In the queue for the next edition of OTR, House Republican Speaker Matt Hall.

What about those delays in the state budget?

Our lead story, the governor huddles again in the Oval with you-know-who: the President.

OTR correspondents here this week, Kyle Melinn, Jordyn Hermani, and Rick Pluta.

Here's an invite to sit down with us as we get the inside out.

Off the Record.

Production of Off the Record is made possible in part by Bellwether Public Relations, a full service strategic communications agency partnering with clients through public relations, digital marketing and issue advocacy.

Learn more at bellwetherpr.com.

And now this edition of Off the Record with Tim Skubick.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for tuning in to off the record from Studio C. Not a big news week this week, but enough stuff that we can chew on, right?

Ready, set our clocks.

What do you expect?

Yeah, well, wait a minute.

Actually, that is that is a bad setup to a bad show.

Right.

I apologize.

There is stuff going on.

Let's talk about the governor in the Oval Office again for the fourth time.

What's going on there, Kyle?

Well, I think she's trying to get some keep the lines of communication open.

You know, obviously, the project in Mundy Township didn't happen.

And so she'd like to keep the lines of communication open with the president.

He said we'll put something bigger and better there.

Well, was kind of keep that top of mind.

Also, she's concerned about Medicaid.

And if there is a particular waiver that the that the state has been using to help cover more people in Medicaid and because of the one big beautiful bill, the waiver that they have been using is going to get phased out.

So she wants to talk about if there's a way that they can continue it, if there's something else they can do.

Stretch it out.

Yeah, get me out of office.

If nothing else.

So there's there's certainly things.

So those are the two big things on her agenda.

I mean, it didn't shock anybody that she's back in the Oval Office again and it's proven that we've seen that from her former visits, that we get stuff out of it.

Michigan, when she does come to the Oval Office, that she negotiates with Trump and it goes back to the age old thing.

You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Trump controls a lot, a lot right now, obviously being the president of the United States.

Part of that is also funding for things like I'm thinking of the winter storms that we're going to receive from emergency funding for.

I'm thinking about Selfridge Air Force Base.

So, I mean, if anybody's scratching their heads over this, they shouldn't be.

But the interesting thing about despite the gets that she's getting, she's also getting that continued flak from the progressive wing of the party.

Oh, absolutely.

And what is their beef?

Well.

I mean, isn't isn't that the conundrum that, you know, when you're the governor, you've got to go and make deals at the federal level with people that you don't necessarily agree with, that you've got people whose skin isn't in that game, that they want to win elections and brume out the administration, that they have existential differences with.

It used to be it seemed like this governor was on their side and now she's being really quiet about it, Although we will see what happens as elections draw closer.

And, you know, maybe deals on the table aren't quite as significant.

In fact.

Your take on that?

Well, it's.

Just it's it's kind of the progressive outrage that keeps people ginned up through this period of time between the presidential election and the gubernatorial election.

I mean, you need something to keep that base excited.

And what better to keep them excited than Donald Trump and the things that he's doing in office.

And the more mouthpieces you get out there to... to sing the the hems of how horrible Trump is, the better.

And Whitmer is not participating in that.

And that's that's an agitation.

They need the Democrats or progressives at large want to have the party and elected officials and governors from across the country all singing the same playbook.

And she is not.

And that's an annoyance.

Now you've got Jocelyn Benson and Dana Nessel, the secretary of state and attorney general, who are doing that and even taking some pokes at Gretchen Whitmer over that.

But yeah, it's not the same as a governor who has a who has a national profile.

It's just they have the ability to do that, though.

I mean... What has Benson said about this?

Well, I just for on Benson for a moment, though, I mean, she's running she's running for higher office.

She needs that fodder.

She needs that.

But this is just politics as usual.

As much as that phrase means pretty much nothing.

But, you know, the progressives are always going to be annoyed that a Democratic governor is trying to make strides with a Republican president, especially one that is as divisive as Trump.

At the same time, the Dems outside of that are going to fundraise off of the fact that, you know, you see that the person in office now she's working with Trump.

But if you elect me, I'll be a real fighter for your ideology.

It's just it's politics as usual.

They have the ability to stay there.

Until.

Right know if.

And when they're in office.

And you've got to make deals, right?

Exactly.

That's why from a political standpoint, Dana Nessel actually has the best platform from a legal standpoint.

She can and has many, many, many times challenged what Trump is doing in the White House and the White House and I think is setting herself up for something if she wanted it.

