Detroit News. April 18, 2019
Don’t cheap out justice, or justices
The axiom “you get what you pay for” is as true of judges as it is for a suit of clothes.
Michigan hasn’t given its Supreme Court justices a pay raise in 19 years. That makes it hard to attract good candidates to run for the court, and to hold them once they’re elected.
Chief Justice Bridget McCormack sent a letter to the State Officers Compensation Committee last week urging them to recommend at least a 10 percent pay hike for the seven members of the court.
It’s a reasonable request, and one the commission should honor and the Legislature approve.
Justices are paid $164,610 a year. That’s not much more than the salary of state Court of Appeals judges, who get $160,640, and have received regular pay raises. Nationwide, pay for state Supreme Court justices averages more than $176,000.
The salary for a Supreme Court justice in Michigan is less than what a first year lawyer at a top law firm can command.
Most of the justices are making great personal sacrifices to sit on the court. While they don’t expect to earn what they could in a private practice, they should be fairly compensated.
The pay panel has recommended salary increases for justices in the past, but the Legislature has not approved them.
Supreme Court salaries are tied to lawmaker pay - they rise in tandem. And since legislators are reluctant to hike their own pay, fearing a backlash from votes, the justices never see a boost.
As the chief justice noted, nobody runs for the Supreme Court for the pay. But keeping salaries so low makes it tougher for justices to stay on the court when other opportunities arise.
The court has lost three justices over the past few years to the private sector before their eight-year terms were up.
During the period that justice pay has been frozen, the average pay for state workers has risen 40 percent.
The case for a pay raise for Supreme Court justices is clear.
Michigan needs competent and independent justices, and to get those the job needs to appeal to the brightest legal talent.
Higher salaries alone won’t accomplish that goal, but they will help.
___
The Mining Journal (Marquette). April 18, 2019
Earth Day 2019 right around the corner
Monday will mark the 39th celebration of Earth Day, and the date may be more important to recognize now than ever before.
The website www.epa. gov states that on the first Earth Day in 1970, 22 million Americans celebrated clean air, land and water. Back then, there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act. There were no legal or regulatory mechanisms to protect the planet’s environment. As a result, Sen. Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force this issue onto the national agenda.
Apparently, the gathering of millions of Americans on Earth Day got the message across, as the EPA was authorized by Congress in December 1970.
In “The Spirit of the First Earth Day,” Jack Lewis wrote: “In the waning months of the 1960s, environmental problems were proliferating like a many-headed hydra, a monster no one could understand let alone tame or slay. Rampant air pollution was linked to disease and death in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere as noxious fumes, spewed out by cars and factories, made city life less and less bearable. In the wake of Rachel Carson’s 1962 best-seller, “Silent Spring,” there was widespread concern over large-scale use of pesticides, often near densely populated communities.
In addition, huge fish kills were reported on the Great Lakes, and the media carried the news that Lake Erie, one of America’s largest bodies of fresh water, was in its death throes.”
The creation of the EPA has certainly contributed to the reversal of the environmental issues that the country faced in the 1960s. But today, the world faces an even greater issue with climate change.
The website www.nasa. gov has a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes more than 1,300 scientists from the United States and other countries. The IPCC forecasts a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.
Taken as a whole,” the IPCC states, “the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.”
As a result of these changes, the IPCC says there will be more heat waves, resulting in more droughts; changes in precipitation patterns may result in the types of flash flooding we witnessed in Houghton last summer; hurricanes will become both more frequent and more intense; and the Arctic Ocean is expected to become essentially ice-free before the middle of this century.
In other words, as these changes increase and become more drastic, there is no location on the map that won’t be affected in some way. Therefore, the responsibility lies on all of us to do our part and alter the course of climate change.
___
Petoskey News-Review. April 19, 2019
Straits tunnel authority’s fate shows drawback of lame duck sessions
When one works at an unreasonably rapid pace, the quality of the results can sometimes suffer - and the Michigan legislation which created the Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority looks to offer an example of this.
