In latest statehouse scandal, Senate stops ethics reforms — again

You might think the biggest scandal coming out of the Capitol this year involved a former Speaker of the House, but on behalf of the Good People of the Great State of Michigan, I hearby nominate the outgoing Majority Leader of the Senate.

Sure, former speaker Lee Chatfield was a horny and greedy hustler who raised and spent more money than any legislator before or since he left the statehouse at the end of 2020. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, he was a creep who slept with his brother's wife and lived large on lobbyist loot. If we assume the worst, he was a groomer and sexual predator who used special interest money to reward his friends, family and adult entertainers. The Michigan Attorney General is investigating where the truth lies.

I've heard nothing to suggest that Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey debased himself like Chatfield. In his farewell speech to the Michigan Senate on Dec. 7, Shirkey said he tried using hourglasses that ran out of sand after several minutes to measure his meetings with lobbyists. By contrast, Chatfield measured some of his meetings by how many songs the stripper would dance to.

But Shirkey still gets my vote. Under his leadership, the Senate failed to act on long-overdue open government and ethics reforms before the Legislature ended its session last week. Some of this legislation passed the House unanimously, and enjoyed the support of groups ranging from the liberal American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy. So even after we were shocked by one of the biggest scandals to hit the Capitol in our lifetimes, and at a time when an increasingly cynical public needs a sign that our elected officials are willing to clean up their own house, good government legislation died in the Senate.

Again.

That means with Chatfield's slime still oozing down the statehouse steps, lawmakers will have to start from scratch next year.

Instead of encouraging his colleagues to use a powerwasher to remove that stain, Shirkey recalled how he stuck his hand down a toilet to check the water temperature in a Senate office building. That was just one of several folksy tales he worked into a nearly 40-minute farewell speech that focused more on international conspiracies than the threat within.

Optimist Prime

Ed McBroom probably should have known better.

McBroom and Jeremy Moss have been working since 2015, when they were both state reps, to improve transparency in government. Their proposals to make the Legislature and governor's office subject to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act passed the House during the 2015-16 session. It passed in the 2017-18 session. McBroom, a Republican from Vulcan in the U.P., and Moss, a Democrat from Southfield, were elected to the Senate in 2018. Chatfield, who became Speaker in 2019, helped get the legislation through the House a third time.

Each time, it died in the Senate.

Nevertheless, in early 2021, Speaker Jason Wentworth, a Republican from Clare, made open records and ethics reform a priority, said state Rep. Ann Bollin, a Republican from Brighton who chairs the House Elections and Ethics Committee.

The reform package that passed the House was sweeping, but hardly revolutionary.

While the Legislature and governor's office would be subject to FOIA — like virtually every other branch of government in Michigan — decisions to deny the release of public records would not be subject to judicial review or lawsuits. Requiring lawmakers to disclose information about their personal finances is so overdue that 48 states already do so. Our state officials' resistance to reform is one of the reasons Michigan received an "F" in 2015 and finished last when the Center for Public Integrity ranked states by transparency and accountability. Yet even legislation crafted to stop the revolving door from lawmaker-to-lobbyist by imposing a two-year cooling-off period on elected officials and top state officials passed the House by an overwhelming margin.

In a twist that would be funny if it wasn't so infuriating, Chatfield unintentionally gave the reform package a fighting chance in the Senate when his scandalous past became front-page news that even the most obtuse lawmakers could no longer ignore.

So, McBroom's enthusiasm could be forgiven when he told the nonprofit news service Bridge Michigan in February that he hoped to tighten campaign finance rules in the wake of the Chatfield revelations. The legislation was expected to reach the Senate floor by spring. Shirkey expressed some reservations, but still told Bridge: "We're very close to having the ethics package ready to run."

A month later, in March, McBroom told my colleague Dave Boucher: "I think that the table is set for some significant legislation to get through on government transparency, on accountability, campaign finance issues. I think that we could get some of all three of those done this year." This time, the goal was to move forward by fall.

But by the time the Legislature adjourned for the year on Dec. 8, nothing had changed.

"I'm really quite disappointed that we weren't able to get these very important reforms across the finish," Bollin told me earlier this month. "Both the Speaker and I have advocated for these with our Senate counterparts."