Well, it does seem that across the country that.

She's not running for anything.

That ... it seems like across the country that the attorneys general in in many respects are taking the lead on challenges, relevant challenges.

They're going to court to a lot of these policies.

And, you know, they are they're getting results.

It will, in fact, in the National Democratic Party, that is the only sense of unity that you sense out of what the Democrats are doing In your statement.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's talk about the 35th Senatorial District.

Is there a vacancy?

There has been since January three.

You know what's made this so unusual is that it's taken the governor out.

Now we're into 200 and possibly 20 days, and we're getting close to that mark where she hasn't announced the special election.

This is extremely unusual, not keeping a seat vacant for this long, but not announcing the special election.

This week, I took a look at all the letters that Milliken, Blanchard, Granholm, Engler signed to set special elections and how long it took.

And you could take all of the days that Granholm took for all nine of her legislative appointments.

Add them all up, and it still doesn't equal this time frame that were the 200 pages.

You're not talking about when the elections are held.

You're talking about when they were announced.

When they were announced, so that people can.

File start campaigning.

All right.

So let's cut to the chase.

Why is she delaying?

Because she doesn't want in a 19-19 Senate, that's why.

Explain to the folks what that means.

So the.

Senate is.

In the weeds here, folks.

People that care about those things.

And yeah, there's a there's a huge point to it and I apologize.

Continue.

So the Senate is currently 19 Democrats, 18 Republicans.

And in this particular district, the front runner to win the special seat would be Bill Schuette who is a Republican.

And I say he's going to win, but the odds are better than even that he would that would be a 19-19 Senate and would create a problem for the governor to have an ally advancing her agenda, because now you would have a split body.

And while the lieutenant governor breaks all ties, the Republicans can still throw sand in the gears by withholding a vote.

And then you couldn't get the tie breaking.

Vote, 19-19.

So basically, she's worried about getting enough votes to move her agenda for the rest of her things.

So she has a nice legacy.

That's right.

Jordyn's written about this quite a bit, too.

I mean, it leaves effectively there's 270 something thousand people in that area that don't have representation in the Senate.

Now, people might ask, why does that matter if they have some of that district which has Midland Bay?

Yeah, Bay County, Midland County, parts of Bay County, Midland County, and there's a third Saginaw County.

They have house representation, so they should be fine, right?

Well, I mean, we're on the middle of a budget negotiation right now.

And people told me in the Senate and in the House that they're upset.

And when I say that, I mean Republicans who have been raising the alarm about this.

But Democrats are actually starting to get pretty fired up, too.

I talked to one of the Democratic candidates out there who's running in the 35th, and he actually uttered the phrase, you know, like a fraction of the phrase no taxation without representation, which is what's going on in that district right now.

And if you're starting to have Democrats that are starting to say stuff like that, you know, yes, there's there's a point to holding the current governor.

Gretchen Whitmer's number two has said that there ought to be an election.

There's a point to holding the cards here.

But again, it's a very delicate dance.

Whitmer could burn her goodwill that she has in continuing to hold off and hold off because at the end of the day, like we're doing right now, people are asking why?

Well.

If she hasn't burned the goodwill in 230 days, what's the magic number?

628?

You know, the.

Thing is to I mean, either either a state Senate seat is important or it's not.

Either it's important that people have representation in the Senate or it's not.

And what Whitmer is showing by not calling the election is that it's not important for.

People to say the.

Opposite.

It's showing exactly how important it is because they're afraid it's going to go republican.

Question is, who is it important to?

Yeah, okay.

I think that's a good point, Tim.

All right.

Let's talk about the speaker's news conference before we bring the speaker in to defend himself.

He's still there, isn't he?

Okay.

What was the lead out of that news conference?

My lead was that Matt Hall seems to be open to supporting Whitmer on getting that longer window for on bringing in Medicaid cuts.

That he's not against it, but he's also not against the governor seeking it and maybe getting that from the president.

What was your lead?

Well, I watched from afar and my lead honestly, we didn't end up writing about the press conference specifically.

But to us, that was because it seemed like business is continuing on as usual.

You know, we haven't had a session in quite some time.

We're still working on a budget.

We're still out here trying to hash through some partisan politics back and forth.

And as part of that budgetary process and we're still here, there is a session scheduled for next week.

Not quite sure if we're going to be there.

I would love to ask the speaker that when he comes on in a minute, but we're still in the same holding pattern that we've somewhat been for months now.

