| The shiftin' o' the goalposts. In his filing, Schuette complained that organizers for Protect Our Jobs "cannot … propose an innocuous-sounding constitutional amendment that has the secret effect of wholesale changes in Michigan law." "(T)he issue is whether Michigan citizens will be given the basic tools — such as full publication of the proposal's changes to existing law — essential to know precisely what the citizens are voting for," he argued.
The flimsy pretext for this, if you remember, was Mark Brewer's Reform Michigan Government Now! petition campaign that would have reduced the number of Supreme Court justices, reducing salaries for elected officials, and shrinking the Legislature. The number of laws changed is entirely irrelevant. Anyone who's dealt with a legal issue is aware that there are laws that cross-reference each other through the compiled code, and that what seems like a simple change in intent might require changing the wording in four or five sections of law. This is why people say that the legal code is too complicated for normal people to understand. But, really, at this point, it's not an attempt to simplify election choices, but to get booted from the ballot a law that they fear will wind up passing. Unfortunately, the job for making that partisan argument ought to be left to a lawyer of the aggrieved party -- in this case, the Republican Party -- not a lawyer hired and paid to represent the interests of the taxpayers at large. |
