Welcome back to our state Senator Jeremy Moss, Democrat from Southfield, is up next with the discussion on ethics and government.

Our lead story, the Democrats will have to wait to take back control of the Michigan House on the OCR panel.

Kyle Melinn, Rachel Louise Just and Craig Mauger sit in with us as we get the inside out.

Off the record.

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

Thank you very much.

Welcome back to Off the Record from Studio C. Well, the Democrats thought they were going to get back control of the House.

Mr. Mauger, at an earlier timetable, finds out.

Not going to.

Happen.

No, I mean, it sounds like they're going to have to wait possibly five or seven months to get their majority back in the House, which is going to make some for some really interesting times in Lansing.

Yeah, Why don't we just adjourn until May?

Who knows?

They might.

I mean, we don't know.

We don't know.

Here's the irony about this, Tim, is that the Democrats were the ones who are very excited about expanding voting rights, expanding accessibility to the polls.

And it's these very new rules as to why the Democrats are going to have to wait a while in order to get their majority back because of the amount of time they need now for early voting.

We've got a presidential primary that they themselves scheduled for February 27, which puts a whole wrench in the to everything because presidential primary, you need those 45 days for military to cast their overseas ballots.

And there's no wiggle room on that.

There is kind of for like state elections, but not a federal election like this.

So this this expanded time period is actually a problem of their own making.

But things can change, too.

This is something I've been thinking about lately.

So right now it looks like it's going to be 54, 54 for a long time.

What if one of these people gets a job doing something else?

Yeah, or there's an illness health problem.

I mean, often a lawmaker dies during a term.

We've seen that happen in the last few sessions.

We can't predict five months out.

And I'm guessing that's probably what keeps House Speaker Joe Tate up at night right now.

Well, the Republicans saw this as an opportunity.

They're looking at the calendar now.

Wow.

There's a couple you know, we should be working together.

Mr. Hall made an overture to the speaker, which was what.

He is asking, that they kind of share power in this case, which is something that.

It is tied.

Right?

It is tied.

And I think it's it's it's an interesting scenario.

And we've seen Republicans in the House kind of jump on these issues whenever they have a chance to get in there because they've lost power for the first time in a decade.

I think it's kind of new to them.

And so the possibility of, oh, maybe we can like at least get some public sympathy for this to happen.

I mean, of course, they're going to jump on that.

And Leader Hall has previously acknowledged that if it went to 54 or 54, he would not be the speaker.

So it's kind of a flip flop from what his office has said previously.

Now it's 5454, and we should talk about shared power.

It doesn't seem like that's going to fly because of his past statements.

I don't think he's so much concerned about being speaker, but I think he wants to get an equal representation on each committee so.

That, you know, I don't.

You don't think.

Rules have it so that it can't happen?

I mean, nothing in the rules, but you need 55 votes to change the rules and they only have 54 votes.

But Hall does bring up a good point here.

The Republicans are in a position now to negotiate anything that passes through the House.

Now, whether you call that shared power or whatever you want to call it, the Republicans have equal share, an equal say over what happens over that chamber until May.

So why is that important?

Well, there's a budget that needs to be passed and presumably it has to get passed by June.

And if you're going to start moving bills through the process and you want to get things moving through a chamber, you need 55.

Votes on its face, it does look that way, right?

Yeah.

If he got to get you got to break this 54 C caucus that Hall has, and that's going to be difficult.

You got to negotiate with all do you have to negotiate with Hall or do you have to negotiate with one House Republican and get them different?

So he's been pretty firm, though, as a caucus.

They've been pretty firm.

Not on the biggest issue of the term, though.

I mean, you saw Representative Mike Miller cross over and give them the vote on one of the biggest issues of the term.

So it's not unheard of, right?

No, it's not.

It's not unheard of.

The other problem for the governor, it's not a gimme that she gets all of her votes on everything she wants.

So it's not just one Republican vote that she has to pick up.

It may be more than that, depending on how rambunctious her caucus is in the House.

And someone made a point earlier that what if Karen Whitsett crosses over and starts voting with the House Republicans on a lot of issues?

So it could swing both ways.

I think we are now entering, as I describe it, the Monty Hall issue of the legislative process where everybody is available to make a deal.

If you need one vote, it might not right or wrong.

Well, I think you're right.