You know, our lead was a little bit more wonky in the sense that he's charged the subcommittee chairs with coming up with budgets based on changes made due to the one big beautiful bill and some alterations that need to be made there.

But the fact that he's asked the subcommittee chairs to actually come up with budgets so that they can pass them soon was what we led with.

Aren't you supposed to call a revenue estimating conference to get some hard numbers that you can work on cutting?

That was that was suggested.

But the speaker said that the House fiscal agency has run through the numbers and they have their estimates on what the impact is going to be.

And that's good enough.

That's all we need right now.

Well, how do you set targets if you don't know what the target money is?

I think that's that was a point that was raised during the press conference, I believe.

I think you raised it, didn't you?

Yes.

By himself.

He had didn't go for it.

It's it's happened that the whole point of the consensus revenue estimating conference is consensus that everybody is going through the same numbers.

And what the speaker is talking about is a return to the days that you'll remember, Tim, where the budget process dragged on because the House and the Senate, before they even got to negotiating the substance of the budget would negotiate separately on how much money there is to spend, spend.

There were no this is supposed to solve that problem.

There were no bean counters in the room to help lawmakers get to what that number was, and they were flying on radar.

And if you put it into a neutral bond, you got the speaker's not so sure he trusts the numbers out of the revenue, if I heard that correctly.

Well, yeah, but at some point, you know, there has to be an agreement on what the numbers are.

I thought one of the leads out of there was that basically you declared this the school cellphone ban to be dead for this school year.

There's not enough time to implement that, but I think there could still be a vote on it that could make an effective for the next year.

Am I reading the tea leaves wrong?

I think there could be a vote on it that could impact this current school year.

Maybe not the beginning.

I understood the window was closing, right.

I mean, but the.

Administrators said we need time to get all the boxes to put the phones in.

Blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, right.

So, I mean, they're not going to pass it tomorrow and it's not going to be adopted, you know, by the the beginning of school, which for some people is next week, you know.

So yeah, it's not going to be in place by then, but I mean it could be in place by.

October November said that some kind of bargain on that could also set a template for bargaining on other things, including the.

Budget.

I mean, let's be frank, though.

I mean, what they're bargaining over is who gets the PA?

Isn't that what they're bargaining?

Whose name is going to be on the public act that signed into law?

That's really the problem, because if you look at the substance, the substance isn't that different.

I mean, they're talking about kids not using their phone when they're in the classroom.

That's it.

I mean, that's not that hard.

So why don't the R's go and find a deal to be a co-sponsor so they could share the PA?

Because the Ds, The Ds are united with the Senate Dems because the Senate Dems were the leaders on this issue from their standpoint, and they believe Polehanki the Senate Democrat who's leading on it should get the pay all right.

In the middle of this mess.

Let's call in the speaker of the house.

Mr. speaker, welcome back to Off the Record.

It's good to see you.

You had quite a I think you set a record this week.

That news conference may still be going on without you.

Hi.

Yeah, well, the media needs a lot of education on what's really going on.

So we spent an hour and a half with you guys taking every question until there were no more questions.

Wouldn't that be great if Witmer or Winnie Brinks did that or any of the Democrats?

Will you allow or do you want another vote on the cell phone ban?

Like I said in the press conference.

You know, we don't want that answer.

I want the real answer.

So like I said, we put it up for a vote.

This was a big priority of Governor Whitmer.

We encourage it.

We told the Democrats, this is your one chance to vote on this bill.

Every single Democrat voted against it.

They voted against Governor Whitmer.

And just to really briefly talk about what you said earlier, there was a deal in place to give Polehanki a PA and Tisdale and Polehanki and the other Democrats are lying about it.

So you're saying I'm going to have another vote on this cell phone ban this year?

Is that a fair statement?

Correct.

Yeah, I think Democrats should own their vote.

They vote because of the Democrats putting politics ahead of our kids.

Our kids are going to suffer when they have cell phones in the classroom and they're learning, not learning in our education scores and math scores will continue to suffer as a result.

With all due respect, it appears on the surface that that's to get even with the Democrats at the expense of the kids.

Well, I think that the Democrat votes are the ones that voted against putting the kids.

So forgive them for the way going the wrong way, but give them another chance.

I think that the media should be talking more about the fact that people like you look at Noah Arbit and other Democrats, they said we support the bill.

We're happy Mark Tisdale is doing it.

