State Rep. Alabas Farhat (D-Dearborn) talks with reporters. February 2024 | Kyle Davidson
State Rep. Alabas Farhat (D-Dearborn) was removed as the minority vice chair of the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday evening after a political standoff on the chamber floor ended with two Republican priorities dying without enough votes to pass.
The episode was just another bad blood performance between the Republican and Democratic House caucuses this term as budget talks have ground to a halt and gamemanship runs rampant.
Farhat met with members of the Capitol press corps after session, and started by saying: “This town is a f****** mess.”
“Unequivocally. That’s what it is,” Farhat said. “If you look at my legislative history as who I am … every single bill was bipartisan last year. [I am a person] who worked 19 substitutes to get Republicans the support of a Public Safety Trust Fund, who went out of his way to make sure we incorporated voices that mattered at the table, because I believe when you govern, you want to govern through consensus.”
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
In a regularly scheduled press conference with members of the Michigan Capitol press corps, House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) said Farhat’s removal was predicated on a number of issues. Some of that had to do with their negotiations on the budget – which have all but ground to a halt – and commitments he supposedly made with House Republican leadership to get votes on bills that were up for final passage.
Those items were House Bill 4141, legislation to ban the use of cell phones in schools during instructional hours, and House Bill 4506, which would amend state law so prosecutors could continue to seek life-without-parole sentences for 19- and 20-year-old criminal defendants convicted of some crimes. The latter bill is part of a larger three-bill package.
Both bills were defeated on the House floor on Thursday, with the cell phone bill dying with a vote of 53-43, and with the criminal sentencing bill also dying on a 55-43 vote. The criminal sentencing bill was put up for reconsideration after it only mustered a vote of 55-42, but the second vote produced no better outcome for the legislation.
Of note, a key Republican, state Rep. James DeSana of Carleton, was not present on the floor Thursday evening in a quasi protest because House leadership wasn’t taking up his own legislative priorities, DeSana told The Detroit News. He could have delivered a vote to at least save one of the bills.
But during the second vote on the criminal sentencing bill, the board remained open for nearly an hour, which Hall said was done to give Democrats an opportunity to vote on the bills without letting them off the hook of taking a no vote on the issues.
Once Farhat voted no on the criminal sentencing bill, the voting board was closed and it was determined that the bill had failed for a second time.
Almost immediately afterward, the House read a letter sent in by Hall, which instructed the Republican House leadership to remove Farhat as minority vice chair on appropriations.
Hall later said that he and leadership had worked out a deal that if they could get votes on the bill, and even with some amendments made to curry favor with their Democratic colleagues, they would put some of their members’ bills up and move them along.
Hall said he was certain that he had secured a deal with Farhat to do just that, but then he changed his mind. That led Hall to question Farhat’s commitment on other deals that could be worked out in the future.
“I’ll just say that, in this business, the only thing you have is your word,” Hall said. “I’ve done a lot of deals with Democrats over the last several years, and I always follow through on the things that I said I was going to do. And we expect that from everyone, Republican and Democrat.”
Hall added that if the Republicans don’t have someone they can count on across the aisle, then a change has to be made in the leadership structure, which is what happened with Farhat on Thursday.
“We need somebody that we really think is really going to represent the Democrats well, and somebody who could honor their commitments,” Hall said. “That’s what we wanted, a partner to work together to get a bipartisan budget deal done. I think we’re making so much progress with Governor Whitmer coming together on the budget, on roads, on education. We attempted to help some of her priorities today, like the cell phone ban.”
To Hall’s point, the ban was floated by Whitmer in this year’s State of the State address to the Legislature.
House Minority Leader Rajeev Puri (D-Canton), said the night was a disaster and he wasn’t sure why they were brought in tonight. He also said that Democrats all term have been willing to work, but the way the institution works, the buck stops with the leader of the chamber.
“This is just a failed approach,” Puri said of Hall’s leadership and the institution of the House writ large. “It’s not set up to be sustainable. I think it’s driving the institution into the ground. I think the Speaker has signed up for a role that he’s a little overwhelmed in right now, and not understanding how to move pieces in order to run the institution in a way it needs to go.”
Puri said none of the situations present before the House were novel, not the budget or otherwise.
“Getting a budget done on time has happened before,” Puri said. “The only piece that’s different here is we’ve been living through this political theater with some really bad actors. I don’t know when the Speaker is going to realize that he has to actually work with the House Democrats if he wants this to work.”
Farhat added that what lawmakers are seeing is an ideology that rewards lack of cooperation, and the chaos of the evening, he said, was an attempt by Hall to get an attention grabbing headline out of an otherwise lackluster day.
“This is all being pushed, unfortunately, to straddle real negotiations,” Farhat said. “This is impacting our ability to do a budget. I have worked in good faith through this entire process, and I think to use a non-budgetary item – let’s be clear – this wasn’t the budget – this wasn’t a budget negotiator. … This was more of an exercise of the dysfunction of this town than it was an exercise of the willingness on our side to work.”
When asked if the speaker’s narrative was accurate, Farhat said there were conversations on the bill, but he doesn’t ever remember coming to an agreement with Hall or leadership to vote a certain way.
On whether the budget negotiations were the issue at hand, Farhat said he hopes Hall “was not surprised that I would never accept us to defund school lunch or teacher retirements.”
“I got moved because I was someone who wanted to fight for values,” Farhat said.
Comments