A year earlier, Gov. Snyder had started the process of placing Detroit under a czar, but instead entered into a consent agreement with the city that included a financial plan. The plan had not succeeded and in February 2013, a state determined that Detroit remained in a financial emergency with no satisfactory plan to resolve it. On March 1, Gov. Snyder announced that he would appoint a Detroit czar and the next day he formally declared Detroit to be in a "financial emergency." On March 14, he announced the choice of Washington attorney Kevyn Orr to fill the position for 18 months (subject to reappointment). The appointment authority came from an earlier law, allowing the governor to act without participation by local officials that would be mandated by the new law. Orr took office the day before the new law took effect.
How is it constitutional to replace elected officials with czars?
In a federal lawsuit filed March 27 in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan (Detroit), the original 22 plaintiffs argue that Michigan's czar law is unconstitutional in a variety of ways, including violation of their constitutional rights to equal protection, republican form of government, free speech, and ability to petition their government. Plaintiffs' attorneys include lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed an amicus brief supporting plaintiffs in the case (Phillips v. Snyder, 13-cv-11370).
Before this lawsuit could resolve any constitutional issues, it was stayed by the Detroit czar's bankruptcy filing in July. In November, bankruptcy judge Rhodes ruled that the constitutional challenge lawsuit can go forward, after the parties agreed that the case would not seek to remove the Detroit czar.
In other words, it is one of the oddities of the priorities of federal law, as currently enforced in Michigan, that issues of municipal debt are given more importance than issues of the constitutionality of laws by which those debts will be adjudicated.
Meanwhile the Detroit czar, while making some apparent effort to find a compromise, continued to move the city toward the long-threatened bankruptcy that elected officials opposed.
So who is this Detroit czar and what are his priorities?
By most outward appearances, attorney Kevyn Duane Orr, 55, fits the classic profile of a hired gun, a consummate professional brought in to clean up Dodge (or in this case Detroit). A Florida native who last worked in Washington (he lives in Chevy Chase) for the Cleveland-based international law firm of Jones Day, which he joined as a partner in 2001 (Jones Day employs more than 2,400 lawyers in 37 cities on five continents). For the previous 20 years, Orr was a federal government attorney mostly handling complex litigation and bankruptcy.
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