On the cusp of Democrats’ trifecta control: The week in Michigan politics

At noon on New Year’s Day, Democrats will be in control of every branch of state government.

The inauguration of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer into a second term will be held bright and early Sunday morning. I was one sober sally on New Year’s Eve to make sure MLive can offer you a recap of all the festivities whenever and wherever you awake — hopefully not too hungover.

This is the first time Democrats will control both chambers of the legislature since 1983. They have a long wish list of policy changes and political observers are very interested in the order their priorities will take.

MLive’s Senate reporter Alyssa Burr spoke with incoming Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, for a little insight into what will top their agenda at the outset of 2023. In the House, Dems have made clear they’re interested in affordable housing. Whitmer has expressed a desire to solidify LGBTQ protections and laws to reduce gun violence alongside expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and nixing taxes on retirement income entirely.

That doesn’t mean that policymaking ground to a halt in the weeks after Democrats’ sweeping victory in the November election.

The Republican-led legislature still had a relatively low-key lame duck session, clearly a flurry of bills in one late-night legislative session. Whitmer, however, didn’t offer any assurances for legislation that hadn’t been negotiated with her office beforehand.

Alyssa and House Reporter Jordyn Hermani published run-downs of all the major legislation desk that crossed Whitmer’s desk in the final days of 2022, whether it earned her signature or a rejection via veto. She passed 278 bills into law this year.

It included:

A vacancy in Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees was also filled before the year was out, filling the seat left by Pat O’Keefe, who resigned, with banking executive Sandy Pierce. (For what it’s worth, she gave $2,500 to Whitmer’s campaign for this election. Not a huge sum given the $38 million she raised in total.)

In another sprint to the finish, the Jan. 6 committee in the U.S. House is making a last-minute push to wrap up their work investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and in doing so has been releasing transcripts from some of the key figures interviewed along the way.

We’ve already covered the thrust of the role Michigan’s former legislative leaders played at the time. But the transcripts released over this past week offer additional insight into just how central Michigan was in growing the conspiracy of a fraudulent election that ultimately led to a violent insurrection at the seat of U.S. government.

And in the transcript released of the interview with outgoing senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, we’ve had another revelation: That Shirkey was repeatedly pressured by key figures in a scheme that sought to replaces Michigan’s electoral college representatives with a slate that’d cast votes for Trump, despite then-candidate Jow Biden’s 154,000-vote win.

If that wasn’t enough to chew on, state cybersecurity officials are now reviewing whether the extremely popular social media platform TikTok might pose a threat to state government devices.

The review, which MLive was first to report, comes amid growing concern about the company’s data practices and 19 other states governments have banned the app from state-issued phones. Michigan’s congressional republicans even asked Whitmer to look into forcing state employees to delete TikTok off their personal phones.

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