The Detroit News reports on the citizens of House Speaker Andy Dillon's district collecting what seem to be enough signatures to put a recall question on the August ballot.
Dillon apparently held a press conference with lawmakers from both parties to address the recall effort.
""It's a sad day in the state of Michigan," Dillon told reporters. "It's just not a productive way for us to spend our time."
Flanked by House members from both parties, Dillon said the fight will distract him and other lawmakers from dealing with the housing crisis, energy restructuring and needed jobs in a state that leads the nation in unemployment"
This seems to be a VERY revealing statement about the nature of the Lansing machine. I wish a reporter would've bothered to ask him what he means by claiming this will distract from other business. How will this distract from legislative business? It does not require any action whatsoever from Dillon or any other legislators. What does he mean it’s a bad way to "spend our time"? What are lawmakers going to be spending their time doing for the recall?
He's giving away the fact that in Lansing, politics trumps policy, and that lawmakers will drop their legislative duties to address a completely non-obligatory non-policy issue to preserve their power. Whatever your thoughts on the recall effort, no one should be proud to know that lawmakers paid upwards of $90,000 a year to conduct business on our behalf are admitting that they will drop legislative business and divert their time (and presumably our tax resources) into pure political self-preservation at the expense of important state policy issues.
Turns out, politicians are not there for the "public good", but are unapologetic self-interested actors seeking to obtain and expand their own power. Public choice theory in practice. This need not shock or even worry us, but we should put aside naive notions of politicians as somehow purely altruistic. Acknowledging that, just like all of us, politicians respond to incentives and choose those actions that maximize their own utility should clue us in on how we might get good policy out of them - make it politically beneficial to do the right thing and politically dangerous to do the wrong thing.
The threat of recall hanging over the head of every politician who votes to hike taxes on strapped citizens to support special interests and a massive bureaucracy is a pretty damn good incentive to do the right thing (more accurately, to NOT do the wrong thing). When weighed against currying favor, prestige and money from those feeding at the public trough, powerful as these incentives are for fat government, I'm guessing (hoping) the fear of a recall will emerge as the greater incentive.