bad beer.jpg

Ken Braun once violated the Michigan Constitution by drinking lots of bad beer. Michigan families can't trust him.

(File photo | MLive.com)

I’ll never run for public office because even a mild inspection of my past would reveal willful and sometimes severe violations of the Michigan Constitution. What’s worse, I know of numerous lawyers guilty of this same offense, both Democrats and Republicans. Many of them are friends who committed their unconstitutional acts right in my presence.

Michigan Constitution article IV, section 40 states: "A person who has not reached the age of 21 years shall not possess any alcoholic beverage for the purpose of personal consumption."

It’s horrible but true. I downed adult beverages before the state’s highest law said it was okay, and so did a whole lot of people I know. I’m neither going to apologize for, nor condone it. And when investigators have asked me whether I knew of any “character issues” that would prevent some of my friends from serving as lawyers or gaining security clearances, I guess you could say I participated in a cover up by not revealing their disrespect for their own state’s constitution.

Imagine the political attack: "Ken Braun willfully and without apology violated our constitution and protected others who did the same. Michigan families can't trust him!"

Such a counterfeit controversy should be confined to the The Onion and other satirical pages, right?

State Rep. Kevin Cotter, R - Mt. Pleasant, now age 37, pled guilty at the age of 22 to the misdemeanor of traveling in a vehicle while holding an open container of alcohol. This was not a case of either drunk driving or driving under the influence. And since he was older than 21, he doesn’t even share my sin of shredding the constitution.

So when answering a question from MLive's candidate questionnaire this fall regarding past convictions for a "criminal" offense, this youthful (and non-criminal) open container misadventure slipped his mind.

But the Democrats were paying attention.

"Cotter should stop running from his record and come clean to families in his district," snapped the communications director for the Michigan Democratic Party, treating this more seriously than 9,999,999 of Michigan’s 10 million residents ever will.

Back in July, it was the Michigan GOP trying to inundate us with irrelevancy by swatting Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer for admitting he (gasp!) voted in the 2012 Michigan Republican Presidential Primary. As I noted at the time, this is a deed I and countless other Republicans have been guilty of doing in Democratic primaries.

But this was no trivial matter to the communications director of the Michigan Republican Party, who griped it was proof that “Schauer would rather undermine Michigan’s political process than play fair, even going as far as deliberately tampering with our primary system.”

The GOP news release accused Schauer of continuing to “shock and disappoint Michigan families.”

Michigan families don’t care that a 37-year-old man drank a beer in a car at age 22, or that another politician voted legally two years ago. And they’ll swiftly stop caring about political parties preoccupied with such negligible nonsense.

Bear in mind that unlike other political party candidates, Democratic and Republican office seekers are granted special ballot status via partisan primary elections that cost Michigan taxpayers many millions of dollars. Our two major parties are thus state-sponsored corporate welfare projects. They’re like Solyndra, but produce irrelevant issues rather than botched business plans.

A recent Pew Research Center poll revealed 38 percent of Americans claim a political affiliation of "independent." This is the highest rate of rejection for the two main parties in at least 25 years, and their news releases are a clear hint as to how this happened.

Ken Braun was a legislative aide for a Republican lawmaker in the Michigan House and worked for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He has assisted in a start-up effort to encourage employers to provide economic education to employees, and is currently the director of policy for InformationStation.org. His employer is not responsible for what he says here, on Facebook, or Twitter ... or in Spartan Stadium on game days.