Senate Majority Leader Reflects on End of Democrats' Trifecta in Lansing
December 26, 2024
Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com
Lansing is still abuzz about last week's meltdown in the Michigan House, where GOP members walked out amid infighting within the Democratic majority.
The Senate then held a marathon session to pass the bills it could.
“We faced a choice to come back to work and to do everything we could to get good legislation to the governor’s desk that was sponsored by our House colleagues who were not there for us,” said Majority Leader Winnie Brinks of Grand Rapids.
“We did take the time to understand the policy to ensure it was good policy,” she told WZZM. “More power to them (Republicans). They had the constitutional right to do that, but at the end of the day, it was really just a way to obstruct progress on things that had already been vetted.”
The Michigan House is adjourned until New Year's Eve. Republicans will take over majority of the House in 2025, breaking the Democrats' trifecta in Lansing.
The party’s control in Lansing, according to Brinks, should not be judged by how it ended.
“Tax fairness. Putting more money back into the pockets of working people who just can’t pay their bills,” she said. “Record funding for K-12 education. Making sure we were implementing policies on gun violence prevention that people had been asking for decades.”