The responsibility for a sleazy plot to trick Michigan voters into handing Democrats one-party rule apparently reaches all the way to the top of the Michigan Democratic Party. In a July 20th column, the Detroit Free Press’ Ron Dzwonkowski reveals the shocking truth that both Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Lt. Gov. John Cherry funneled campaign funds into Reform Michigan Government Now’s effort to get a bogus constitutional amendment on the November ballot.

“We [Granholm and Cherry] participated in an effort to do research, polling, focus groups, etc.,” Cherry said. “We had some concern about the direction it was going.”

Now that the “direction” is clear – “Changing the Rules of Politics in Michigan to Help Democrats,” as a UAW PowerPoint puts it – Gov. Granholm and Lt. Gov. Cherry should disavow this plot and instruct the state party to keep it off the ballot. Both Gov. Granholm and Lt. Gov. Cherry are elected to represent all Michigan voters, not just Democrats. Rather than spending their time and money secretly working to rig Michigan’s political system by shredding the state constitution, they should be focused on solving Michigan’s myriad economic problems.

Jim Vote from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which uncovered the UAW’s PowerPoint, picks up on this theme in a post today:

The recent petition to “Reform Michigan Government Now” and the recent decision by Volkswagen to build a manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., rather than Michigan, only prove that organized labor is a significant roadblock to prosperity.

Vote is right, but he leaves out another “significant roadblock” – a cynical state Democratic Party more interested in perpetuating its own rule than helping Michigan citizens. As Dzwonkowski puts it in his column (entitled “A plot to rule the state”): “Democrats’ secret strategy aims to trick voters into one-party advantage in Michigan.”

The presumption here [with the RMGN plot] is that Democrats will not have enough to offer in terms of leaders or ideas to actually win a majority the old-fashioned way, with votes.

Brian Dickerson also writes in the Free Press that the “implosion” of this scheme:

…likely will strengthen the hand of insurgents who seek to depose longtime [state Democratic Party] Chairman Mark Brewer and his anachronistic backers.

Dickerson concludes that the PowerPoint exposed by the Mackinac Center reveals:

…a tiny cabal led by Brewer, AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney and a handful of other top union leaders conceived the RMGN initiative as a stealth recall campaign against Chief Justice Clifford Taylor and his GOP colleague Justice Robert Young, Jr., whom Brewer and Company see as an obstacle to their party’s plan to draw more favorable legislative district lines after the next census.

As we reported last week, Bob LaBrandt of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce has pledged to file a lawsuit to keep the proposed amendment off the ballot. Gov. Granholm and Lt. Gov. Cherry should save him the trouble and deep-six this cynical plot.