This week, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, former Congressman Peter Meijer brings the conversation to the table.

Our lead story, Who will control the Michigan house and on the road?

Our panel, Jonathan Oosting, Emily Lawler and Simon Schuster, sit in with us as we get the inside out.

Off the record.

Production of Off the Record is made possible in part by Martin Waymire, a full service strategic communications agency partnering with clients through public relations, digital marketing and public policy engagement.

Learn more at martinwaymire.com.

And now this edition of Off the Record with Tim Skubick.

Thanks very much.

Welcome to an Off the Record.

A busy Friday in our town is lawmakers are gone for the holidays.

We'll get to that in a second.

But first, let's get to this.

Before they left, they did financial disclosure sort of the clock on the wall read.

2:45 a.m..

When the Michigan house finally got around to adopting the financial disclosure package for everybody from the governor on down there were 15 progressive Democrats, including Lansing Democrat Representative Emily Dievendorf who voted no on the package because it did not go far enough.

But by the same token, Republican floor leader Bryan Posthumus was among the 15 Republicans who voted yes.

One of the sticking points was whether the spouse of a state official had to make a financial disclosure to House Speaker Joe Tate got votes for a provision that any spouse with any ties to state vendors had to disclose that information.

But for the Progressive Caucus, that was not far enough.

Watching all this Michigan Common Cause, where the director last week hinted at a possible lawsuit if the House did not go far enough.

Is there a lawsuit waiting to happen, sir?

I mean, I think it's absolutely possible.

You know, the voters.

Want to see transparency.

They want to see financial disclosure in Michigan.

But in the wake of what happened this morning, Mr. Turner is now saying, quote, I'm not prepared to take legal action at this point, end quote, as he and others will review what the House did before a final decision on the lawsuit is made.

Meanwhile, the measure moved to the state Senate, where the senators were also reviewing the House action because when voters approved proposal one, they ordered the legislature to adopt this disclosure by the end of the year.

So the Senate voted and approved a House amendment sending it to the governor for her expected signature.

A majority of members elected service member.

Therefore, the House of Assembly concurred in the bill's order and roll for printing and presentation to the governor.

I believe because of this lost opportunity, the people of Michigan.

Will never be.

Given the true financial transparency that they deserve.

Legislative leaders, however, have promised that this debate over more transparency for public officials is not over yet.

They'll take it up again in the new legislative year.

So they say all right.

So, Emily, is this a half a loaf, a quarter loaf, or is it not even in the oven?

I think they've characterized it as a good start and are meeting the floor of that requirement put in by proposal one, which voters overwhelmingly passed.

I think it was close to 67%.

It was higher than any other proposal on the ballot in 2022.

We know voters want this and we know legislators at least took a bite of the apple.

You know, I think what's important to note is that, you know, November 8th, 2022, essentially at that point, they knew that they had until the end of 2023 to get this thing passed.

And so I think much to the chagrin of some of these progressives and some Republicans as well, who wanted to see, you know, more attention paid to this, a more deliberative process in terms of looking at what should be exposed in terms of transparency.

This was really frustrating for them because it sort of signaled where this was on the majority's agenda.

I think this thing was always set up to be kind of weak, to be honest.

I mean, if you recall, the way this made it to the ballot was a group started a tougher had a proposal for a tougher financial disclosure package.

The legislature weakened that and then paired it with term limits.

This was always there to sell term limits reform, which is hard to sell to the public.

But we'll coat it in this nice wrapper of we're going to expose our own personal conflicts in the legislature.

And the proposal itself had had a very low floor.

You know, if if they just followed the letter of the law, which they pretty much did, we're still going to have one of the weaker financial transparency laws in the country.

And that's the people are sitting at home and saying, why couldn't they do more?

I like that question.

Let's be clear that they could have.

Right.

They could have started working on this six or eight conversations, not 12.

But yeah, I mean, they could have started working on this earlier.

They could have had a more substantial discussion and they could have considered different, more proposals.

You know, there was sort of a leadership proposal, an alternative proposal in the House.

And so, you know, they just they didn't take that action.

And I think that Michigan, as you look at states in the nation, Michigan's one of the least transparent.

This is the only movement that we've made to step away from that ledge, from that reputation.

But I think for some people it's not enough.

And what we don't what we don't know is who did.

Somebody didn't want tougher financial transparency.

It was too bad.

Nobody is going to come out and say it's me, raise their hands.

But obviously this was negotiated behind closed doors with, well, the final product with the governor, the Senate majority leader and the House speaker.

