That's yesterday's protest by Michigan seniors of Gov. Rick Snyder's radical budget proposal, which includes taxing retirees' pensions. The protests continue today, and are being
liveblogged by Eclectablog. The protests aren't just over Snyder's budget, which gives corporations an 86% tax cut, while increasing taxes on the middle class and the working poor by 31%. It's over the entire draconian package Snyder has introduce, including his
"financial martial law" bill that passed last week.
At ThinkProgress, legal expert Ian Millhiser says this new anti-union power grab is unconstitutional.
There’s a pretty serious problem with this power grab, however — invoking it would violate the Constitution. The Constitution forbids state laws “impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” This provision provides a robust limit on a state’s ability to dissolve contracts between the government and a private party. As the Supreme Court explained in United States Trust Co. v. New Jersey, state laws impairing such contracts must be “reasonable and necessary to serve an important public purpose.”
The bill does contain some language requiring the emergency manager and the state treasurer to determine that they are not violating this constitutional limit before a collective bargaining agreement can be blown up, but Snyder’s own budget gives the lie to any claim that an assault on working Americans is “necessary” to ensure that Michigan governments can pay their bills. Snyder proposed a massive $1.73 billion business tax cut even as he was arguing that his anti-union power grab was necessary to restore the state’s fiscal balance.
The consequences of Snyder’s actions could be stark. If a state is free to break contracts whenever they feel like it, then no one will agree to do business with the state. Investors will refuse to buy the state’s bonds, and state contractors will demand all payments upfront out of fear that the state will accept their work and then tear up the contract requiring the workers to be paid. Creditors will charge the state enormous interest rates to secure against the risk that the state will just waive its hand and make its obligation to repay go away.
In other words, Snyder is so determined to chip away at collective bargaining, he’s demanded a power that he cannot constitutionally use and that would drive his state into an even deeper financial hole if he ever tried.
I think you could call that a scorched earth approach. Rick Snyder campaigned as a moderate. He lied. He's at least as ideologically motivated as Scott Walker or any other teahadist in the GOP.