If you are like most folks, you enjoyed your extended 4th of July
weekend with all the wonderful weather for a change. And now you are
dutifully back with your nose to the grind stone trying to make ends
meet.
Back here, it's a ghost town. Michigan senators and
representatives, you see, have super-sized their July 4th holiday
which, for them, will run through July 21st.
You got one, maybe two days off and they get about 14! Yeah,
you're in the wrong career.
Oh O.K. All the staffers of all those legislators are reaching for
the email file to protest the implications that somehow their bosses
are at the beach, or mowing the grass or checking off the goodies on
the Honey-do list.
No sir-ree Bob. They are back home working on something
else…getting re-elected.
Lawmakers said earlier this year they wanted to get their main job
completed by July 1st i.e. write the new state budget and balance the
deficit in the old one.
Well, July one came and went and so did legislators. They left
town with only one budget bill completed. Sure it was a biggie, the
school aid bill, but what happened to the self-imposed deadline to iron
out the other spending stuff as well?
"They should be ashamed," notes turn coat Rep. Rick Jones (R-Grand
Ledge.) He tells a statewide Public TV audience, legislators should
stay in town, as he is doing, to finish the people's work before they
begin work on their own agenda of getting re-elected.
If someone took a poll on that, the general public would
probably concur with Mr. Jones, who is also running for the state
senate.
Lawmakers are under no obligation to finish the budget. They
have until October first to do that. What's the rush? They also have
every right to set their own schedules and this practice has been going
on for years and nobody has taken these guys to task.
Hence why should they change?
They won't cause it works for them.