But what I also think we're going to see is since the committee structure isn't going to change because the Republicans don't have votes to change it, I think we're going to see a lot of action in committee and things getting teed up so that when Democrats do get their 56, 54 majority back, that they're going to be able to just go ahead and line them up like airplanes coming down for the the runway.

Well, you might find committee chairs who may be more sympathetic to working with the Republicans.

Is that a possibility as well?

Because look at if you can work out a compromise on both sides in a committee, it is teed up for passage in the House.

No, that's true.

And we've seen that some of the committee chairs not necessarily going along with what the speaker wants on everything.

So, I mean, there seems to be a lot of tension within the House Democratic Caucus, maybe more tension inside the House Democratic caucus in the Republican caucus, which is unusual because usually the minority caucus is the one that's in an uproar.

And the Republicans are used to it because they've had it this way.

Okay.

They've they've always had those people who have been out on the far right.

Okay.

That they can't bring under the fold.

But the most telling vote was a disclosure vote.

Those those showed where the divisions were.

Yeah.

I mean, you had a group of people who were on, I don't know, maybe first-termers, but people who had a particular point of view that they wanted in those bills.

And they got rolled over by leadership and they were just going to go ahead and just try and get the votes anyway.

And obviously they didn't.

But it gave the kind of the rambunctious, as you put it, freshmen a chance to put up some no votes.

And they did.

But there were enough Republicans to pass it.

But it's also it also displayed two different views of how Lansing should operate.

When I'm sitting there watching that vote.

What I'm seeing is you had a group in the majority of the Dem caucus who was saying, we just need to pass this and move on.

And then you had this other group, not the majority, but a substantial group.

Carrying a flag.

Carrying a flag, saying, We're here, we're new, we're going to change Lansing.

And I don't think that vote resolved their feelings and that's going to continue to play out.

And there's.

There's lawmakers on.

The Republican side that are with them that are saying we do need to change Lansing.

But it doesn't seem like they have the majority right now to get it done.

And they're not in positions of power where they can leverage to get more.

Votes in the good or bad old days, depending on your perspective.

When the speaker basically said, here's what we're going to do.

Yeah, everybody said, Yes, sir, we're ready to go.

And those times changed.

They changed and a telling thing.

And I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.

I think it's noteworthy he doesn't have the political power, Joe, take to punish these people for speaking out openly against him.

He didn't.

There were no repercussions that we saw against these individual, individual who openly went against what he was trying to do.

Well, ultimately, you couldn't take staff members away.

You could reduce their office budget.

There's all sorts of backdoor ways you can get their attention, but you got to have the power to do that.

And, you know, if you do that, what does that do to the rest of the caucus?

You know that that's got bad things to do.

Any of that.

You know, you can't do something like that unless there's an overt in-your-face screw you to the speaker.

These people were just voting their mind.

They were voting on a different position.

They wanted to be stronger with financial disclosure.

And as a caucus, I mean, this is still a group of 110 people with 110 different opinions.

The speaker of the House is the most difficult job, I think, in Lansing, because you got to get 56 of these people.

You can crack the whip all you want, but unless somebody does something absolutely egregious, which we have seen before, he's not going to be taking staff.

Away from time, just in time.

For voting your mind.

No, that's just not being persuasive enough, I think.

All right.

So Donald Trump's going to be on the ballot in Michigan.

What does that mean?

Well, I mean, it's it's it's something we've been singling out all over the country.

I mean, Colorado, Minnesota have a similar situation.

We've we've now got him on the primary, but there's still a lot to be seen for what happens after that.

And it's assumed at this point that, you know, polling has shown consistently for the last couple of months he's likely going to be the nominee.

So there's this battle isn't over.

But I do think that, you know, there's there's more to to play out.

Will any of the other candidates bother to come into Michigan?

It's a great question.

But on this, TV.

Stations are hoping they do.

I mean, I think some will.

I mean, there's already some making I mean, they got to find some state that they can win.

I mean, they're in search of this.

Maybe all of their campaigns die after Iowa.

And it's just Trump left standing there in Michigan doesn't even matter.

That's a possibility.

But on his eligibility for the ballot as it stands now, one judge has said he will be on the ballot.

It looks like this thing's going to go to the Michigan Supreme Court where you have a Democratic nominated majority, and that's going to be fascinating.

Are the Democrats on the Michigan Supreme Court going to say, let's put let's keep Trump on the ballot?

If Trump isn't on the ballot, people will write his name in.

You write uncommitted, they'll do something else.

