| The tough-on-crime shouting point meets the fiscal responsibility shouting point. You won't find the words "there is no free lunch" stamped on each page in the mountain of spending bills lawmakers are sorting through as they figure out how to produce a balanced budget by Thursday. The reminder is there nonetheless no matter how easily it's forgotten in political campaigns. Midland Republican Bill Schuette, former congressman, state senator and appellate judge seeking the nomination for attorney general, last week timed his official announcement in advance of the GOP's weekend leadership conference on Mackinac Island. The timing couldn't have been better coming on the heels of budget talks in which his Republican opponent, Senate Majority Leader Michael Bishop, agreed to more spending cuts to prisons and to state aid for local governments, i.e. city police departments. The jam Bishop's in is that if he eventually green-lights a revenue increase to mitigate those public safety cuts, he'll be slammed for that too. He's already being criticized to allowing tax hikes to move through the chamber in 2007.
...snip... But according to Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith, D-Ypsilanti, the House point person on the prison budget who is also running for governor, Bishop blanched last week when he realized that the size of the corrections cut he agreed to inevitably would lead to still more prison closings. As a result, corrections will likely get more money than was initially agreed to. All those Michigan college students who could still lose every dime of the Michigan Promise scholarship owed to them this year? Sorry.
Perhaps rather than reciting the same old schtick until you find yourself backed into a corner, the GOP could instead formulate a real, cohesive, coherent policy platform that people with an IQ higher than double digits can take seriously. Somehow, I doubt they'll do that. |