It's one of those three we know.

We know Governor Whitmer has raised some issues with spousal disclosures and concerns.

So there's that.

But in terms of, you know, trips paid by 501c threes, nobody has justified why they won't do that.

Nobody will actually say on the record.

We want to keep our trip secret.

But that is what they voted to do.

I mean, when you look at what's what's given state government ethical black ice over the past several years, it's really easy.

Gift travel disclosure, spousal disclosure, the transfer of assets to the spouse to hide this information is all readily, you know, able to do by elected officials under these new.

Laws, money that will never see through the nonprofit loophole.

And the legislature had the opportunity to cover these things up to required disclosure if they wanted to, and they chose not to.

This was this.

Is a why should we believe them when they see will come back?

This is the first step and the new more steps.

Why should we believe them?

Guys, do you believe that?

Well, I didn't say I did.

It didn't say I didn't.

But why should we?

I think it'd be a tough sell.

I mean, you know, this legislature has said that they want to do more in the realm of transparency, disclosure, etc..

They just introduced a bill, I think, yesterday to actually subject the governor and legislature to FOIA, But we really haven't seen the sort of actions to back up a lot of the rhetoric.

And to be clear, there was a coalition of both Democrats and Republicans in the House who I think had the votes to pass a tougher form of financial disclosure, and leadership did not allow that to happen.

Yeah, I mean, there was an alternative package put forward by a by progressive Democrats who and then would have been supported by Republicans that was placed on second reading.

It was basically placed on ice and never to see the light of day again.

But I think one of the things that ultimately doomed also that alternative proposal is that these progressive Democrats never spoke to Republican colleagues either.

So they had an opportunity for a bipartisan coalition and that coordination just simply didn't happen.

All right.

So we have a 5054 tie now as a result of the elections this week, two Democrats are becoming mayors probably as early as next week.

So the folks at home.

Who cares?

Well, I mean, if you had a really pressing issue you're hoping the legislature tackled in the next, I'd say three and a half or four months, you know, it's going to be harder to do that.

The legislature, first of all, they are adjourning for the year, so they are done for this year.

I think the earliest they could possibly fill those vacant seats is probably the February 27 presidential primary date.

So you're looking at three and a half months where Democrats will not have a majority in the House to pass things.

So anything that does pass in January or February before those seats are filled is going to have to be bipartisan.

Now, that could happen, but in terms of the momentum of Democrats saying we're getting all this stuff done, that's going to stop for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, I think there's a real question as to whether we're enters entering this bipartisan three and a half months of legislating or whether we're sitting on our hands for three and a half months before the Democrats get their majority back and can keep going with their Democratic agenda.

We have been here before in 1994, but it was so different.

Okay.

I mean, you didn't have Donald Trump hanging over everything.

You didn't have this.

There were divisions, but it wasn't as bad as it was now.

So people say, well, it worked before.

But that's the same dynamics are not at play here.

Yeah.

I mean, when you look at when Democrats took over trifecta control, the state government, one of the sort of promises they made is that they wanted to govern differently.

But I think that when you look at what their policy priorities have been, they found that if Republicans aren't going to voluntarily get on board with precisely what Democrats want to do, they're certainly willing to run roughshod over them.

And I think we've seen that time and time again.

And I think that makes the hopes for sort of a bipartisan, you know, period of time more and more dim.

Well, the key to this will be the relationship.

If they can develop one between the speaker of the House, Mr. Tate, and the Republican leader.

Mr. Hall, that is off on some rough footing.

So the rules of the House, you don't pick a new speaker until you're at a 55/55 split.

They're in a 54/54 split.

Speaker or Speaker two It has been very clear that he is holding on to that gavel and, you know, Mr. Hall has been sort of throwing out that they should do a shared power agreement, which I think is a remote possibility at this.

Well, I assume.

He's not a possibility, Speaker, So you can remove the shared part of that word from that.

Mr. HALL I assume, is going to go to Mr. Tate and say, you know what, what we need to do is have divided committees.

If you've got 20 members on a committee, let's have ten in ten, okay, so that we have an end.

What do you think Mr. Tate will say to that?

I think that whatever, you know, bipartisan collaboration you're going to see is horse trading with individual members on the Republican side, an attempt to get individual, probably small pieces of legislation.

These are safe Democratic seats that have become vacant.

You know, really, the speaker has no incentive to cooperate like that.

And so they're gone now.

So what do we do between now and the end of the year, guys?

