Tim Skubick

With great fanfare which produced a momentary sigh of relief in this town, the governor and two legislative leaders revealed last week that they had signed an agreement to get the state budget done on time to avert an ugly state government shutdown. And they also agreed to a new $1.85 billion road fix package.

To be clear, signing a piece of paper promising to do something, and actually doing it are two distinct items, but more on that later.

However, to begin with, the focus here is how did they get to the point where such a deal could be reached?

One theory is that it actually has its roots in the dead of winter last December. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revealed for the first time on the Evening with the Governor public TV broadcast that unlike other more aggressive Democratic governors around the land who wanted to fight President Donald Trump, she pledged instead to forge a relationship with him to plow common ground if they could. And of course they could and they did, much to the chagrin of some Democrats who did not embrace her strategy.

And it’s at this fork in the road where the foundation for the budget agreement of last week commenced.

Watching the governor on the tube back then, House GOP Speaker Matt Hall, the theory goes, took to heart her willingness to work with his president, and the governor and the speaker thus commenced with her to form a deeper professional and respectful working relationship that would see the two of them grow to trust one another, which of course is the foundation of any agreements made in politics.

Michiganders don’t know it, but they have been lucky to have governors in the past who were eager to work with the other guys. It didn’t always work, as one remembers the toxic exchanges between then senate GOP leader Mike Bishop and then sitting Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Let’s just say there were no back-slapping “let’s have a drink after all this is over” moments between the two, but other modern day gov’s found the magic sauce and now Ms. Whitmer and Mr. Hall drink from that cup, too, to their mutual credit the good government types feel.

In the end, the only way to do the people’s business is to find middle ground between competing political parties and not be afraid to compromise even though some consider the term itself to be a four-letter word. Never mind that the Founding Fathers found compromise to be at the heart of the new Democracy they were creating.

There was then another event that moved the governor/speaker relationship needle that eventually gave rise to the agreement reached last week.

The legislature last February hammered out an 11th hour bipartisan deal to rewrite the state’s minimum wage and tip laws. Again, this had nothing to do with the shutdown story to come, but again, it showed that both sides could work together to get stuff done. And like learning to ride a bike, learning to trust one another gets better with each time you get on the bike.

“I can work with him,” the governor noted earlier in the year referring to the GOP speaker, and after the two of them were photographed together in the Oval Office consulting with President Trump, they worked together to get his approval for a new jet fighter wing at Selfrige Field and federal spending to keep the dreaded Asian carp out of the Great Lakes.

The speaker, at his marathon weekly news conference, always found a way to praise this working relationship with the governor. “If the Democrats would just follow the governor’s lead, we could get this budget done quicker,” he would advise capitol scribes as talk of a government shutdown got louder between February and last week.

So all this culminated with Senate Democratic Leader Winnie Brinks adding her name to the bottom line with the other two on the paper deal last week. Which was pretty incredible in that Mr. Hall had spent months chastising the Senate leader for her lack of leadership skills but even though he had no relationship, per se, with Ms. Brinks, the deal was sealed.

“We still have to work out all the finer points in the line items and we need to see whether Winnie Brinks can perform in the Senate,” the speaker noted, meaning could she muster the votes to pass it?

All those line items are the sentences in the budget that declare how much money will be spent in each state agency and, last Friday, the forward momentum continued as everyone agreed to what they call “target numbers” for each budget. In terms you will understand, each budget sub committee chair was told how much they could hand out, and over the weekend, it was up to them to craft their department budgets on how to spend that money.

Depending on when you are reading this, as word is put to paper here, the betting money is they will get all of this done even though it normally takes four months to compose a new state budget. This one was done in four days, which leads one to wonder if this rush produced a quality product? It may take days and weeks to answer that, but one thing is for sure — some who argue the current legislature and governor are hopelessly stuck in a partisan muck that is dysfunctional at best and hopelessly unable to work together at worst — that opinion has been, for the moment, proven false.