And then when it came up for a vote, they voted with their radical left leader, Ranjeev Puri, and they've tanked the bill.

And ultimately they're the ones that are going to have to go back to their schools and to their to their parents in their district and say, you know, I wanted to blame someone else or I don't like Speaker House.

I voted no.

And as a result, your kids are going to be distracted in the classroom.

That's crazy.

Vote.

I'm feeling a little hung out to dry here because it did seem to me at least that you said in the news conference that negotiations on this could set a template for other other questions before the legislature.

Yeah, what I said was I went to Winnie Brinks after the deal was kind of in place between Mark Tisdale and Senator Polehanki and I told her, I said, I want to call you and say, I think this is how we can start things going again.

Let's pause from the budget.

Let's pick an issue like this where we've been working together.

The governor called for this in the state of the state, and let's set a framework for this.

What we saw from there was legislative Democrats blow it up.

And now you see Mike Duggan pointing it out.

I mean, Mayor Duggan is saying the Democrats, this is everything that's wrong with the Democrat Party.

They'd rather try to embarrass their political opponents than than help kids.

And so I think, you know, that was our attempt.

The Democrats failed.

And I think it's unfair to try now to, you know, what are we going to do this when the Democrat Senate comes back in September and in the middle of the school year, try to implement this.

So this is dead for this year because of House Democrats and Senate Democrats will try to take it up again for the next school year.

Respectfully, Mr. Speaker, weren't you missing two Republicans who had boycotted session and then another Republican who didn't show up for a session, the one who didn't show up probably runs all her subcommittee.

Energy now has no more bills.

One might venture to guess because of that.

But I guess what does that say, though, about the House Republican caucus?

If we're members boycotting session and members not show up for important policy votes?

Well, what I was trying to do here was set a tone of bipartisan negotiations.

Now, at any time, I could call Representative Karen Whitsett and bring her in and put it over for a vote.

But what we were trying to do here was use this as a catalyst for bipartisan negotiations.

I looked at every bill that we have sitting in the house.

This was the one that was most ready to go.

We had agreement from several Democrats right before the vote that they were going to vote yes.

Every one of those Democrats, after being pressured by their extreme left, leader Ranjeev Puri, walked.

And if you look at that vote again, there's four or five Democrats that disappeared about 5 minutes before that vote, and then it failed.

So my view of it, they asked me, are you going to clear the board?

No, we're not.

We're going to file this vote.

We're going to make it an official vote, and we're going to hold every one of those House Democrats accountable because they're putting politics ahead of their kids in their districts.

So if this was the template, then for how things could work and it blew up, I don't sound very good going into budget negotiations, then.

Yeah, and that's why we removed Alabas Farhat We just we said, this guy isn't getting it done.

And he was going to vote for that bill?

He did, Yes.

And he disappeared.

You noticed he wasn't in the room when the vote occurred.

And then we saw it again on a later vote where he actually was being bullied by his leadership for, what, 20 minutes before the vote and then voted no after he'd agreed to vote yes.

On this program For the last 160 days or so, people have sat in their chair from your side.

You said, we're looking for waste, fraud and abuse.

Have you finished your hunt?

And if you have, what dollar amount have you come up with, sir?

Well, Matt Maddock was here.

He did a great job.

He's a vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, and he's leading our efforts to find waste, fraud and abuse in the state budget.

How much?

He's doing a great job and he's identifying it, but he still hasn't identified all of it yet.

How long does it take, sir?

Please.

Well, I'll say what you saw in the past is, you know, when they had a July one deadline, you know, what do you become?

You get in office, you're there, what, three or four months, and you got to put a budget through your chamber when you're really trying to find value for your dollars and you're really trying to make smart and thoughtful cuts to this budget in order to fund things like roads and set better priorities for state government, it takes more time.

And that's what we're doing.

We're really going through this, looking at each line item, finding the waste, fraud and abuse.

And when our budget comes out very soon, it's really going to be a perfect budget.

A perfect.

But why is it taking so long to do this?

That you know, that that you've been in power for a while, that there are a lot of entities, including your K-12, K-12 schools, including your community colleges in your districts and public universities that are now into their budget years with barely a clue of how much they have to spend.

And this is breaking a system that was set up that was supposed to be bipartisan.

It was a Republican idea that was supposed to set a pattern for responsible budgeting and governance.

Yeah.

So when the Democrats in the Senate walked away from the education negotiations on July one, that that guaranteed we were not going to meet that deadline.

