Elections Have Consequences: Michigan

Following the adoption of impartial redistricting process, the Democrat Party in Michigan controls both houses of the legislature and the Governor's mansion.

Rather than spending their time trying to appeal to people who literally want to kidnap and execute them, the Dems got down to business in Lansing, and have now repealed the states right-to-work law.  They also repealed the decades old state abortion ban, passed gun control legislation, added LGBTQ to the list of classes protected from discrimination.

This is good policy and good politics, but all too often, "Moderates" in the party apparatus who want to suck up to the Chamber of Commerce and try to renege on these promises, with the inevitable electoral disaster to follow.

You win an election, you deliver what you promise, and if possible you engage in activities that secure the support of the electorate, things like this repeal:

For several decades now, a basic political dynamic has recurred in Washington. Afforded political power, Republicans push their agenda as fiercely and aggressively as possible, using every tool at their disposal. Among Democrats, something like the opposite is more typically the case. Awarded a sweeping mandate in 2008 and a governing trifecta in 2009, to take a recent example, Barack Obama and his administration refused to go to the mats for the public option for health care, refrained from overhauling America’s financial system, and backed away from promised reforms that would have made it easier for workers to organize unions.

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Elected with their own governing trifecta last November — the first of its kind in forty years — state Democrats are now, refreshingly, pursuing a version of Snyder’s strategy in reverse. In a single day alone, ignoring the anguished cries of their Republican counterparts, Michigan’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed a new gun control law, voted to repeal the state’s unenforceable abortion ban, and enshrined protections for LGBTQ citizens. Significantly, legislation to end the state’s Snyder-era right-to-work law was just passed through the Michigan house and senate and is now on its way to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s desk for approval.

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Elected Democrats winning political power and wielding it to expand basic rights while rolling back draconian legislation imposed by the Right. What a thought. 

Indeed.  People don't vote for the civility fairy, they want their elected officials to kick ass and take names, and will support those politicians who do so.