Attorney General Dana Nessel speaks to reporters in Lansing following Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s State of the State address on Jan. 24, 2024. (Photo by Andrew Roth)
As Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel discussed the accomplishments of her office in 2024 with reporters, offering status reports on large cases, her two-hour discussion Monday was bookmarked by condemnation of state lawmakers who boycotted the final days of the 2024 legislative session.
All 54 state House Republicans left mid-session in December and did not return for the rest of the year, citing inaction on bills to preserve tipped wages and amend earned sick leave policies. They were joined by Democratic lawmaker Rep. Karen Whitsett of Detroit, who offered her own list of demands, and blocked the quorum necessary to vote on legislation, effectively ending the session.
On the last day of scheduled session, then-House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit) ordered a call of the House, which directed the House sergeants to bring absent members to the chamber and bar the door. However, the House still did not achieve a quorum. Tate adjourned the House an hour later as the chamber still did not have enough lawmakers present to vote on any legislation.
Nessel in December expressed her dissatisfaction as votes were halted, calling their willful absence “literally criminal.” But during the roundtable, she said she will not take action against them.
Michigan House adjourns after again failing to get a quorum, stranding legislative priorities
“As sworn public officials, people have a job to do, and they ought to do it,” said Nessel, a Democrat. “Now, am I going to charge any of the legislators that did not appear for session? I am not, but I maintain that they shirked their duties by intentionally not appearing for session.”
Lack of attendance led to “deeply nonpartisan” bills to die as the legislative session ended last month, Nessel said, including bills to curb price gouging during a state of emergency. Prior to the attendance boycott, Republicans voted against human trafficking bills some of them had sponsored in previous sessions.
Nessel noted that the final weeks of 2024 marked decisive blows to the party as Michigan Democrats lost their majority in the state House and former President Donald Trump won reelection. But another loss for the state was all the bipartisan bills that lawmakers could have easily passed together.
And the attendance issues didn’t start in December, Nessel noted, slamming Tate for only holding 55 session days during the two-year legislative session, leading up to the laundry list of priorities Democrats kept until the last second that ultimately failed due to the attendance issues.
“Fifty-five days of session. I mean, I think that we can all collectively, and I would say that I believe that the Michigan public would agree with me. You know, that’s not what you’re getting paid for. That’s not what you’re getting health insurance from the state to do, to show up to work 55 times that year,” Nessel said. “And I argue that you’re when you intentionally don’t appear, when there’s not some other reason … and you just can’t bother to walk into chambers in order to discuss these matters and to vote on these matters, I would argue that you’re undermining our democracy, and you are shirking your duties and your responsibilities as an officeholder.”
New Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Twp.) maintained that Democrats would have spent the rest of the legislative session taking up progressive policies saying at the start of the walkout on Dec. 13: “We’ll just stand around for the next eight hours and then they’ll put up some bill. … It’ll do something that nobody ever even cares about.”
But you need only look at the gun safety legislation that was signed into law following the 2023 mass shooting on Michigan State University’s East Lansing campus, Nessel said, to know that Democratic leadership did important things last session.
“You can’t say that the Legislature during this session didn’t do anything that was impactful or important involving the work of our department, because they certainly did,” Nessel said. “Did they do everything we would have liked them to have done? No, absolutely not. But they did do some things that we think were impactful and important, and we thank them for that.”
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