And so, with this jeremiad from the Freep, a grieving Official Detroit starts what's likely to be a long, bitter cry over the demise of Mike Duggan's campaign, which the candidate confirmed Wednesday morning:
Tuesday’s Michigan Court of Appeals ruling sustaining Duggan’s disqualification — on the absurd grounds that he violated Detroit’s charter by turning his campaign petitions in too far in advance of the May 14 qualifying deadline — likely marks the end of a mayoral campaign that has been under way for two years. Barring an unlikely reversal by the state Supreme Court, Duggan has little or no chance to contest the ruling before Saturday, the statutory deadline to print ballots for Detroit’s Aug. 6 mayoral primary.
But make no mistake: The real victims of Tuesday’s ruling are Detroit voters, who have once again watched the judicial system that is supposed to protect their voting rights be exploited in order to trample them.
Until perennial also-ran Tom Barrow asked the courts to intervene in the mayoral election last month, no one in Detroit’s Election Department had challenged Duggan’s eligibility.
In one fell swoop, we get it all:
- A sudden bout of righteous indignation over the supposed damage to the "will of the voters" (meh, tell it to Kevyn Orr).
- A cheap charge of incompetence aimed at the jurists who dared to interpret the city charter against Duggan's interests.
- A clear willingness to diminish the rules and look the other way from them when it serves the interests of the powerful.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: A plain reading of the charter seems to clearly suggest that Mike Duggan was ineligible to run when he filed. It's immaterial as to how long his campaign has been underway or how silly some think the rules to be or how hard Duggan supporters want to read the words "filing deadline" where they don't exist.
Higher Appeal Doesn't Look Good
He messed up. And he has no one to blame but himself and his team.
Sure, he might appeal to the state Supreme Court, but, given that Popke's original decision references a ruling by state Supreme Court Justice Robert Young, chances don't look good.
Two courts have looked at the case and neither supported his contention that the charter's language says anything other than what it does. The interpretations may seem literal, but literal doesn't make them wrong.
Still, the Freep complains:
The absurdity of the court’s reasoning is self-evident. The purpose of any residency requirement is to assure that candidates enjoy some minimal familiarity with the constituency they seek to represent. Yet, according to the Court of Appeals’ logic, a candidate who became a resident of Detroit a month later than Duggan did could have satisfied the residency requirement merely by waiting five or six weeks longer to drop off nominating petitions.
And if Duggan was clearly precluded from dropping off his own petitions until April 12, as Judges Murray and Talbot contend, wasn’t the city clerk charged with enforcing the one-year residency requirement obligated not to accept them before then?
"Logic" Vs. Language
Well, first, that's not "Court of Appeals' logic." That's simply what the charter says. I get the argument about "intent," but there's no universally accepted rule on when someone has attained "minimal familiarity with the constituency they seek to represent." You can't objectively quantify that — but it's not ridiculous for an electorate try and establish a time frame. Duggan's candidacy fell outside that.
The subtext to all this hand-wringing, of course, is that Detroit is now royally screwed without Mike Duggan, the Only Candidate Experienced Enough To Save Detroit, to come in here and perform one of the infinite turnaround miracles for which he is reputed.
Suffice it to say that, Detroit voters have survived worse.
Heck, until Orr is done running the show, I'm hard-pressed to see how anyone who wins the race is going to be any more of a factor than the Ghost of Dave Bing is now anyway.
And if we're going to fret about the state showing disregard for the will of Detroit voters, I can think of a much more obvious example than Mike Duggan's tripping over his own calendar.
As for the City Clerk, I'm riding with the Barrow-Wattrick ticket on this one: Janice Winfrey needs to pack it up.
Not only did she apparently give Duggan bad information when she told him that it was OK for him to file early, the cynic in me also can't help but wonder whether that bad information was in any way influenced by personal ties. Her husband, Tyrone Winfrey, was once one of the few competent members of the Detroit school board and now works for the Education Achievement Authority, where Duggan was a board member until recently. Was either Winfrey also a Duggan for Mayor supporter? And could that have impacted Janice's decision to approve Duggan's early filing in spite of the charter language?
Barrow obviously thinks so, as he called on Winfrey to recuse herself because of her spouse's ties to Duggan.
The fact that, as the Free Press notes, "no one in the city Election's Department challenged Duggan's eligibility" seems less an argument for Duggan's eligibility than a cause to wonder whether the former Wayne County prosecutor simply benefited from -- and then was poisoned by -- that peculiarly Little League brand of insider baseball for which the worst of the city's bureaucracy is infamous.
The last thing this city needs is an election tainted by those sorts of games.
And if that's the case then you have to wonder whether the appellate court did Detroit voters harm -- or a big favor.
