Overview
Michigan’s legislature has an extensive range of powers related to public policy in Michigan. These include powers related to regular legislation and reviewing regulatory changes, as well as special powers related to ballot proposals. The Constitution and various laws dictate the processes the legislature is supposed to follow related to these matters.
This assignment provides you an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge of processes members of the legislature and/or other parties have used to manipulate existing procedural provisions and use them to their advantage to pass partisan policies.
Specific Instructions
- Take the same policy issue that you wrote about for the “Intended Processes” essay.
- Now, post an audio/video of yourself explaining steps that partisan advocates for your cause might take to manipulate existing processes to ensure your proposal is approved (and made very difficult to change) or blocked (depends on the tool being used). Assume whatever partisan distribution is needed in the legislature/public for your practices to work, but explain them.
- Also, provide your perspective on whether or not such practices, and any others covered in the assigned learning resources, are appropriate for sound and democratic policymaking.
Length: No specific requirement. Just be sure to cover the topic sufficiently.
Required Sources: I expect you to incorporate knowledge from learning resources, though no citations/references are needed, given that this is a video/audio post.
Note: You won’t be able to see anyone else’s post until you post your own video. However, you might want to check back to see what your classmates had to say.
I posted the past assignment that this is based off