|  Sometimes it's just a matter of who gets to sign for what.
It is impossible to, on paper, tell Tom McMillian apart from his policy doppelganger Dave Agema. Oh, sure, Agema has a thing or two in his history that sets him apart (FORESHADOWING!), but they are interchangeable when it comes to being homophobic and xenophobic. McMillin was once described as hailing from the "Taliban wing" of his party, and that was by fellow Republican L. Brooks Patterson. This year, he suggested that Democrat Henry Santana is a bigot because Santana pointed out that the bill banning foreign law in U.S. courts (and enshrining the Constitution, more on this in a second) was unnecessary and just red meat for the racist set, as well as swapping correspondence with the Mackinac Center in an attempt to bust up the MEA. The law forbidding foreign laws from attaining supremacy in U.S. courts over the Constitution wasn't the only case where McMillin thought state law was needed to enshrine the Constitution as supreme law in U.S. courts. When the Senate sent over its anti/pro-bully bill earlier this year, McMillin was one of only a handful of people who thought to defend it. Bullies are bad, he said, but we can stop them only in a way that doesn't infringe on someone's First Amendment right to call someone a faggot in the name of God. But, what we've taken so much delight in this year was McMillin's bill that would permit light bulb manufacturers to manufacture inefficient incandescent light bulbs in the state of Michigan as long as they sold them entirely within the confines of the state. That not only would have created the sort of regulatory patchwork that light bulb manufacturers sought to avoid when they pressed Congress for the nationwide efficiency standards in the first place; but it would have been a case of centralized market planning, since it would have created and limited a market all at the same time. It's not nearly as awful as being the point man for a bill that strips away health care protection for domestic partners out of bigotry. It's just hilariously silly and ideologically incoherent. |