I mean, also keep in mind that the way that the Michigan Republican Party had to do this, 15% of the delegates are going to be determined by this vote.

So the vote on February 27 for Republicans is a beauty pageant vote.

Really, The lion's share of these delegates are going to be decided behind closed doors, which I'm sure Trump already has.

Anyway, you're talking about the delegates, though.

Yeah.

Headlines.

The national headlines in the momentum of this race will be based on what the actual vote is.

No.

Yeah, but.

No one on national TV is going to wait and say, well, let's see what Christina Karamos delegates are going to say, but it's.

Not enough delegates for him to get the nomination.

This it's not only a beauty contest, it's just the first run at it.

The numbers are still so small.

And like I said, there will be something else on the ballot.

So if you're only choices are DeSantis and Haley, I mean, then they vote uncommitted.

I mean, we saw that with Barack Obama when he ran against Hillary Clinton.

There was no Barack Obama on that ballot.

It was Hillary Clinton.

And uncommitted and uncommitted got a lot of votes.

So, I mean, that could be the headline as well.

And it's right before Super Tuesday.

Will it get will it get a lot of attention nationally?

I don't know.

I may not even get all that much attention because as we said, this thing could already be over.

Dan Kildee is getting a lot of attention, kind of surprise, folks.

He says, I'm done.

What do you make of that?

Were you surprised?

I guess I wouldn't necessarily LeSean surprise just because, I mean, that is he attributed his decision on that to his cancer diagnosis.

And while he's cancer free, I mean, it makes sense that you want to reconsider things.

I guess I'm a little surprised they weren't able to convince him to stay.

I mean, I think the instinct to want to leave is understandable.

But I mean, Democrats have now lost a reliable seat that has been in the Kildee hands for a long time now.

And with these new competitive seats, Republicans might have an end.

Now.

There are no more kill these alive to run for this seat.

Am I correct?

Or I may find someone.

As far as we know, Who as.

Far as you know, I mean, maybe there's somebody you know, what a hard I mean, this is such a difficult seat now.

And, you know, for Dan Kildee to step aside, I mean, I guess I was surprised.

But in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have been because, you know, when you get a health scare like cancer and, you know, you start thinking about, oh, yeah, it's a wake up call, it's like, okay, so how many how much time do I got left on earth?

And do I really want to spend it doing this, which, you know, for a seat like this is raising money all the time.

Look, Dan Kildee and the Kildee family have held that seat for a long time, and he still only got 53% of the vote in that last election.

That was the toughest election Dan Kildee has ever had to run.

And he had to think to himself, do I want to go through this year after year after year after year when I'm 65 years old?

The answer was no.

So I don't really blame him.

Well, the other part of the piece here is that it's no longer fun in Congress.

That's what I.

Mean.

Okay.

It's that climate is completely different and it's just it's a tough role.

But everybody in his uncle now looks like they're running.

It must be somewhat fun because there's a lot of people that want to take the job that you look for.

And and this becomes one of the most competitive US House seats in the entire country.

Michigan becomes even more of just a massive state in terms of influencing which party is going to control the majority.

We're going to see so many advertisements.

You've got this seat.

KILDEE Open sea.

You've got Elissa Slotkin is open seat in the Lansing area.

You've got John James kind of scrambling and trying to hold on to his seat.

This is these seats are so crucial.

And the Kildee seat is going to be just fascinating to see who the Republicans can come up with to be their candidate.

So the Democrats appear to have a pretty big bench of potential contenders to run for this seat.

On the Republican side, it's a little bit more sparse.

And if some of these people that are potentially key candidates passed, they're going to be in a bad spot.

Something to note about that is that these three of those force ones we mentioned, those are Democratic seats.

Those were Democratic strongholds in a way.

And so now Democrats might lose their majority within the Michigan congressional delegation.

I'm sure that's not something that they are wanting to have.

You see a theme running through this.

All these stories are Let's call in State Senator Jeremy Moss.

Senator, are you down there in Southfield this morning?

Good morning.

sir.

Im here.

Good.

Nice to have you back on board on off the record.

So you've survived the vote on disclosure.

I wonder if you could help me clear up some confusion.

It looked like going into the final vote that the spousal display of where their income was going to go in the bill.

Who personally told you that that was not going in the bill?

Well, we laid the foundation based on the ballot proposal, and we always had this conversation of how much further do we want to go?

And candidates and spouses were always on the table.

