Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

At the eleventh hour of budget negotiations, the GOP-controlled Michigan Legislature is begging for a rebuke — and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ought to let them have it.

Whitmer, a Democrat, proposed her administration's first budget back in March. That's when budget negotiations should have begun in earnest. With good faith on both sides, the state budget could have been approved before the Legislature's summer recess, as it has for the last eight years, when Republicans controlled the governor's seat and the Legislature.

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But thanks to the intransigence of Michigan's Republican legislative leaders — who rejected Whitmer's proposed gas tax increase but declined to propose an alternative that could deliver the money grown-ups in both parties agreed was required to fix the roads — our state is now days from the Sept. 30 deadline by which a budget must be approved in order to avoid a state shutdown.

Let's not kid ourselves: This is where things were always headed.

Whitmer, whose central campaign promise was to fix Michigan's roads, proposed to raise the roughly $2 billion a year authorities from both parties agree is required to complete that task with a 45-cents-per-gallon gas-tax increase. Funding roadwork via a gas tax would redirect some sales tax dollars currently applied to roads to Michigan's struggling schools, the state's other area of critical need.

Proposing a 45-cent gas tax increase was audacious, even foolish in the view of political strategists preoccupied with the Democratic Party's image. But it was also an opening position in what should have been an earnest and robust negotiation.

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Instead, state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Clarklake) and House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R-Levering) recoiled in theatrical horror. Fetch the smelling salts! Get us a fainting couch! The governor wants to pay for the roads by taxing the people who use them!

The GOP's best counter-proposal was a cockamamie scheme that involved borrowing money to pay teacher pensions and fund road repairs.

Mostly, what GOP lawmakers have done is object. Some of their objections step from principled differences over spending priorities, But Shirkey and Chatfield have seemed preoccupied with establishing Republican dominance over Michigan's divided government, and Michigan's Democratic governor.

Now, the Legislature has approved a $59-billion budget, spread across 16 bills, that gut Whitmer's road-repair promise, directing just $400 million to repair our pothole-ridden roads. It reshaped Whitmer's K-12 funding plan, which moved the state toward the kind of weighted funding that educators and policymakers elsewhere say is imperative if Michigan schools are to reverse their long decline. Whitmer's office said Thursday the governor still hadn't received final versions of most of the budget bills.

(Rosh Hashanah runs from Sunday night to Tuesday night. While the Legislature typically takes the Jewish holiday off, given the looming deadline, some Lansing reporters had expected the Legislature to hold a special session.)

Whitmer has few options: Veto all the Republican budget bills outright, triggering a state shutdown; exercise her powers to make line-item vetoes; or use her untested administrative authority (asserted by former Gov. John Engler, and subsequently upheld by the courts) to shift funds within departments.

Shirkey told the Lansing newsletter MIRS that if Whitmer were to shift funds, it could fracture her relationship with the Legislature. But he and Chatfield have already strained that relationship with their take-it-or-leave-it tactics.

We share Whitmer's reluctance to shut down state government. Too many Michiganders would be too badly hurt.

But short of a shutdown, she has earned the right to exercise her veto pen liberally and to shift funds, within the limits of her Engler-engineered authority, to the advantage of her own priorities.

In 2018, Michigan voters chose Whitmer by a wide margin, presumably because they agreed with the priorities she articulated: Roads. Schools. Infrastructure. If the governor surrenders to GOP legislative leaders without a fight, it's going to be a long four years for all of us.