What Will Jocelyn Benson Do As Governor?
She's pitched high-speed rail publicly, and will almost certainly give state funds to Planned Parenthood
In ninth grade civics, you learned the importance of checks and balances in government. In 2027, you’re going to get the refresher course.
Democrats will enter Michigan’s 190th year as a state in control of the governor’s office, House, Senate, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and state Supreme Court.
With nobody willing to check anyone else’s power, the Democrats have carte blanche to do whatever they want.
Here’s what you can expect in the early days of Gov. Jocelyn Benson.
Benson’s predecessor vowed to “Fix the Damn Roads” and did not. Benson hasn’t touched that third rail of Michigan politics.
Instead, she will seek funding for high speed rail, which she promoted during her few campaign events this year. If Whitmer’s failures to repair roads and California’s failure to build high-speed rail after years of trying and billions of cost overruns are any guide, high-speed rail in Michigan will be a boondoggle.
They’ll start small on “studies.” These will enrich Benson’s friends and manufacture consent for a rail project that nobody has asked for and few would use. (Dear Reader, how many times have you asked yourself “Why isn’t there a train from Detroit to Traverse City?”)
Eventually the full request will reach the state budget. A vehicle mileage tax—the state taxing you for every mile you drive—will be presented as the way to pay for it.
Roads will get worse yet, and your wallet will be lighter, and you will struggle to remember why you thought Democrats would lower your gas prices.
You can expect a funding request for Planned Parenthood in the state budget. President Donald Trump withdrew federal funding for the abortion mill, and several branch offices have closed. And now a mother who has suffered the loss of a child through miscarriage will become a champion for killing unborn babies through abortion, and using your tax dollars to do it.
Benson ran on a platform of “what Whitmer did, but worse.” As governor, she will grab the pro-abortion baton from Whitmer, who has lamented that her daughters might someday lose their freedom to kill her grandkids, a freedom she held as a young woman.
Benson will present this as a matter of “reproductive rights,” and the Michigan media will repeat that in headlines. State government will grow more ghoulish, and we’ll all be made complicit.
Finally, the Democrats will tire of watching other blue state trifectas have all the fun, and will enter Michigan into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
National Popular Vote is a blue-state pact to grant their electoral votes in presidential races to the top vote-getter nationally, even if it contradicts the results in that state. If National Popular Vote had been the law in 2016, Hillary Clinton would’ve gotten Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, even though Trump won the state.
Democrats will face a constitutional hurdle, and one of their own making. In 2022, Proposal 2 carried a provision that election outcomes will be determined “solely by vote of electors casting ballots in the election.”
Proposal 2 of 2022 was a Democrat-led effort. A portion of it was designed to close the door on Republicans granting Michigan’s electoral votes to Donald Trump even if he had lost.
After the 2020 election, this was a scenario Michigan Democrats feared, and Republicans did produce an “alternate” slate of electors in protest of the election, which they argued was rigged.
With Democrats running all of Lansing, would the Michigan Supreme Court decide a National Popular Vote case along party lines, or by reading the plain language of the Constitution?
That it could come to that highlights the problem facing Michigan Republicans in 2027: The only thing stopping the Democrats in Lansing is themselves.