Well, I mean, you know, if you ask Republicans, Democrats are taking a vacation.

That's a tried and true.

You shouldn't try a tried and true talking point in Lansing politics.

I mean, Tim, you're old enough to remember Governor Rick Snyder saying to his own Republican legislature, take a vote, not a vacation on Medicaid.

You know, realistically, there are some big things out there that folks can certainly be working on behind the scenes.

For instance, a couple of big ticket items the governor wanted to get done this year and are nowhere near too close to getting done, such as paid sick leave.

Senate Majority Leader Majority Leader Winnie Brinks said yesterday she wants to work group that, you know, spend some time really digging into the policy and try and come up with some sort of, you know, version of that that can pass.

But, you know, that's going to be it for the foreseeable future.

Some behind the scenes stuff, you're not going to see lawmakers.

All right.

Let's dig into the candidacy of Peter Meijer Mr. Meijer.

Mr. Meijer, welcome.

Off the record, let's start with the easy stuff.

Is the baby sleeping through the night?

Define through the night.

I mean, we're down to one.

Feeding 8 hours of solid sleep over.

11 to 12 hours broken up by maybe two.

Feeling all right?

Okay.

That's not bad.

Anyway.

Congratulations.

All right, so if you ever had a conversation with Mike Rogers about asking him not to run and or has he ever had a conversation with you about getting out of this race.

I've spoken to Mike Rogers.

I don't want to obviously divulge what private conversations have been.

So you did have a conversation about that.

Not about whether or not I should run or he should run or anything along those lines.

I just have spoken to him in the past.

But I would talk about.

We talked about our shared military backgrounds, but apart from anything else, that would probably not be appropriate for me to share.

Well, do you think he should drop out of the race so you can win?

Well, I mean, I frankly would love anything that might be beneficial to me politically.

But I think the voters of the state of Michigan, especially the Republican primary voters, deserve a chance to choose between their candidates.

Congressman, to Tim's point, though, I think he's asking you and Mike Rogers have in the past both enjoyed perhaps the same donor base and some quote unquote, establishment GOP support.

Are you worried that you're going to split the vote and allow, you know, a less feasible general election candidate to win the primary?

You know, and this is a concern that I've heard from folks.

And I think if you're just looking from the outside or looking at the rough approximation, who who might be able to get on the ballot, and then you start to look at the GOP and you divide it into various constituencies and say, okay, X percent go here and Y percent go there.

Sure, We have no idea who's going to make it on the ballot.

You have no idea how candidates are either going to project themselves or be ultimately be perceived.

So it's a fun speculation.

It's a good little parlor game.

The I mean, I'll put it this way, the National Republican Senatorial Committee came out with a statement you might have seen the day I announced, and I loved it because it started off with this guy can't win a primary.

And then it concluded.

And if he does win the primary, we have serious concerns.

So you have a lot of conflicting messaging that's based on these sort of right out the gate approximations.

The reality is the filing deadline is not until the third week of April.

Obviously, the primary is not until next August.

So I get there were an early stage.

Maybe you have some fundraising reports from some candidates, you have some initial polling, but this is an early race.

Let me follow up on that real quick.

You just almost gave the quote yourself, but this is the NRC.

This is a national committee tasked with electing Republicans to the Senate that they use.

And they said Peter Meyer isn't viable in a primary election.

And there's worry that if my were nominated, the base would not be enthused in the general election.

What do you make of that statement?

That I do not have the support of the establishment Republican Party, that frankly, they just want to make sure and this is their aim.

And I respect that their pathway to bringing back a majority runs through keeping some certain individuals very calm and happy so that there are not disruptions in a primary context.

They are they their institution has their incentive.

I don't necessarily think it's aligned with the incentive of Michigan Republicans for the simple fact that I have yet to have anybody in Washington, D.C. tell me we think Michigan can be won.

Right.

They say that Michigan elects Republican governors, not Republican senators.

And I get that the past six Senate elections in this state, a Republican has won one of those elections for one solitary term.

You know, apart from that, I get their their trend.

I get their hesitation.

But I wouldn't be in this if it was.

Oh, here's our easy glide path.

No, this is going to be a hard race.

It's going to be difficult.

It's high risk, high reward.

But I'm also not somebody who shied away.

When I reach a fork in the road, I usually take the path that, you know, scares me a little bit more or is a bit more uncertain.

Along those lines, the Michigan Republican Party had a pithy tweet about you originally, later blamed on an intern, but overzealous intern and overzealous intern.