So we got to the point where we listed the candidates are part of me, we listed the spouse.

It is occupation, and it got stronger throughout the process.

So nobody told me Yes, no, we laid the foundation as we crafted this policy, heard the scrutiny as we went through the committee process and landed, I think, in a really good spot.

Well, how come it wasn't broader?

You know, asking to display your revenue from a vendor with the state is a very small universe.

So there are people making money in other areas.

Why not disclose that?

So again, with this, with the open records reform that I've been working on for a long time in the legislature, you always have voices on both ends of the spectrum.

You have voices within the legislature that say, let's go further.

It's not enough.

Your voice is on the other end of the spectrum that say, this is too much, this is intrusive.

Well, the voice making, it's figuring out how to get it done.

Okay.

This is the route that we took.

Were three of the voices that I told, you know, on this, the governor, the speaker and the majority leader.

Nobody told me no.

We laid the foundation.

We were in a constant work group of discussion and how to get it done.

And this is the this is the place that we landed on.

And ultimately, you know, widening the landscape does this achieve the goal of of moving forward on financial disclosure compared to the system that we have now, which is self-policing, You know, I hear a lot about what isn't in the final product, but I would want to parade what is in the final product and how much more information lawmakers, candidates and their spouses are disclosing to reveal those conflicts of interest.

Rachel Senator, I know you talked about having that spectrum of of how much to disclose at a certain point.

I know that for a long time you and Senator McBroom have been working on having more transparency bills in the legislature.

Were you leading forces on taking this forward or were you more moderating forces?

Well, so I feel like we've been leading in this space for a while now.

I within the Lansing media Corps, this has been a very prominent issue.

I don't think a lot of Michiganders are talking about this at night at the dinner table.

I think that's the reality.

This was not the sexiest issue in town, open records, financial disclosure.

So I think we have elevated this to really recognize there is a direct line between operating in the dark and how it impacts people back home.

So I've been a loud voice throughout this process and in particular in the drafting of it.

Yeah, I was at the table.

We went through all of the language in the ballot proposal.

We sorted through definitions and how to put that into law.

We presented a product to our respective leadership.

We were at the table as we kind of negotiated what could pass.

Each chamber and the product that we landed on was what was introduced and it got stronger through the committee process and through the chamber process.

So at the end of the day, we have done a gargantuan task that previous majorities neglected to do.

So the upshot of all this, Senator, is that as of what, April 15, is that right?

All elected officials at the state level, legislative and the executive elected, will have to report there that whether they received a certain amount of income from a certain source, over $1,000, and that has to be available on a website for the public to see.

And if the spouse has some type of connection with state government, that also has to be disclosed.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

And on top of that, you are learning about what the spouse's occupation is and you are you will be able to vet if they have a conflict there.

You are learning about somebody's significant liabilities.

You are learning about their assets that are held for income or investment.

You are learning about boards and other task force commissions that we may serve on.

I mean, this is a really big exposure of lawmakers.

And again, this was not achieved in the last several years here in Lansing.

And I'm glad that there was a ballot proposal to propel this forward to kind of break through that logjam of lawmakers unwilling to work with us on this.

Senator, let's talk about your favorite subject.

What's not in the bill?

That's your favorite subject, right?

The governor, the governor's team has released a nonprofit disclosure this week that shows that her organization, Road to Michigan's Future, this organization, works closely with her raised $13 million from anonymous donors in 2022.

Should the top state official in Michigan be able, under our state laws, to raise $13 million from anonymous donors without reporting them to the public?

I'm going to get in the weeds here, and I think this is the perfect program for that.

I think Tim likes this.

You know what our goal was on financial disclosure was to unveil our personal income, our personal finances.

And does that create a conflict of interest in how we carry out our duties?

What you're saying and what you're talking about has merit.

It is its own separate, gargantuan task to lift the veil on all of these various fundraising accounts in Lansing.

When I got to Lansing, you know, everybody by law has to have a campaign committee that's subject to disclosure.

When I got to Lansing, very few people had PACs.

Now everybody has a PAC.

When I got to Lansing, even fewer people had these corporate accounts.

Now, many people have a corporate account.

I don't have a corporate account, but many others do.

So we're always going to be chasing after the next account, the next fundraising vehicle to unveil and disclose how the money comes in and how it's expended.

That is a meritorious.

It is a it is a is a task worthy of merit.

