Mark Brewer's Facebook post regarding Governor

Whitmer's veto of the 9 bills carried over from 2024

I was the lawyer for the Michigan Senate in Michigan Senate v. Michigan House, the successful lawsuit over the 9 bills Speaker Matt Hall refused to present to the Governor. I am also the General Counsel of the Michigan AFL-CIO. The views and analysis in this post are my own and not theirs.

Governor Whitmer’s recent vetoes of 9 bills from the 2024 legislative session were cruel to the millions of Michigan workers, consumers, and Detroit residents hurt by them. Those vetoes are a betrayal of people who supported her and for whom she claims to fight. The veto process reflects abysmal governing by her and the veto letter (copy below) is full of legal sophistry. Those vetoes cannot be justified and were an arbitrary act showing callous indifference to the consequences.

The governing failure was her veto process. She had 14 days under the Michigan Constitution to consider those bills. Instead she rushed to veto them on a Friday within hours of the Michigan Supreme Court decision requiring their presentment. There was no advance notice, except perhaps to GOP House Speaker Matt Hall, to legislative leaders, bill sponsors, or the many groups vitally interested in the bills. That is indefensible. If there were issues with the bills - and there weren’t - she had 2 weeks to consult, think, and try to resolve them. She failed.

The second failure is the fallacious “legal” reasons for the vetoes set forth in her letter. None of those reasons withstand scrutiny.

Most of the reasons are based on her claim that the bills would be retroactive to April 2, 2025 citing Article 4, §27 of the Michigan Constitution. However, that provision only sets the earliest date a bill can take effect (unless given immediate effect which these bills were not), not a mandatory effective date. Moreover, it is well-established under Michigan law that “statutes are presumed to apply prospectively unless the Legislature clearly manifests the intent for retroactive application.” Buhl v. City of Oak Park, 507 Mich. 236, 244 (2021). There is no language in any of the 9 bills giving them retroactive effect. Because the bills aren’t retroactive most of Whitmer’s “reasons” for her vetoes - illusory “administrative burdens,” fears of “endless litigation,” and claimed effects on past budgets - are pure fiction.

She also tries to justify her arbitrary veto by claiming that some of the bills - she doesn’t specify which ones - would “overwrite laws that have since gone into effect.” Even if that’s true, legislative statutes conflict quite often and that’s what courts are for, resolving conflicts between laws. We could’ve gone back to the Court of Claims, where the case was pending when she rushed to veto, to work out those problems. Similarly, she asserts that “many” of the bills have deadlines which have passed. That’s simply false. As to the few bills where that may have been the case, courts could have adjusted those dates as they have in the past when the Legislature’s unconstitutional conduct interfered in the lawmaking process as it did here. See Mothering Justice v. Attorney General, 515 Mich. 328 (2024).

The veto of these 9 bills and the way in which it was done cannot be justified.