Attorney General Bill Schuette
Michigan's Attorney General Bill Schuette, a long-time fixture of state politics, can be a personable guy. But his vigorous fight to defend very conservative values, and his costly and unsuccessful campaign against same-sex marriage have rubbed quite a few people the wrong way.
Put Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry in that camp.
Lessenberry writes:
I've been watching Michigan politics for a very long time, and I can't remember anyone more potentially dangerous than Bill Schuette, our demagogue of an attorney general.
Not that we haven't had a cast of crooks and characters. Yes, there was Kwame Kilpatrick the greedy man-boy mayor, who thought the city of Detroit was his candy store, bank, and harem, and who is now guest No. 44678-039 of the federal government, with a room booked till August 2037.
We've got the two comic-opera defrocked state legislators, at least three more who should probably be in the slam, plus a past passel of crooked prosecutors and penny-ante racists. There was Diane Hathaway, the felonious Democratic state Supreme Court justice who went on the bench in 2009 and into a cell in 2013. And all that's just scratching the recent surface.
But none of those birds had national pretensions. Schuette does. He serves the worst right-wing elements of his party, and seems willing to do anything to please them to try to win as much power as he possibly can.
Lessenberry feels that his moves of late are motivated by his desire to be Michigan's next governor.
Every move he makes seems to be politically calculated.He dragged his feet disgracefully on launching any investigation as to whether Cindy Gamrat and Todd Courser had themselves misused state resources and violated Michigan law.
But he's very quick to take stands on issues that have nothing at all to do with his office — something most previous attorney generals have avoided. In perhaps his most bizarre and blatantly partisan move, he wrote to governors across the nation, urging them to impose their own sanctions on Iran.
He stabbed Gov. Rick Snyder — his fellow Republican — in the back last winter by denouncing Proposal 1, the governor's attempt to get voters to raise the sales tax to fix the roads, something that even the conservative Detroit News saw as disgraceful pandering to win Tea Party support
