to have potentially thrown out. so we just need to know why. i got you. let me ask you this. so if you become mayor, you essentially have to wait about, i don t know, perhaps a year before you re fully running the city. what do you plan on doing in that first year when you really don t have the powers of the purse when it comes to running the city? well, that s not necessarily the case, because there has been a challenge to the michigan emergency manager law. we have a federal case pending and hopefully we will have a decision from the federal court that says that, as i believe it is, the emergency manager law in michigan is unconstitutional. now, if that does not happen, then i m in the situation that you have placed me in. that would then require me, as the elected mayor, to go to the
grounds now too. saying, quote, the michigan legislature seems to have ignored the two-thirds vote requirement when it gave the emergency manager law immediate effect. the legislature has perverted the immediate effect exception. and then listen to this, with this is from the ruling, quote, apparently the michigan legislature believes the michigan constitution can be ignored. so the federal appeals court is now asking a lower court to essentially look into whether republicans passed that law illegally. so, against the voters and against the constitution. against all the interests our governing system is supposed to serve in a democracy. what started off here as a small-scale dispute between angry retirees in pontiac, michigan, and their emergency manager, has now grown into something that could potentially restore small d democracy across that state. democracy has been dead in michigan, in a lot of places in michigan, for a few years now. and, you know, anti-democratic fantasies asid
telling michigan republicans, not so fast. the ruling does kick the law back to a lower court, but they re directing the lower court to, quote, consider whether the michigan legislature possesses the power to retroactively immunize its own acts that the voters rejected by referendum. you may also remember our coverage of how the republicans passed this law in the first place. i mean, after you pass a law, normally, there s a long lag time before the law goes into effect. most laws in michigan go into effect three months before the end of the session in which they are passed. but when michigan republicans pass this emergency manager law, they decided it would go into effect immediately. under the michigan constitution, you can only do that if you have the support of two-thirds of the legislature. republicans did not have the support of two-thirds of the legislature, but they rushed the bill through like that anyway. they claimed they had the votes for it to go into immediate effect, but
voters went to the polls and they voted resoundingly to repeal the emergency manager law, to repeal the republicans radical emergency manager law, which stripped democracy at the local level in michigan, and instead install as three one-man governments. these unilateral emergency managers, chosen by republican governor, rick schneider. the republicans radically expanded emergency manager law was put on the ballot and michigan voters repealed it. they chose to eliminate the law altogether. in response to that, michigan republicans in the state capitol just went ahead and passed a new one. they just passed a new emergency manager law a month later, a month after the voters had repealed the previous one. redid basically all the things that they had done under the old law, except this time, they did it in a way that it basically can t be repealed. so screw the voters, right? republicans know what they want. voters repealed it. eh, we ll put it back. turns out maybe not. this federal appe