John Conyers, Jr.
Congressman John Conyers wants U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to
check out the state law that could add Detroit to the four other cities in Michigan run by an unelected emergency manager.
Public Act 4 backed by Gov. Rick Snyder and the GOP-dominated state legislature gives emergency managers power to get rid of elected bodies, override local officials and break union contracts in financially troubled municipalities. In particular, Conyers wants to know whether the law violates the Constitution's Contract Clause (Article 1, Section 10) by allowing an emergency manager to end collective bargaining rights and whether it violates Article 4, Section 4 on the requirement that states have a republican form of government.
In a letter to Holder, Conyers wrote:
While I fully appreciate the magnitude of the fiscal crisis impacting the City of Detroit, there are less disruptive and lawful means of resolving the crisis, other than eliminating the very right and protections our nation was founded on—democracy, the right to vote, and the right to contract...
The Supreme Court has previously held that this clause guarantees the people the right to a democratically elected form of government. It goes without saying that appointing an unelected manager in place of an elected mayor, city council and other public officials would be totally anithetical to the concept of democracy."
Eclectablog, who has been following the issue for more than a year, has recently pointed out that if Detroit joins the other four cities under emergency managers, it would mean half the state's African American population, nearly 700,000 people, will "have lost their representative government." The other cities are Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint and Pontiac, which has had three emergency managers since 2009. In all of these cities, the majority of the population is African American.
A lawsuit has been filed against this terrible law and a repeal effort is also under way.