The first steps in the long road to relevancy have begun for the Michigan GOP so that it can once again be in the business of electing Republicans instead of scratching the itch of special interest groups more aligned with liberal Democrats than conservative Republicans.
I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it couldn't come soon enough.
I will admit right here and now that over the past 10 years, on both my radio shows and my writings here and elsewhere, I have not been the biggest fan of how the Michigan GOP operates and have had many issues with how they've done business, and I've complained both publicly and privately to those who might be able to change its path.
However, the one thing I never advocated for was the dismantling of the party by people who acted and looked more like Democrats than conservative Republicans. That thought never crossed my mind. If it ever did, I would have wished it had been done to the Michigan Democrat Party rather than what has been done to the Michigan GOP since February of last year.
In March of 2023, the now-deposed former leader of the Michigan GOP, Kristina Karamo, made a move that confounded me and set off alarm bells in my head. I wrote about this right here. Did the Michigan GOP Just Concede the 2024 POTUS Race With Its Latest Move?
The latest installment of the Michigan Republican Follies comes in the form of news that the newly elected Michigan GOP chair Kristina Karamo has decided to abandon the Michigan GOP headquarters in Lansing, Michigan. There is nothing really wrong with the building, but she decided that it was time to move party operations across the state and use a P.O. Box out of Grand Rapids for an official mailing address.
How 21st century is that?
From The Detroit News
Kristina Karamo, the new chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, announced Monday she doesn’t plan to use the GOP’s longtime headquarters in Lansing, a development that represents a significant shift in the party’s operations.
Karamo, a frequent critic of the so-called Republican “establishment,” contended there were better ways to expend donors’ contributions than paying a trust, run by former party chairs, that controls the property. It would cost about $12,000 a month to keep operating out of the building, wrote Karamo and her co-chair, Malinda Pego, in an “update” email to Republican activists.
“Instead of paying a lease/rent to ‘a trust’ that is claiming we can’t even see the trust documents, and instead of attempting to repair the building that does not belong to MIGOP, we shall not be making use of this building given that, to do so, does not represent best use of fundraising dollars,” Karamo and Pego wrote.
I can't tell you how stunned I am that the article I just listed above, from March 18th of 2023, made me look like I was clairvoyant. I'm almost always never ahead of the curve, and I often wonder who in the hell put the curve there. Yet I called this one correctly because when you're a state party that has never had problems raising money, and you're going to abandon a building that had a lease of a dollar a year and claim that you're going to focus on other things without an actual headquarters to have meetings with people across the state that is odd.
Something didn't jibe with that; I knew that all those months ago.
Well, Pete Hoekstra, the new Michigan GOP chair (after some wrangling), and his new legal counsel, former Congressman Mike Bishop, have decided to drop a Karamo-led lawsuit to find out who actually owned the building that she abandoned. You might think that you would find out who owned the building before you abandoned it, but obviously, that wasn't Kristina Karamo's style.
As evidenced by her historic 14-point loss to Jocelyn Benson in the 2022 Secretary of State race, she is more a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants gal rather than doing things based on logic or facts.
I caught up on that part of the story right here.
New Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra has abandoned a lawsuit, launched by former chairwoman Kristina Karamo, who sought to take control of the party's past headquarters building in downtown Lansing.
Former U.S. Rep. Mike Bishop, who is the party's general counsel under Hoekstra, signed a document, agreeing to dismiss the suit Friday, three days after a Kent County Circuit Court judge ruled that Karamo was no longer the chairwoman of the state GOP.
Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Wanda Stokes then ordered the building lawsuit dismissed with prejudice and the litigation closed on Monday, according to court records.
"One more step towards normal/unity and winning in November," Hoekstra said in an email on Wednesday.
The order from Stokes concluded a bizarre legal effort by Karamo's leadership team, which had eyed selling the Michigan GOP's former headquarters on Seymour Avenue in a bid to alleviate hundreds of thousands of dollars in outstanding debts.
Thankfully, due to the efforts of many people, the Michigan GOP now has a competent leader who can do the thing that the heads of state parties are supposed to do: raise lots of money to get Republicans elected.
That includes Donald Trump.
This could have gone on until February of 2025, but as I mentioned, a lot of hard work has been done to expose what was going on here in Michigan. Much of that was put in place by a gentleman, Scott McMahon, who wrote this story right here, which helped me put the puzzle pieces together of what was ACTUALLY going on with the nonsense of the former chairperson.
Instead of Republicans running in Michigan going down for easy losses in November this year, they now have a shot at possibly holding their own and even winning, and in a blue state, yearning to go purple, that's all you can ask for.
Michigan is about to get interesting for a good reason and that is a pleasant change for once.