I'm sure we've all run into a few of those, but I do want to get your sense of whether you think the party is really connected to the everyday Michigan Republican voter that you're trying to court in the upcoming election.

I mean, when it comes to, you know, a social media post that you might send out in the heat of the moment and then think better of, I mean, who among us has not been there?

I think anybody who has a Twitter account or even a Facebook account has maybe had some words that they, you know, think the better of at some point in the future.

You know, I don't want to speak on whether or not the Republican Party in the state, you know, is you know, how well that reflects the average Republican voter.

I ultimately am I will support anybody who can bring some functional institutional organization, I'll put it that way.

Does that describe the current Michigan Republican Party?

I'm very much rooting for the success of this party.

I think there are some folks who are on the outside who say, let it all collapse, let it all fall down so we can go in and roll over the rubble.

That's not me.

I mean, I have I have a lot of friends who are within the party right now.

And I know it's a it's a difficult time.

It's obviously folks who have, you know, maybe some party experience.

But most of the leadership is very new.

But I mean, as we're seeing with the Democratic majorities in Lansing, that's going to lead some growing pains.

And I think ultimately time will tell how they perform.

You know, in your last election, which you were defeated by John Gibbs, former President Donald Trump actively campaigned against you when I talk when we spoke earlier this week, you told me that you hadn't thought of whether you should seek Trump's endorsement, if you could sort of form a truce with him or at the end, you know, it's been a few days.

How do you feel now?

I mean, I haven't reevaluated whether or not to reach out to him.

I can imagine what his audio response would be.

There would be something about crawling back like a dog or something along those lines that I'm not even going to attempt his accent or his his mannerisms.

I mean, yeah, I could obviously look back and say, ah, you know, you you helped defeat me.

He gave $5,000 to my primary challenger.

The Democrats spent 435,000 running ads to boost him.

So, you know, I have a lot of blame to go around for that one.

And frankly, at the end of the day, the blame falls on me because I was the candidate who lost that.

You know, I got more votes in my reelect than I did in my initial general.

But there's interesting winning story in the primary.

But there's a difference between winning with 50% in a five way and losing with 48 and a half percent in a two way.

So no hard feelings then?

I mean, I have very I have a range of feelings towards a range of individuals in politics that run the entire gamut.

You know, I certainly think that at the end of the day, what is well, I have no issue subordinating maybe some frustrations that I may feel, because if I look around at the political spectrum, including people I worked with and had good relationships with, I don't think there's anybody that I've ever said you have done everything perfectly right.

But that's just the reality of human interaction.

Let's assume you get the nomination, you're on the ballot and Donald Trump is a candidate.

Does he reduce your chances of winning if he's at the top of the ticket?

If you would have asked me a year ago, I probably would have said yes.

Now, if Joe Biden is the Democratic opponent, I don't think so.

I think that if you look at where Republicans have performed well and we've seen this both on Tuesday, it's Friday, both on Tuesday and the in the off year elections and in prior midterms, that high turnout elections benefit Republicans or the Republicans.

Best chances.

If we you know, and when it comes to complementary voting bases, I mean, we very much have those.

So if it's not Mr. Biden on the side and Mr. Trump is on top of the ticket, does he hurt you?

Is it Kamala Harris?

Right.

I mean, we can play this game of who is where.

The point is, is he a liability for you?

I certainly think both of us would have an interesting relationship and interaction and dynamic with the other.

Whether or not that is going to be a liability at this point, I think is challenging to know without knowing where the economy is.

You know, what is the overall feeling about right direction, wrong direction of the country?

And frankly, at the end of the day, who is the opponent?

Because right now we have all the polls that say, you know, Biden against a generic Republican, Trump against a generic Democrat.

The thing about generic Republicans and generic Democrats is they don't exist because whoever is running has a name.

Whoever has a name, has a background, is has certain liabilities, certain assets.

And I believe me, as somebody who's been evaluating this race and trying to understand like, hey, I get it.

There's one thing to make a bold forward movement.

Looking just at the history within this state, I mentioned 15 of the last 16 Senate runs, you know, has been won by a Democrat.

You know, I'm not going to make a calculation or go into something with if there is zero chance understanding that it's going to be, you know, a high risk proposition.

But at the end of the day, I don't think we'll have any certainty.

And it's all going to come down to that magic word, turnout.

You voted to impeach President Trump, of course.

Do you think he's fit to be president again?

Who's you're running against?

That's not the question on his own.

