Jim Copland, director for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, nails the sham constitutional amendment being peddled by Reform Michigan Government Now in a Detroit News oped today. While masquerading as “good government” reform, Copland writes that the plan is actually:

an effort to seize control of each of the branches of state government to gerrymander the next decade’s electoral maps.

Copland’s analysis was confirmed last week when the Mackinac Center for Public Policy unearthed a smoking gun PowerPoint presentation exposing the proposed ballot petition as a scheme to rig the political rules to help Democrats. The beneficiaries of this plot, Copland rightly notes:

would be Michigan’s powerful trial-lawyer lobby. Michigan’s litigation industry, from Geoffrey Fieger on down, is working feverishly to reverse the state’s significant legal reforms passed in the 1980s and 1990s.

The trial bar – along with their allies in Michigan’s Democratic Party – has never accepted the fact that, after tort reform, Michigan’s courts are no longer a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trial Lawyers, Inc. Their attempt to force strong rule-of-law justices from the bench was inept and badly bungled; but it does show that the trial bar and Michigan Democratic leaders have no scruples about shredding Michigan’s Constitutional to further their own personal and political aims.