To further disclose how Lansing operates, nothing in financial disclosure are law.

The personal financial disclosure prevents us from working on that.

And you've heard us, me Chair, saying Senator McBroom talk about our our wanting to tackle those.

Those types of disclosure.

Theoretically, those some.

Layer on this too, you know, I can understand.

All of us have been burned by a previous Senate majority that refused to take any of this up.

You have to at least give us the benefit of the doubt that we are going to move forward on these issues.

I've been burned, too, but now I'm happy to be in leadership in the Senate to be able to move these issues forward.

Theoretically, though, Senator, can you, as a state legislature, require disclosure of these 527, these corporate accounts?

Can you theoretically do that if you wanted to at the state legislative level?

And that has been the question, and that has been what has been most challenging to unpack that.

So we weren't going to get bogged down with federal rules and how state can can intervene while trying to create a financial disclosure law.

Now that we have the capacity to be able to look into other areas of transparency, we will have the bandwidth to look into what can we do as a state to abide against federal rules.

Craig and I have discussed this and, you know, it's just not it's not easy.

It's not just a wave of a wand or a line on a financial disclosure form.

We're going to figure out how to make this work.

Senator, if you had a $13 million account from sources that did not have to be disclosed, would you voluntarily do it?

I would, but I don't.

So should the governors follow your advice and do that?

I think sunshine is the best disinfectant to ethics breaches, to rumors, to innuendos.

And I would not feel comfortable having this type of account.

And I don't.

So the money that I get in, I report in my other account.

So I do think that these should be subject to disclosure.

I've long said that.

Well, I mean, don't the people have a right to know who's who's helping you financially?

What what's the argument from when you talk to your colleagues in general why they don't want to disclose, kind of share with us what's in their mind, why they don't want to disclose these five 27,000 corporate accounts?

I don't think that anybody has come up to me, and I truly mean this.

Nobody has come up to me and said, we don't want to do it for this reason.

I just think that if it's not required, I think people aren't going to take the bandwidth to fill out yet another form and file it with whomever.

If we require it into law, it's going to be required.

So we're balancing that.

We're trying to figure out how to properly disclose and and expose every fundraising vehicle that lawmakers may have.

I think I think this is a worthy project of figuring out how to get there.

But I haven't had people who have pulled me aside and say, hey, I got this shady account.

This is the reason why I think it's if it's not required, people don't do it.

Senator, the governor said the other day that she was not unilaterally going to release information on the Freedom of Information Act because it would take the pressure off of you guys to do the same thing.

One of you heard that.

And two, is that a legitimate reason as to why this has stalled?

I have not heard that and I have not heard that from her office.

And over the last several years, we've had a lot of exchanges with her on how to actually get something, and he's got zippo.

Tim, every time I've been on this program, you've been passing Mystique about the prospects for this.

Now I'm in Senate leadership.

Our Senate Majority Leader has has flagged this as a priority.

So I will invite you to the bill signing for the bill.

You get the bill.

You altered the law once it signed.

The bill you will introduce is a simple bill.

I mean, it's not that complex.

Subjecting the governor's office in the legislature to FOIA.

It's a.

Lot.

More simplistic than what has been introduced in the past.

Why not just put this on the board?

Everybody understands this.

All of you understand this issue.

The governor understands this issue.

She's called for it before.

Why not just put this on the board when you come back, have the vote and move on?

You know, we take heat and criticism when we rush something to a vote, but when it's something that you want and we want to go through the committee process and vet this out all of a sudden, why arent we rushing this to a vote?

Come on, Craig.

We're going to go through the committee process.

We're going to see if it holds up to scrutiny.

We're going to take feedback from stakeholders and hopefully, maybe even make this this product stronger.

But this is going to go through the normal committee process in the normal process.

Senator, Quick, quickly, who who's your candidate for president?

Joe Biden?

100%.

Oh, yeah.

And you think he'll be on the ticket?

I do.

You don't buy the thing that he's too old.

I look at what he's done and, you know, regardless of age, he's probably been one of the most impactful presidents in my lifetime.

And do you think your district agrees with you?

Oh, no question about it.

Senator, thanks for do an off the record.

It's good to see you.

You got it.

I'll be at your bill signing.

Right.

Counting on it.

All right.

Thanks also to you guys for a great one.

See you next week.

For more off the record holiday edition.

As we look at the year for you, what happened in the legislature?

Ooh, goodness gracious.

See you then.

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