If you're still negotiating on July one, you failed to meet that deadline.

So what we did is we went to the House Democrats and we said, look, we're going to give you a very generous offer here.

We we put a lot of the things they were looking for in our proposal.

And we went to them and we said, look, let's do this education budget that has a lot of your priorities in it.

Let's tie it to roads.

Let's force the Senate back to the table once again.

House Democrats agreed to do it and then backed away from it.

And at that point, instead of putting it up for a vote and passing it, I just said, look, we're going to go home.

So we seen a pattern of this and it really comes down to their radical left leader, Puri.

Really, he's very dishonest to his members, but but also has a very negative governing philosophy.

So what I'm looking for are Democrat leaders that are going to support Governor Whitmer, not tanker ideas.

And you saw Governor Whitmer come out and say there is no budget without a road fix.

Her and I are unified on that issue.

We're looking for Democrats to support her on this.

And I'll just point out one thing you were talking about with this 35th Senate District.

Okay?

If you guys believe the reason Whitmer's not calling that special is to help her allies in the Senate.

Are they really her allies?

And at what point?

We'll see.

Just call it and say I'm not getting any support from Winnie Brinks in the Senate Democrats.

I might as well call it.

Maybe I'll do better with a tie because Speaker Hall and I get along on a lot of things.

What kind of.

A reaction have you gotten to your proposal that you made this week to basically cut out everyone else and turn the budget negotiations into a bilateral discussion between only you and only Governor Whitmer?

Well, Democrat legislators would be very wise to empower their leader, Governor Whitmer, as she's much more popular than they are.

I've looked at the polling.

I did a poll recently.

Only 8% of the public trust Senate Democrats on this budget.

Okay.

Everyone else trust either House Republicans or Governor Whitmer.

So ultimately, we're the ones that should get to the table, make the deal.

We could do it very easily.

The problem we have our legislative Democrats rebelling against their governor.

And I'll point out just last week, you had every legislative Democrat in the in the House committee vote with the Republicans to force members of the Whitmer administration to appear through subpoena.

No one's talking about that.

But this is a Democrat Party that's very divided.

But if that's the case, can Governor and just for the purposes of discussion, if that is the case, can Governor Whitmer then really represent Democrats in the legislature?

Because you've got to get this.

You know, no matter what you come up with, you've got to get this through a legislature on a bipartisan basis.

Well, I think that's the question.

I mean, if the Democrats cannot get their act together, then we're we're really facing a potential government shutdown.

But I have faith in Governor Whitmer that she's going to be able to rally these Democrats, and she doesn't need a majority of them.

She just needs a few of them.

I look at Ranjeev Puri as sort of the you know, he's a personification of this ... Is that his name from New York wing of the party?

And Gretchen Whitmer is kind of the lead of the more moderate, mainstream kind of Biden wing of the party.

And yeah, I mean.

You could say that Ranjeev Puri is doing exactly what you did as minority leader.

You set up Joe Tate to fail and you could say Ranjeev Puri he's trying to set you up to fail.

Well, Puri has a very negative governing philosophy and he represents.

Yours when you were minority leader.

Sir.

And really he is his ally is the former floor leader, Abraham Aiyash.

And every single person that worked for Aiyash, Puri hired.

Okay.

I watched these guys last term undermine Joe Tate.

I watched them come to me and leak things about what their caucus was doing.

I watched them divide their caucus.

They threw him under the bus and they took over the caucus.

And what I can't believe is those moderate Democrats let them do, let them continue to tell them how to vote and make stupid votes.

That cell phone bill is a 75% issue.

The Democrats followed Puri off the cliff and they're not listening to their leader, Governor Whitmer, who knows how to win.

And that's a problem for the Democrats.

Mr. Speaker, you've agreed to do over time.

So one quick last question.

Would you support a citizen panel to oversee the Michigan State Police?

I would support looking at something differently than what they're doing now because this is a mess... what would that panel look like?

Well, I'm looking to our leader on this, Mike Mueller, to help make some recommendations.

A citizen panel is in the works.

Again, Mike Mueller's doing a great job investigating this department and we'll see what he comes up.

With all due respect, why won't you answer that question?

Well, because I empowered somebody to lead this and I don't want to undercut their work.

But if I report that it is under consideration, that would be accurate.

I'm not aware of it being under consideration.

I took that to mean you you have a source that told you that somewhere else.

Maybe do, maybe don't.

Mr. Speaker, thanks very much.

Don't go away.

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