The corridor authority was established to provide oversight for a new utility tunnel project beneath the Straits of Mackinac, which, in part, would provide an enclosed replacement for the Straits segment of Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 petroleum pipeline - an aging structure which has sparked concerns about the potential for spillage into the Great Lakes.
The legislation creating the new body was passed in late 2018 - amid the Republican-led Michigan Legislature’s frantic lame duck session - and signed into law by Gov. Rick Snyder in his waning weeks in office. The new authority board soon met and entering initial agreements with Enbridge.
When current Gov. Gretchen Whitmer - who had called for Line 5’s decommissioning during the 2018 campaign, and opposed compromises such as a tunnel - took office in January, she promptly asked a fellow incoming Democratic officeholder, Attorney General Dana Nessel, to review the legislative framework for the corridor authority. In an opinion issued in March, Nessel concluded that the law which formed the new body was unconstitutional, as it violates the “Title-Object Clause” of the Michigan Constitution.
When introduced in November, the bill originated in the Senate as an amendment to the Mackinac Bridge Authority charter. In those initial drafts, the bill would have handed the ownership of the tunnel to the Mackinac Bridge Authority. But, that set up proved unpopular among environmental activists and members of the Bridge Authority itself, so legislators altered the language to create a complete separate authority.
According to Nessel’s opinion, that switch was one of the main factors that made the law unconstitutional.
Nessel argued that by amending the language of the bill to create a separate Straits Corridor Authority, the bill no longer accurately represented the purpose of the bill as expressed in its title. On the same day Nessel issued her opinion, Whitmer ordered state agencies to halt tasks toward the tunnel.
As of mid-April, the next steps associated with the Straits pipeline crossing remained uncertain.
Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, told Bridge Magazine the Senate would see that the corridor authority has the resources needed to make a case for its existence in court. Soon after, though, Mike Nystrom, who served as the authority’s chairman, told Bridge his understanding was that Whitmer’s decision essentially abolished the authority - and thus the body would face a challenge in making a case for itself. Nystrom said pipeline owner Enbridge looked to be in more of a position to challenge the governor’s tunnel decision. Enbridge was weighing its next steps as of early April, a company spokesman told Bridge, adding that the company intended to work with Whitmer’s administration on a path forward.
When considering the corridor authority bill’s path into law, it’s not surprising that the document proved vulnerable to a challenge on its syntax, one that brings the pipeline crossing’s future back into uncertainty.
The legislation’s approval, the tunnel board’s creation and its entry into agreements with Enbridge all transpired in a matter of days - amid lame duck efforts by the Republican-controlled legislature to fast-track a wide assortment of partisan policy proposals while a potentially friendly governor remained available to sign them into law. When it came to the Straits tunnel bill in particular, Democrats and environmentalists raised complaints of the limited vetting the legislation and its language received as it made its way through the process.
We’d say poor vetting of legislation is endemic to the type of lame duck legislative session which Michigan has seen in recent years. As lawmakers scurry to ram through base-pleasing proposals, concepts such as transparency and well-informed analysis can easily suffer. We see this as a troubling approach regardless of which party’s legislators are steering the process.
As policymakers sort out a long-term alternative to the current Line 5 setup at the Straits, there’s a tremendous freshwater resource at stake. The frenzy of lame duck hardly seems a conducive environment for contemplating this, and we’d say the Strait’s corridor authority’s fate offers a prime example of why the Legislature should do away with lame duck sessions, at least in their current form.
As we’ve said before, Michigan would be well-served if policymakers pursue any of three possibilities for the lame duck phase of the legislative year:
1) Move up the swearing in of newly election politicians to the day after the November election results are certified. This would greatly limit lame duck maneuvers driven by petty partisanship.
2) Following a November election, forbid the state legislature from meeting, except in cases of emergency.
3) Following a November election, allow the legislature to meet, but only in “caretaking mode.” This means they can only do business that would keep the government running - such as paying bills - for the next government to take over. During this time, no new bills may be introduced or voted on.
____
Please read our comment policy before commenting.