Tim Skubick

They say that money is the mother’s milk of politics, but money is also the root of all evil, so sometimes that milk turns sour.

And that notion is what is driving a brand new proposed statewide petition that seeks to stop Michigan’s major utilities and others from making political contributions to their “friends” in Lansing.

Seemingly out of nowhere popped up this effort by Michiganders for Money Out of Politics. Charter members include Clean Water Action, Michigan United and Voters Not Politicians.

They were the folks who shocked this town by collecting a whopping 600,000 grassroots petition signatures to put a ballot proposal before the voters to dramatically revamp the method for drawing voting district lines. The intent was to water down any attempts to gerrymander or tilt the districts in lopsided favor to one political party or the other. Hence VNP showing up with this new gambit provided instant pop for the ban on contributions by DTE Energy, Consumers Energy and all corporations that have contracts with the state in excess of $250,000.

The coalition argues DTE funneled $4.9 million into campaign coffers for both parties while the Consumer Energy donors ponied up $4.6 million in the 2022 election cycle.

The two firms tell Bridge that all of their contributions comply with state law, with Consumers boasting that it has “gone above what the law is” when writing those checks. And in bold letters they shout NONE OF THE MONEY CAME FROM RATEPAYERS.

But is is also true that some of their stash is what is known as “dark money.” Bucks sent to a nonprofit entity which does not have to disclose who the donors are so the money gets to politicians, thus avoiding other state campaign finance disclosure reporting.

Obviously, it is too early for the energy folks to draft a counter argument but they could contend that since the U.S. Supreme Court has declared corporations to be “persons … with free speech rights” and since giving money to office seekers can be considered part of free speech ergo the utilities have a right to write checks to whomever. But critics of that might retort, the high court did not declare the corporations to be “citizens.”

Regardless of how this unfolds, let’s assume MMOP navigates all the hoops to get on the ballot, including the collection of 356,000 legal petition signatures, and then what?

A Holy War on two fronts. Those spending oodles to bury it and others spending oodles to pass it.

And if this was the only item for voters to decide, the soothsayers in this town that predict this stuff would, at this read, handicap the outcome in favor of the yes vote.

After all, when it comes to targets that citizens love to hate just think winter power outages across the state with DTE and Consumers on the front lines trying to restore the juice before the leaves return to the trees.

But it looks like this one will not stand alone.

As noted in this space a couple of weeks ago, the 2026 statewide vote has all the makings of another ballot-palooza with six or more questions for voters to weed through … or not.

Here’s the bad news for this money out of politics effort.

Back in 2012, there were exactly six ballot questions in front of voters, including wiping out the state’s Emergency Manager law, anti-Right to Work legislation, 25% renewable energy by the year 2025, forcing home care workers to join a union and all future tax increases would require a tough-to-get two-thirds majority vote in the Michigan House and Senate. Several of those, if standing alone, probably would have passed, starting with that two-thirds tax restriction.

But some smart consultants somewhere hatched a brilliant strategy. Each entity that wanted a “no” vote on their issue combined forces with all the other negative groups and popped $150 million for a campaign urging citizens to vote “no” on the whole shebang.

It even included a nifty little commercial with a couple sitting around the breakfast table and the wife says to hubby, “Honey, I don’t want to put this junk in the constitution.” And hubby retorts for the cameras, ” You’re right, sweetheart!”

And when they counted the noses, every single measure bombed. Only three of the six got 42% and that was that.

Of course it would be fool hearty to assume that because voters 14 years ago did that, they would repeat history and do it again.

But for the MMOP folks not to at least ponder the possibility might be equally as silly?