LANSING – Senate Republicans coalesced Friday around Sen. Randy Richardville of Monroe as their choice for majority leader for the 2011-14 Senate term with Sen.-elect John Proos of St. Joseph dropping out of the race.
The Senate GOP will elect its leaders for the upcoming term Tuesday, but any remaining drama will likely involve the lower-level leadership posts with Richardville sewing up the majority leader post and Sen.-elect Arlan Meekhof of West Olive the apparent favorite for majority floor leader.
“I’m very excited to have the caucus united and moving in the same direction,” Richardville said. “As far as we’re concerned, there is only one team to talk about now and that’s the Senate majority.”
Friday’s developments, first reported by Gongwer News Service, also effectively cement Sen. Roger Kahn of Saginaw Township as the next Appropriations Committee chair. Both Kahn and Meekhof have Richardville’s backing.
Richardville will succeed outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R-Rochester), who is leaving the Senate in January because of term limits.
The race to lead the Senate GOP caucus took several twists and turns after initially being extremely quiet. It started out as a three-person contest between Richardville, Sen. Mike Nofs of Battle Creek and Sen. Mark Jansen of Gaines Township. And there were rumblings that Proos had ambition for the job.
But as the word started to spread that Richardville was locking up more and more commitments, Jansen and Nofs decided to back Proos in hopes of combining support to mount a viable alternative to Richardville. Proos announced the names of six senators and senators-to-be publicly supporting him, but the following week, Richardville trumped him with nine names. That meant, once Senate Republicans won 26 seats in Tuesday’s elections, that Proos needed to convince seven of the nine uncommitted GOP senators to back him to get the 14 votes needed to win.
By Thursday night, Richardville said he had 16 commitments. Friday, Nofs, Proos and Richardville discussed the situation, and Proos announced his withdrawal from the race.
“As we look to the future of our state, our most important task as legislators is to work cooperatively with our colleagues and our new governor to put Michigan back on the track to prosperity,” Proos said in a statement. “With the best interests of the caucus in mind, we plan to unite with our colleagues behind Senator Randy Richardville to achieve this goal. This will be the first step toward creating a caucus environment that helps to reinvent Michigan.”
Proos did not return a message.
Richardville, 51, brings to the post four years of experience in the Senate and six in the House, where he served from 1999-2004. In his last term in the House, Richardville was the majority floor leader. In his first Senate term, he was chair of the Banking and Financial Institutions Committee.
Richardville also is one of the most successful legislative candidates of the term limits era. In 1998, he stunned Democrats by winning the 56th House District, despite what at the time was a 55 percent Democratic voting base. Then he survived a furious effort to unseat him in 2000.
He won his Senate term without great difficulty in 2006 and cruised to re-election Tuesday. This year, he and Kahn headed up candidate recruitment for Senate Republicans.
Like all legislative leadership changes, Richardville will mark a departure from Bishop’s tenure. Bishop was a down-the-line conservative who came out of the caucus’s right-flank. Richardville has shown more willingness to vote with Democrats during his legislative career – although those votes occurred more during his time in the House than the Senate when he was under the constant scrutiny of Democrats for any politically questionable votes.
As part of the House Republican leadership in 2003-04, he also was willing to cast some controversial votes for some major budget issues, such as when he was one of 13 Republicans to support a 75-cent per pack cigarette tax hike in 2004. In the Senate, there were fewer such instances. For example, Richardville opposed both the income tax hike, sales tax on services and voted against the workplace-smoking ban.
One prominent tea party activist, Wendy Day, had posted on her Facebook page yesterday that Senate Republicans should not support Richardville.
“Randy Richardville is a really nice guy, but his effective and subtle work with the MEA and other unions should disqualify from leadership,” she wrote. “Randy Richardville can’t serve two masters – the unions and the people.”
And Richardville was one of the few Senate Republicans who voiced openness, bordering on support, for the Detroit River International Crossing.
But there appeared to be no such worries among the rest of the Senate Republican caucus, which is overwhelmingly conservative.
Sen.-elect Jack Brandenburg (R-Harrison Twp.) said Richardville has both good leadership skills and good people skills.
“I liked Randy from the very first time I met him. My first two years, when he was (House) majority (floor) leader, Leon Drolet was my mentor, but Randy kind of took me under his wing,” Brandenburg said. “He basically always took care of me and pointed the right direction. I thought he was always a straight shooter. And the most important thing to me always was he was a team player.”
This story was provided by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on Gongwer.Com
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