Government of the (State), by the (State), and for the (State)

I closed off my last post with a call to return local control, in all communities, from the State to their elected governments (and by extension, their constituents). Today, we dive deeper, into the specific case of the City of Detroit. As I stated then, enshrined within the Constitution of the State of Michigan is political power for the voter through referenda. According to John Locke, in the first chapter of his work, The Second Treatise, that political power of the voter is also entrusted to (and transplanted into) their elected rulers through their agreement, consent, and vote.

Kevyn Duane Orr was appointed as Emergency Financial Manager of the City of Detroit by Governor Rick Snyder on March 14, 2013. A mere 11 days later, with Orr's assumption of the position, democracy was put on pause in the city. Control over the city would not be handed back to the locally elected City Council and Mayor until December of the following year. During those 21 months, Detroit would be led by a man who could not be held responsible by any of the people he was trusted to serve. As a State-appointee under Public Act 436 (2012), Orr would answer only to the Governor, even though his powers included overruling the decisions made by the Mayor and the Council. Thus, Orr's political power as EM would be without the agreement, consent, and vote of the constituency, the opposite of Locke had envisioned.

Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr

Curiously, this appointment, in and of itself, also stood in direct contrast with the beliefs and writings of one of our Founding Fathers, James Madison. In The Federalist No. 39, Madison speaks to high regard given to home-rule by stating that the "honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, [is] to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government." The people of the City of Detroit, who were the constituents of their elected Council and Mayor, were deprived of that representation, their avenue for self-governance.

When Orr's tenure as EM began, Raquel Castañeda-López was just another Detroiter, and didn't think much of his appointment, since it didn't affect her and her family directly. When I spoke to her last week, she emphasized that "in reality, we knew he was there, but he hadn't changed anything. We didn't notice a difference because we still had no street lights and our daily quality of life was the same as before." But in November of that same year, Raquel made history by becoming the first Latina elected to the Detroit City Council.

That was when she began to notice the EMs unilateral influence over the city. As a councilmember, she noticed "the contracts we got, and the ones we didn't get. We were always pressured to vote quickly, and vote in the way he wanted. If we didn't, he'd overturn it and get his way anyway. There was a lack of transparency, and there was really no point to voting since we couldn't do anything." Even since his departure, the City Council has been bound by Orr's orders, with them " still effecting us today."

Councilmember Raquel Castañeda-López

Councilwoman Castañeda-López was elected by her district to serve the people of her neighborhood, and the broader city. Against the wishes of the voters, her hands were tied as soon as she entered office, with her decisions not actually affecting the policies of the city. The self-governance that was given the highest honor by those who founded our nation, like Madison, was thrown to the wind. She, while in power, was powerless in the face of the State and its surrogate.

In her view, "the [re-passing of the law] is totally unethical, and I would argue that it's illegal. The people opposed it, words were changed, and it was re-passed. It was a slap in the face of democracy. That is not how you run a successful democracy." Echoing the councilwoman, I do believe that the action taken by the legislature in passing a law rejected by the people through veto referendum, should be illegal. The state's overreach impedes the rights of the residents of Michigan, and the procedural moves used to achieve it should be outlawed.

In the Gettysburg Address, one of the most popular speeches in American history, President Abraham Lincoln coined a phrase defining democracy that remains in use to this day. On the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, while dedicating the the Soldiers' National Cemetery, Lincoln reassured the crowd by saying, in the midst of the Civil War, that "we here highly resolve ... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

It is clear that the State of Michigan, in re-passing an emergency Manager Law, failed the ideals of Lincoln. The EM put in place is not of the people, he is not chosen by the people, and the government that put him there is definitely not working for the people.

For the sake of the citizen and the democratic foundation of our nation, the State must a) actively work to reaffirm local control and voter-initiated referenda, and b) outlaw the measures used by the legislature to subvert it in the first place.

Next time, in the final post of this series, we'll delve into the darkest corners of the harm left in the wake of Public Act 436 (2012), and the third step to restoring democracy in the State of Michigan.