Is he fit to be president?

You know, I wish we lived in a world where we can make those individual decisions and calculations.

I think his presidency had a lot to offer.

He certainly disappointed me greatly in the post-election period after the November 2020.

In general, up to and including what I saw on January six, which was a disgraceful day.

It was a sad day.

It was an embarrassing day and a shameful day for this country.

I voted to impeach him.

One week afterwards when that was brought forward.

And subsequent to that, that was I mean, I think it's probably no exaggeration that had I not voted in that way, that I probably would not have lost my primary.

But I felt that that was the right vote to make at the time.

Now we're running headlong into a race where it's potentially a candidate who voted to impeach and an incumbent president that I think should have been impeached for four or five different reasons, not the least of which the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, then, yeah, that puts me in a position where I'm having to make a value proposition between two alternatives.

So you'd be making your calculation of who to support based not on Trump himself, but on the sitting president.

Is this a utilitarian, maybe even Machiavellian calculation on your part?

Those are some very big words for you to describe, frankly, what is reality, which is if we're forced for two alternatives, it's very easy to just say, well, I'm going to take my ball and go home because, you know, I don't like either of these or, you know, I, I have a hard and fast opposition on one side.

And so it doesn't matter what the other is.

But that's not the way life is.

That's not the way people are right now.

And this is, I think, both true on the Republican side of the aisle and in politics more generally is it is okay if I like somebody, I cannot say a word critical of them or else, you know, I'm banished.

If I hate somebody, I cannot give a single word of credit or else that's contradictory.

But that doesn't reflect where people are.

It doesn't reflect where life is.

I, i when I talk about the fact that I will support the Republican nominee, I'm not saying that that's going to come very easily.

Right.

At the same time, I have to make that weight of who will be in the best interest of the country.

And I have a lot of friends who are strenuously opposed when I make the case that compared to the Joe Biden administrator we've seen, which has been far less dramatic.

Right.

He's a nice well, grandpa, maybe grandma, very grandpa, Grandpa.

80 year old, you know who is ice cream and and kind of has the aviator shades and drives the Corvette.

Great.

I think as somebody who worked up close to this administration, as somebody who sat in classified briefings and had members of his team, I mean, flat out lie to my face when I ask specific questions about what was going on in Afghanistan as somebody who had that administration lied to my face about whether or not there were migrants coming into my district and just did everything possible in my mind to avoid any semblance of accountability after the conflict in Afghanistan.

That combined with where I think the long term economic consequences of this administration's policies will lead us as a country.

Lead me to the conclusion that we cannot afford to have another Biden administration term.

And I also will point out I have a strong frustration with the Democratic Party that sits there and says, well, we're the party of democracy and look at all these, you know, anti-democratic forces, on the other hand, who are driving American ruin.

Meanwhile, their entirety of their political calculation and their theory of the case for why the American people should reelect them is directly tied to propping up and keeping those very same forces alive.

And again, coming back to my own primary, I think I have reasons to be justifiably cynical.

And if I can lighten the mood just a moment.

I knew this is the Maya logo.

Your families, the grocery store chain, the old logo, not the current logo, but the one I grew up knowing.

Circa late eighties through the early 2000.

This is your Senate campaign completely different.

Do you see the the eye, the dots of.

The decision to basically use your family company logo as your Senate logo?

I will say one challenge that I've had and we've gone through several iterations and I won't show it on the record, I guess now on the record, off the record, but I'm happy to show you after it's frankly a little bit challenging.

I smell my name in all lowercase and it looks like the current logo.

I make it all caps.

It looks like, you know, the former logo we had some iterations that were a little bit more mid-century retro, what they look like the fifties and sixties logo.

And at the end of the day, I didn't want to fall into an uncanny valley where somebody like that looks just close enough, but is making me a little bit weird here.

You're not worried about copyright infringement As to.

You know, I think our campaign is we're going to go through a variety of logos over the course of this campaign.

I think that was a fun first blush at how we wanted to accomplish things.

But if I look back at my old congressional campaign logo, I wanted to revive that a little bit, but I think.

Not.

The student over time will argue about the logo.

I was just going to riff on graphic design for a little bit.

Okay, Well, you can do that after we do closed credits.

Okay.

Go to WJR Dawn for more of our conversation with the congressman.

Production of Off the Record is made possible in part by Martin Waymire, a full service strategic communications agency partnering with clients through public relations, digital marketing and public policy engagement.

Learn more at martinwaymire.com.

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