Rick Snyder Is Done. He's Toast.

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

25 January 16

Rick Snyder is done. He's toast.

t's really time for Governor Rick Snyder to go. It's impossible to imagine him continuing to do his job if the e-mails yet to come about the poisoning of the city of Flint reflect as badly on his administration as today's batch do. Therein we find negligence, incompetence, buck-passing ,and ass-covering in the extreme. It's plain that political considerations were paramount when the news of what had happened in Flint first reached Lansing.

In the e-mails, Muchmore wrote that U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, was "engaged in his normal press hound routine" after the congressman issued a press release noting he'd asked the EPA to help the state deal with the crisis. Muchmore added that then-mayor Dayne Walling "went out on a CYA effort due to the election." They also show doubts about returning Flint to the Detroit system and even questioning if the reports of higher lead levels are accurate. "They can't reconnect to DWSD even if they wanted to as they sold the connector line," Muchmore wrote Sept. 26. "And, especially with the new rate increases in Detroit, their citizens would be less able to pay than they already are.  Now we have the anti everything group turning to the lead content which is a concern for everyone, but DEQ and DHHS and EPA can't find evidence of a major change per Geralyn's memo below."

Later, of course, under the expanded emergency-manager law that was a pet project of Snyder's from the time he was inaugurated, Mayor Walling was replaced by an "emergency manager"—the city has had four of them since Snyder expanded the law—under whom the switch from the DWSD to the Flint River was completed. By the time the crisis was brewing underground, the elected local officials of the city of Flint had virtually no power at all. It's hard to imagine that this crisis would have come to the point to which it has come if the people responsible for it actually had to face the voters. At the very least, Snyder may have to have a chat with Congress about the whole thing.

However, for the moment, the emails get even worse.

A background memo sent to the governor on 1 February dismissed the pleas of Flint's then mayor Dayne Walling for state assistance, saying that the mayor had "seized on public panic … to ask the state for loan forgiveness and more money for infrastructure improvement". Flint's water supply was contaminated by lead, poisoning thousands of residents, after the source of the city's drinking water was switched from Detroit to the Flint River in April 2014. Water from the Flint River had for months corroded lead from the inside of water pipes in thousands of households across the city. The memo, which was among 274 pages of emails related to the city's crisis, also said that it was "clear that folks in Flint are concerned about other aspects of their water – taste, smell and color being among the top complaints", but said that the Safe Drinking Water Act "does not regulate aesthetic values of water". The words "does not" were underlined.

(We should never forget that the voters of Michigan overturned the expanded emergency-manager law in 2012, only to have a new Republican majority in the state legislature pass another bill slightly adjusting the parameters of the law that was defeated. Would you like a banana with your republic?)

A city in his state was poisoned on his watch. 

How does Snyder have any credibility on anything going forward? (Yes, I know, he still has credibility with the plutocrats who helped put him and the legislators in office.) If this were a city in Japan, the responsible officials would have resigned honorably by now. People would have insisted. People are insisting that Snyder resign, too, but they will be ignored because most of them are the same people he and his administration ignored when their water started coming out of the tap a fragrant shade of yellow. There are people for whom democracy works and people against whom democracy works. It is not supposed to be that way, dammit.