Michigan Constitution Article 1 Section 10 :  No bill of attainder, ex post facto law or law impairing the obligation of a contract shall be enacted. 

I was at the capitol today and attended the House Committee on Education meeting on House Bill 4306.   I asked my representative Lisa Brown, who is against these bills, for an explaination of the constitutionality of the bills being proposed and  passed.  If you point out the Judicial Branch is responsible for upholding the Constitution you are correct.  I was told that our elected officials are aware that these bill/laws could end up being challenged in the Michigan Supreme Court. 

If you know that something is illegal and against the constitution, why proceed?  Who is paying for the introduction of these bills, the process of them becomming law and then the subsequent court case?  Thats saving money folks.

Ramona:

Wow, I love seeing my writing cross-posted!  ;)

Yes, that is indeed exactly what I'm saying.

Among the other powers granted them recently, the EFMs now have the power to disincorporate a township. The Act makes no distinction between "land" or "legal" townships (also called "survey townships" or "Congressional townships"), on the one hand, and "political" townships (akin to a city, village, etc.), on the other - it just says "township". If you own real estate in Michigan (or any Northwest Ordinance state - MI, WI, OH, IN, IL), pull out your deed or mortgage, and read the legal description of the land. You'll see it's described in terms of sections of ranges and TOWNSHIPS. Those are "land" or "legal" townships. The Township of Benton Harbor, which recently made the news as the first area in Michigan where an EFM essentially rendered all of the elected officials powerless (also a new power), is a "political" township.

On July 13, 1787, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance ("the NWO"). The NWO created a system of government for the Northwest Territory (which became the states listed above). It also specified how the various parts of the Northwest Territory could become states. Earlier legislation, such as the Ordinance of 1784 and the Land Ordinance of 1785, had only said that the territory would someday become states and had described how the federal government would sell the land to private citizens. The Land Ordinance created the pattern along which American public land would be divided and sold until the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Ordinance of 1785 ruled that the western lands north of the Ohio River would be divided by surveyors into a square grid. Because these federal statutes had related subjects and relatively similar names, in later years "Northwest Ordinance" became a sort of shorthand for all of them.

Under the system created for legal descriptions of land - still used today - each survey township measures six by six miles and is subdivided into thirty-six one-mile-square sections. Each section (measuring 640 acres) could then be further divided, usually into half, quarter, eighth, or sixteenth-section lots of 320, 160, 80, or 40 acres. Certain sections had restrictions placed on their sales; for instance, money from the sixteenth section of every township was to be set aside to fund public schools in the township. Many schools today are still located in section sixteen of their respective townships, although a great many of the school sections were sold to raise money for public education. In later States, section 36 of each township was also designated as a "school section".

The first territorial survey took place in what is now southeastern Ohio, and it measured land that stretched westward from Little Beaver Creek to the Tuscarawas River and southward to the Ohio River. A total of about 91 townships were created (although some of them were fractional and did not contain a full 36 sections), with about 3,276 sections comprising 2,096,640 acres of land ready for development by U.S. farmers. A one quarter-section of land was the amount allocated to each settler. Stemming from this are the idiomatic expressions, "the lower 40", which is the 40 acres (160,000 m2) on a settler's land that is lowest in elevation, in the direction towards which water drains toward a stream, and the "back forty", the portion farthest from the settler's dwelling.

So, if a survey township is disincorporated, your deed now describes...nothing.

Also, the EFMs are now empowered to tear up ANY contract - not just collective bargaining or other employment contracts.  From the Act (MI Pub. Act No. 4, 2011):

Sec. 19. (1) An emergency manager may take 1 or more of the following additional actions with respect to a local government which is in receivership, notwithstanding any charter provision to the contrary: ...

(j) Reject, modify, or terminate 1 or more terms and conditions of an existing contract.

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Contrast that language with the following sub-section, which reads (in pertinent part):

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(k) After meeting and conferring with the appropriate bargaining representative and, if in the emergency manager’s sole discretion and judgment, a prompt and satisfactory resolution is unlikely to be obtained, reject, modify, or terminate 1 or more terms and conditions of an existing collective bargaining agreement.

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The legislature is presumed to understand the terms it uses, and to have selected its terms carefully; thus, when it says "contract" in subsection j, but "collective bargaining agreement" in subsection k, rest assured, it means two very different things.

Deeds are contracts if consideration is paid for the land (they are quasi-contracts if the deed is gifting land - one of the few quasi-contractual agreements allowed under law). Mortgages are contracts, as well.

So, once your deed/mortgage contract is useless and/or terminated, the EFM can seize your land. You can't prove that you own it, because even if you still have the deed/mortgage, the survey plats on which the legal description is based are invalid. So much for an eminent domain claim to at least get paid for the seizure.

It's probably a violation of federal law - the NWO, as well as the 5th and 14th Amendments (eminent domain), but private citizens have no power to sue to enforce the NWO, and, as noted, how do you prove your eminent domain claim without a valid legal survey of the land? You can't.

One other thing: disincorporating a township does NOTHING to get rid of the township's debt, which is what the Republicans claim is the whole point of the law. (It's not about the budget.) Plus, we already HAVE a means of ridding municipalities of debt they can't handle - it's called Chapter 9 bankruptcy!

-amyattorney