Reprinted with permission from MIRS news service
The six public acts Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law this year as of July 15 is the fewest number of signed bills at this point in the year since 1940, the last year in which the Michigan Legislature didn’t meet at all.
A review of 85 years of Public Act tables, summaries and books put together by the Legislative Service Bureau shows that between 1941 and 2024, the Legislature and governor averaged 182 public acts by July 15, a date selected by MIRS to account for budget bills that historically are passed by the Independence Day break.
So far this year, the House has taken 170 roll call votes.
Back in the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and before, the Michigan Legislature met every other year. They met every odd-numbered year except in special circumstances. The tradition ended in 1952.
However, in 1942, 1944, 1946, 1948 and 1950, the Legislature met for at least a few weeks in “special session.” Even in those five abbreviated session years, lawmakers still passed ― on average ― 43 bills per year by July 15.
“This is staggering,” said Bill Ballenger, editor of The Ballenger Report and former legislator from 1969 to 1974. “It speaks to a real dysfunction that’s, quite frankly, depressing.”
The House and Senate gaveled in and out (July 15, 2025) without taking attendance. There was no further reported movement on a Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 budget or a long-term road funding deal.
The Democratic-led Senate is frustrated that the Republican-led House has yet to pass a General Fund budget that shows how it plans to come up with $3 billion in new road funding while cutting the income tax rate. The Dems feel Republicans should present their own balanced budget and own whatever cuts are in that spending plan.
Senate Democrats don’t want to bail out House Republicans from their own rhetoric by agreeing to a balanced road-funding plan that includes revenue increases if they’re going to be blamed solely for raising the taxes needed to balance everything out.
Meanwhile, the House Republicans want to smoke out the Senate Democrats on what type of tax increases they’d agree to on a road funding plan … that is, if the Senate Democrats see road funding as a priority, since they haven’t come out with anything resembling a plan.
The stalemate is representative of a 2025 session in which House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) and Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) rarely talked before Memorial Day in a type of Cold War that prevented House bills from advancing in the Senate and Senate bills from moving in the House.
After 188 days the Legislature could constitutionally meet, the two sides agreed to pass:
- Making the state’s new mandatory sick time law less of a headache for business owners
- Taking restaurant wait staff off the regular minimum wage so they can continue to live off tips
- Allowing state-elected officials to file their personal disclosure forms late because the Secretary of State’s contractor screwed up the reporting website.
- Allows state-elected officials to email their personal disclosure form instead of fighting the clunky website.
- Giving Northern Michigan school districts a bunch of extra snow days after that ice storm downed a ton of tree branches on their roads.
- Selling a jail to the city of Detroit.
The second-fewest number of bills signed into law since 1940 was 1946, when then-Gov. Harry Kelly signed 30 bills over two special sessions by July 15.
Two years prior, in 1938, the Legislature met in special session for five days and sent nine bills to the governor. This was a time before Interstate 96, color TV, cordless phones, personal computers and the Mackinac Bridge.
“We have a lot of problems in this state and the fact the Legislature can’t get together to help solve these problems is pathetic,” said Ballenger, who hasn’t lived during a time of such little legislative output prior to this year. He was born in 1941.
Ballenger said partisanship and polarization are only partly to blame.
“People like to say that back in the ’60s and the ’70s everybody got along, and we didn’t have the partisanship we have today,” he said. “That’s not true. There were plenty of partisan politics and fights back then. The difference is that at a certain point, the leadership came together and said, ‘We’re all in this together, let’s figure this out.’”
That’s not happening now, he argued.
In 2025, the attitude is that if the other side doesn’t see it their way, they throw up their hands and quit talking, he said. The members seem to be encouraging the behavior because it shows their base that they’re not caving on their values.
The only winner in all of this, in Ballenger’s opinion, is independent governor candidate Mike Duggan, who decried the partisan gridlock and called on suspending the salaries of lawmakers and the governor for every day after July 1 a budget for the coming year isn’t signed (See “Duggan: Legislators’ Salaries Should Be Paused For Missing Budget Deadline,” 7/11/25).
Former longtime legislative aide Bruce Timmons noted that past legislatures haven’t always gotten budgets passed on time. He remembered the mid-1970s when the fiscal year was moved from July 1 to Oct. 1 as part of a drastic budget agreement.
He noted that there have been plenty of split legislatures, too. A review of the Michigan Manual shows that between 1941 and 2025 there were 84 years of session. Only in 26 of those years did Michigan’s government have a single party in control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature.
“It’s extraordinary,” Timmons said. “It’s as weird as you found it to be.”