Bollin said House members were told the Senate would hold hearings on their proposals.

"Those hearings were never held," she told me.

When I asked who was to blame for the reform package dying, Bollin said: "That's a question to ask of the Senate; they control their agenda."

Supreme transparency

I know that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was paid $9,000 in 2021 to teach at the Regent University School of Law and $15,000 to to teach at Duke.

He was reimbursed for trips to law schools at Notre Dame, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John, where he lectured and gave speeches.

And I know that Alito has investments in about 100 funds and trusts, including between $1.5 million and $3 million in multiple Vanguard funds; between $100,000 and $250,000 in a "mineral interest" in Grady County, Oklahoma; between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in the company that owns discount department store TJ Maxx; and less than $15,000 stock in the Molson Coors Brewing Company. (Evidently, he likes beer, too.)

That's because Alito, like all the justices, is required to file an annual financial disclosure report as part of the federal Ethics in Government Act, which was passed in 1978.

Yet, 44 years later, here in Michigan we have no idea what assets our lawmakers hold or who else might be paying them.

Shirkey said earlier this year that he had concerns that requiring lawmakers to disclose personal assets could be used as political fodder and discourage some people from running for office.

I tried to ask Shirkey why the reform passages stalled in the Senate yet again, but neither he nor his aides returned voicemail or email messages. Perhaps, instead of trying to push the legislation through during the lame duck session, Shirkey was too busy working on his farewell address.

Or maybe the answer is emblazoned on the Senate Republicans' homepage, which is dominated by large graphics inviting visitors to sign a petition urging Attorney General Dana Nessel to "investigate Gov. Whitmer's nursing home policy" and promoting "GOP election reforms" that it says are "making it easier to vote, harder to cheat." (Nevermind that years of Repubican claims about voting fraud have failed to yield much, if any, evidence.)

McBroom didn't fault Shirkey. He said government reform isn't at the top of many lawmakers' lists.

"I thought that the scandal that came out was maybe going to be that linchpin that finally got it done, and in a normal year it might have," he told me last week, citing competing interests like elections, figuring out how to spend federal money sent to Michigan and the gulf between the Legislature and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

"The legislation received some criticism or critique from other members who pointed that it wouldn’t necessarily stop somebody from finding another way to do wrong things; people who are determined to deal corruptly in these jobs are going to find other ways to do it," McBroom said. "I think that’s a fair consideration to make. However, making it more difficult and placing obstacles in the way of corrupt behavior is still a sensible public policy."

Moss has a simpler explanation: "The Republican leadership didn't let it happen."

An endless loop?

Moss and McBroom are committed to pushing reforms again when the Democrats take charge of the House and Senate next month.

Bollin says she's not giving up, either.

"I think the expectation of the public is that we will get this done," she told me. "We're going to continue to keep the pressure on. Doing the right thing is never wrong."

Let's hope that's true.

If some of these measures had passed in 2015, when Moss and McBroom made their first attempt, Moss said it would have been possible to use FOIA to see if state representatives Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat were using public resources to further an affair that brought shame to Capitol.

Then, if the governor's office had been subject to FOIA, we might know more about who knew what and when about the Flint water crisis.

And there's even a chance we would have known just how cozy Chatfield was with the folks helping fill his leadership funds and nonprofits with millions of dollars before his sister-in-law and brother went public with accusations of sexual assault and financial impropriety. (Chatfield's attorney says he did nothing illegal.)

"If we had just taken this issue on as seriously as some of us did in 2015, not only would we be able to know about this type of behavior, it also might have caused people to think twice about some of this behavior," Moss said.

Unfortunately, Shirkey and his predecessors as Senate majority leader didn't see the value in allowing us to know more about them and how they operate — even after Chatfield made it clear that the greatest threat to our democracy isn't an international cabal but the greedy weasels officials rub elbows with every day.

That's why I say while Shirkey started his Senate career with his hand in a toilet, he ended it with his head down there.

M.L. Elrick is a Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and host of the ML's Soul of Detroit podcast. Contact him at mlelrick@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter at @elrick, Facebook at ML Elrick and Instagram at ml_elrick. Support investigative reporting and use this link to invite a friend to become a subscriber.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Chatfield scandal helped boost reform effort, but Senate failed us