Tag: SCOMI (page 2)

Michigan Supreme Court justices Thursday afternoon are dissecting legal challenges mounted to stop four proposed constitutional amendments from getting on the Nov. 6 general election ballot.

At issue is whether proposals seeking eight new casinos, strengthening collective bargaining rights and placing restrictions on raising taxes and building new international bridges and tunnels make undisclosed changes to the state constitution.

The hearing is a latest development in a high-stakes election-year battle to place as many as six constitutional amendments on the ballot.
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[Solicitor General John] Bursch was arguing against the collective bargaining, casino expansion and bridge amendments on behalf of Gov. Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette.

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via The Detroit News

Commentary: Hathaway land deal merits investigation

Maybe it's too cut and dried. Or perhaps it isn't very sexy. For whatever reason, it appears there is no confirmed, official, criminal investigation into whether Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway committed fraud by hiding assets in order to get a short sale on a home she owned.

It supposedly went something like this: Hathaway, elected to the state's highest court in 2008, owned several homes, including one in Florida that WXYZ-TV Channel 7 described as a mini-mansion that sits on a golf course.

Hathaway bought the home in question, at 15834 Lakeview in Grosse Pointe, on Sept. 21, 2001, for $1.475 million. On Oct. 10, 2010, she listed the home for sale for $1.2 million. On May 2, 2011, she listed the home subject to a short sale, and on Nov. 8, 2011, the home was approved for a short sale for $840,000.

Presumably, the short sale saved Hathaway from a few hundred thousand in mortgage payments. A short sale is a sale in which lender(s) will accept less than the amount owed on the home in order to sell it. Normally, short sales occur because something dreadful happened, e.g., debilitating illness, job loss, etc., and the debtor cannot make his or her payments, and everyone wants to avoid foreclosure.

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via WXYZ

Markman's wife, Kathleen, who works for the Attorney General's Office, is one of two lawyers representing state officials in a federal lawsuit in which a city of Detroit pension fund alleges the emergency manager law is unconstitutional.

A recusal by Markman would be significant because it would erase the 4-3 majority held by justices nominated by Republicans.

Last fall as Lefty Diane Hathaway traveled the state campaigning against then-incumbent Cliff Taylor for a seat on the Michigan Supreme Court she frequently employed one particularly pithy line of attack.  

Taylor, she argued again and again, was a "walking conflict of interest" because the man's wife used to serve as Governor John Engler's chief legal counsel and he had the gall to rule on laws enacted during the Engler administration.

That was her argument.

Got the "logic?"  

His spouse was a lawyer for the Engler administration thus, according to Hathaway, Taylor should have recused himself and declined to cast a vote on any issue tangentially connected to former Engler policy.

Diane Hathway's husband is an auto insurance lawyer.  By her own logic... her own passionately delivered campaign season arguments, Hathaway has a clear conflict of interest in any case dealing with the insurance industry... perhaps more of a conflict of interest, even, than her one-time opponent since her husband, unlike Taylor's wife, stands to potentially make a lot of money depending on her handling of certain cases affecting the insurance industry.

The Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association made that argument themselves earlier this year when they argued Hathaway should recuse herself from a case dealing with one particularly massive claim.  So this judge... this paragon of virtue... she practiced what she'd preached, right?

Yeah, not so much.  According to the Detroit News:

Hathaway denied having any conflict of interest, saying the association's stance "strains reasoned logic."

The association's stance is HER stance.  A direct duplicate.  They could have sent her one of her own press releases.  

And the three Republicans on the Court noticed.  Justices Maura Corrigan, Robert Young and Stephen Markman are reminding their newest colleague that hypocrisy is an unpleasant thing.  The News continues:

"Justice Hathaway's refusal to live up to her own expressed standard of conduct is worthy of note in its own right: The people of this state deserve to know whether candidates promise one thing when running for office but deliver another when elected," wrote Young, who is up for re-election in 2010.

Hathaway wrote she would not respond to her colleagues' "inappropriate and unnecessary" comments. "This court should discontinue devoting the state's limited resources to unproductive colloquy," she said.

Interesting to note that the state may well have significantly fewer of those limited resources if she continues casting votes that could fatten her husband's pockets at the expense of the rest of our wallets but that's neither here nor there.  

Still, there's a part of me that wants to give Hathaway some credit... sure, the woman is dishonest to the bone, and sure, it turns out voters can trust her about as far as they can log toss Mark Brewer, but she may have set a new land speed record for major campaign policy u-turns.  So she's got that going for her.